Pfleger to visit Holocaust Museum after backlash for hosting Louis Farrakhan

CHICAGO (FOX 32) - St. Sabina Pastor Michael Pfleger fired back Wednesday after an outcry over his hosting of Minister Louis Farrakhan at the church where the Nation of Islam leader gave a controversial speech.

Father Mike Pfleger's long-running relationship with Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan has sparked outrage before, usually triggered by Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic language. 

“There are people both in the media and the outside that are seeking now to define my life, and now outwardly calling me anti-Semite,” said Father Pfleger. “It is not a coincidence to me that yesterday the Tribune and the Sun-Times on the same day put large articles condemning me in the paper.”

In the Tribune, Skokie's Rabbi Ari Hart wrote, "Farrakhan said that he had been sent by God to 'separate good Jews from satanic Jews,' words that make anyone who had family separated and then murdered in the holocaust shudder."

After the uproar, Pfleger accepted an invitation to the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

“I will then also be inviting the Holocaust Museum staff to come with me to DuSable Museum on the South Side of Chicago and spend the same amount of time there,” said Father Pfleger. “So, we understand one's pain does not negate another's pain.”

The Holocaust Museum and the DuSable are already collaborating on a current exhibit at the north suburban institution, called "Purchased Lives, the American Slave Trade 1808-1865."

It underscores how important museums can be in a multi-racial, multi-cultural society. The enslavement of Africans and the Nazi drive to exterminate Jews took place a long time ago. The effects of those atrocities, though, remain with us.