Say, Remember that Time When Rahm Emanuel Had a Real Live Hate Group Patrol Chicago's Streets?

Flashback to the olden days of last month. On the same day that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told Chick-Fil-A they were not welcome in Chicago because they didn’t share “Chicago values,” Emanuel welcomed the National of Islam as a crime-fighting partner. Emanuel’s comments helped spark the vitriolic weeks long campaign against Chick-Fil-A that dominated July, a campaign that may have played a role in yesterday’s shooting at the Family Research Council in Washington. Emanuel’s welcoming of the Nation of Islam drew considerably less national media attention.

Ignoring Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s history of anti-Semitic remarks, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday welcomed the army of men dispatched to the streets by Farrakhan to stop the violence in Chicago neighborhoods.

Ald. Debra Silverstein (50th), an Orthodox Jew, has said it’s good that Farrakhan is “helping” in the fight against crime, “but it doesn’t eradicate the comments that he’s made about the Jewish community.”

Emanuel offered no such caveat. Although Farrakhan has a history of making anti-Semitic statements, Chicago’s first Jewish mayor has no interest in revisiting that controversy.

Farrakhan has more than just a history of making anti-Semitic remarks, it turns out. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Farrakhan is the leader of a national hate-group. The SPLC’s “hate map” — yes, they have one of those — identifies every Nation of Islam chapter in the country, and the Illinois section specifically identifies the Chicago group which Farrakhan leads as a “hate group.” Right on the SPLC’s web site can be found the following quotes.

“[T]he Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn’t a great man for me as a black person, but he was a great German. Now, I’m not proud of Hitler’s evils against Jewish people, but that’s a matter of record. He raised Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there’s a similarity in that we are raising our people up from nothing.”
— Louis Farrakhan, radio interview, March 11, 1984

“Jews have been conclusively linked to the greatest criminal endeavor ever undertaken against an entire race of people … the black African Holocaust. … The effects of this unspeakable tragedy are still being felt among the peoples of the world at this very hour.”
— The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (NOI book), 1991

“Who are the slumlords in the Black community? The so-called Jews. … Who is it sucking our blood in the Black community? A white imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew.”
— Speech by NOI national official Khalid Muhammad, Nov. 29, 1993

And so forth.  The SPLC’s site even details the NoI’s attempts to establish a working relationship with the American Nazi Party in the 1960s.

If the Southern Poverty Law Center is an authority on hate, and groups like the Human Rights Campaign say that it is, then Rahm Emanuel has a whole lot of explaining to do. Why is he allowing a group that one of the left’s leading lights considers a “hate group,” and which agrees enough with the Ku Klux Klan that they tried to work together, to patrol Chicago’s bloody streets?