Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison once accused Jewish people of oppressing “minorities all over the world,” Ellison’s former college classmate revealed in an interview.
Mother Jones interviewed former classmate Michael Olenick who worked as the opinions editor at the University of Minnesota’s student newspaper, The Minnesota Daily.
Olenick said that Ellison, who went by Keith Hakim at the time, argued that “white Jews” were routinely oppressing minority groups.
“European white Jews are trying to oppress minorities all over the world,” Olenick remembers Ellison arguing. “Keith would go on all the time about ‘Jewish slave traders,’” according to the Mother Jones article.
Ellison also argued that Kwame Ture, a black speaker who came to the school, was not racist because he was a member of an “oppressed group.” Ture spoke out against Zionism, describing it as version of white supremacy. It was the Jews who were the “oppressors,” Ellison argued.
Ellison has been dodged by accusations of anti-semitism, but has denied them.
“I have always lived a politics defined by respecting differences, rejecting all forms of racism and anti-Semitism,” he wrote in November.
While in college, Ellison also argued for reparations for blacks and for a blacks-only country. Writing under “Keith E. Hakim” for The Minnesota Daily, Ellison described the Constitution as “the best evidence of a white racist conspiracy.”
“Their Constitution also makes provisions for the return of runaway slaves. Their constitution is the bedrock of American law; it’s the best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples,” Ellison wrote.
Another column he wrote insisted that whites pay black reparations for past wrongs.
“It means compensation for all the money ripped off through sharecropping and just compensation owing to all the black athletes of yesterday, such as Jack Jefferson and Joe Louis,” Ellison wrote.
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