WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) – The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s presence in Washington for the Millions More Movement provided the national press corps with rare access to the Nation of Islam leader.

Although the Nation of Islam has rented the ballroom at the National Press Club (NPC) frequently during the last several years, it’s been almost a decade since he was invited to be a guest at “the second most prestigious address” in the nation’s capital, and just as long since he addressed the editorial board of The Washington Post newspaper.

After the decade-long drought of invitations, the new leadership of the NPC invited Minister Farrakhan to be a guest at a club-sponsored “Newsmaker” appearance Oct. 13 for club members and the working press. The event was organized by club Newsmaker Committee member David Anderson, now a federal Administrative Law Judge and a former reporter. It was facilitated with the cooperation of Club President Richard Dunham, who is senior White House Correspondent at Business Week magazine.

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What has not changed is the hostility toward the Muslim leader from many White reporters and many of the officials in the corporate-owned news outlets. Reporters everywhere, for example, pepper Minister Farrakhan and his allies with hostile questions, and then question hostile Jewish groups to say something negative about him for every story they write about him, concerning controversial statements from more than 20 years ago. But they seldom print his rebuttals.

While his Jewish critics may not like him or some of the other co-conveners of the Millions More Movement, “go talk to Black people to see what Black people think about us,” the Muslim leader said in response to yet another allegation of anti-Semitism by the Anti-Defamation League. “We are in the room because our people need our unity and our working together to ease the suffering of our people.

“And I would advise Mr. (ADL President Abraham) Foxman: why doesn’t he write an article about Mr. (former Education Secretary William) Bennett? Why doesn’t he write an article about a man who said that the crime rate would go down if all Black babies were aborted? Why doesn’t he write about Pat Robertson? Why don’t they write about murder coming out of the heart of a Christian pastor?,” Minister Farrakhan continued.

“I have not plucked one hair out of the head of one White person, or Black person, nor Jewish child. You have never seen Farrakhan say one thing about harming Jewish people or White people or any people. So don’t compare me with the killers who have come out of your race that bombed the levee in 1927 and may have repeated it” in New Orleans in 2005.

The reason for the Millions More Movement mobilization is “because we want to put a stop to lies, to thieves, to murderers in the name of government,” explained Min. Farrakhan. “Don’t you ever think that racism, that has poisoned the bloodstream of religion, education, jurisprudence, politics, culture, that it is not existent in FEMA and the Red Cross. It is only our organization, and our mobilization, and our demand that they become accountable, that we will get some measure of justice.”

But the hostile, even insulting questions from White reporters persist.

“Are you worried that people might think you’re nuts, the way you’re sounding?” a reporter from The Weekly Standard asked. The writer had already asked a series of questions in which he tried to bait the Muslim leader to exaggerate his comments beyond the facts he had presented about the possibility that the breeched levee which flooded the Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina may have been caused by human intervention, just as it was in a flood in 1927.

“It is truth that will save America from her fall,” Minister Farrakhan said in response.

Members of the press must be diligent, he added.

“Like you question me, you (should) be diligent and question these things and ascertain the truth–and then be unafraid to print what you know is right. If you do that, the American people will thank you and we may save a great nation from falling from a rot that is within her,” he said. “No power from the outside can destroy this country. But this country can be eroded from an internal moral rot that is being fed by the few to the detriment of the many.”