We swore off coverage of Jude Wanniski after the election last fall, but Jack Kemp's guru has outdone himself. That's no easy feat for the man who called himself Kemp's "puppeteer" and who almost managed to talk Kemp into becoming a sort of junior Warren Christopher -- conducting shuttle diplomacy between American Jews and Nation of Islam anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
Now that Kemp is occupied pondering 2000, Wanniski has busied himself reaching out to Farrakhan. In a Jan. 22 letter to "a reader of the Jewish Forward," self-published on his Internet homepage, Wanniski offers the following analysis:
* "I've observed in the past that virtually all 'black leaders' have been chosen by the white power structure, and when they have not, they are frequently assassinated."
* When Farrakhan claims "to be a messiah, I'm prepared to listen, and when I hear his message of global reconciliation and atonement for sin -- which was the message of the Million Man March -- I'm even prepared to believe he may be a messiah."
* "In my five-hour dinner with Farrakhan in December, I did not hear a word that could have come from someone who was not a man of God. I . . . frankly have been unable to find a clear sign of anti-Semitism in any of his speeches or writings. His words are taken by political Jews as being antiSemitic, but I hear them as challenges to Jews to understand that there is a holocaust underway now, today, not a half century ago."
* "Would it have done any good if there had been a Jewish Farrakhan, with the ability to rally a million Jewish men to march on Berlin, and proclaim themselves not to be subhuman, but human? We will never know. But Louis Farrakhan has taken on that assignment for his people in this day and age, when the circumstances are much different, but the plight of the black family here and in Africa is relevant to what happened 60 years ago in Germany and Poland."
After downloading Wanniski's repellent correspondence, the Scrapbook wanted to be fair and so surfed over to The Nation of Islam Online -- Farrakhan's home-page on the World Wide Web -- where we were cordially welcomed: " Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim; In The Name Of Allah The Beneficent, The Merciful; Click Here or on The Flag to Enter."
What was behind the flag? Well, the hateful and anti-Semitic Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews -- the Nation of Islam's version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- is on sale. And for free you can read excerpts from the group's newsletter, Blacks And Jews News, which helpfully explains that Farrakhan never called Judaism a "gutter-religion" but only a "dirty-religion." And no, there wasn't any mention of Wanniski.