Black Student Union Used Appalling Tactics

* The appalling recitation of hatred and epithets in a letter from Cal State Northridge’s Black Student Union because a Jewish group had the temerity to have a session that conflicted with an appearance of Louis Farrakhan must be addressed.

If one assumed there was some protest in the scheduling of Hillel’s conflicting program, even that would not support the use of accusations that accused Jews of Hitlerian tactics and contributing to the demise of millions of blacks. The kind of language used in that letter not only reflected the kind of racism expressed by their hero Farrakhan, but in another time would have been called McCarthyism.

Significantly, not one voice was raised here or at Berkeley when a black professor admittedly and purposely scheduled an important examination on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, and threatened retribution against any Jewish student who missed the test.

But to accuse Jews of participating “in the murder of 250 million Africans” is beyond being offensive. Those like myself, who supported and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, know that he would spin in his grave to read this kind of tripe today.

The students who published this kind of letter should take another look at what they have done and consider how such garbage should be responded to if they were the targets. The Black Student Union has done no service to anyone, least of all itself. But it has indeed continued the kind of hateful language spewed across the land by a man who chooses to label himself a man of God.

JOSEPH J. HONICK

Chatsworth