Howard University flare-up

FACULTY at Washington's Howard University held a noon teach-in on Tuesday to affirm tolerance, while at night Nation of Islam member Khallid Muhammad called Jews ``liars'' and ``devils'' before a campus crowd of 1,500.

The day before, Mr. Khallid toured the United States Holocaust Museum and afterward denounced the murder of 6 million Jews as a pale shadow of the ``black holocaust'' of slavery which he said caused 600 million deaths. Scholars such as Phillip Curtain at Johns Hopkins University put the total number of blacks transported to the Americas at 11 million.

Franklyn Jenifer, president of the federally funded 126 year-old university, said ``a very small minority'' of students held anti-Semitic views, but that they had their right to speak. ``Anytime haters come to campus we must greet them with love and truth,'' he told the teach-in. In a statement he said Howard students ``are categorically opposed to bigotry in any form.''

``I don't feel anti-Jewish, and no one I know feels like that,'' said Howard student Kantayeni Walker.

The anti-Jewish trend appears limited on campus. ``I say you can send home all of them in three cabs,'' said Professor Russell Adams, chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies.

He organized the teach-in to condemn ``self-appointed racial `messiahs' ''after media reports of anti-Semitic meetings began to tarnish Howard's reputation. Some students reported they lost job offers; the university president said he had received threats that Congress might cut its $190 million annual funding.