Fourteen minutes into his speech, the lights around Malik Zulu Shabazz went out. Give him credit: Shabazz is not one to curse the darkness, at least not when the Jews are available.

"This is the best example we could have of white racism," Shabazz announced when the room fell dark. Across the Carnegie Mellon University campus, in Wean Hall, a hapless technician working the computer-run electrical system hit a wrong button and rushed to the scene to make amends. Campus police rescued him from Black Panther guards who wanted to parade him around the room as proof of a conspiracy. In the world of Malik Shabazz, there are no accidents. There are whites and Jews.

Born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles, Shabazz was educated at Howard University, joined Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and quickly became an acolyte of the late NOI spokesman Khalid Muhammad. When Muhammad died, Shabazz took over the New Black Panther Party for Defense. The New Black Panthers have been denounced by the original Black Panther leadership as a fraud, and they hold the distinction of being one of the few African-American organizations to be designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC usually devotes its time to fighting the Klan.

Shabazz travels with a retinue of young men and women in jackboots, arm patches and berets. One wandered about with a nightstick. Another snapped photos of white people in the audience.

"You take our names, we take yours," she said.

Try to imagine Farrakhan in Nuremberg. There were patriotic songs of race. One speaker cranked up the next. A general sense of victimization, a hint at some unreachable "Other" out there working the levers. Shabazz takes the lectern, talks about his outrage at the outrage his booking at Carnegie Mellon caused, then the lights go out. Cue the orchestra.

Shabazz told the audience to imagine itself inside the hold of a slave ship. He warned that the spectacle was "going out all over the city," seemingly unaware that the organizers had long ago ejected television crews and the student newspaper. A few words made their way through the dark about "white, Jewish involvement." All pretense gone, Shabazz's lecture, officially titled "Black History and the Role and Responsibility of the Black Community," became "Black History and the Role and Responsibility of the Jews."

Every course needs a reading list and Shabazz introduced his. There were books about race, about white perfidy, black history and a standard in the canon of racial conspiracy: "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews." It blames Jews for the European and American slave trade. Henry Ford's "The International Jew" was held aloft.

The surprise recommendation was "Secrets of the Federal Reserve" by Eustace Mullins, an adherent of the Christian Identity religion. Shabazz has probably not read Mullins' other book, "The Mark of Canaan," wherein the author describes Jews and blacks descending from the same satanic strain.

Decidedly not recommended was a document read just an hour earlier by a group of Carnegie Mellon students.

It was the "Declaration of Unity" read at a rally. That, Shabazz crumpled up and tossed over his shoulder to howls of delight.

In most other cities, Shabazz's act would be as quaint as Sha-Na-Na -- nostalgic camp for the disaffected. In Pittsburgh, where segregation remains impossibly static, income divides are indistinguishable from color lines and police brutality is simply assumed to be a sort of blood tax paid by black residents, Shabazz forced race onto the agenda for a day. It is hard to know if Thursday night's performance was an evening's entertainment or a prelude to the spray painting of some synagogue. Either way, he sketched out theories of eugenics and history that show how fascism can find roots in communities forced to the fringe.

Throughout his lecture, Shabazz referred to "so-called Jews" and "quote-unquote Jews" and "white Jews."

"The people you see in Israel today are not the true original Jews. They are the Ashkenazim from Europe. Khazars from central Europe of the Caucasus mountains," Shabazz told the crowd. "What I'm saying is, you are the true Semites. And those -- Ariel Sharon and others in Israel, the Zionists, are from Europe."

This theory is a left-handed adaptation of a 19th-century concept called "Anglo-Israelism," the belief that the true descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel moved north and became the Nordic peoples and that the "other" Jews are satanic imposters. Shabazz simply changed Nordic to African. Much like Christian Identity racists, he believes in "Khazarian Jews."

Possibly Shabazz can try this theory out at the next Aryan World Congress. Perhaps some other school will have him over to explain, with relentless optimism, how he is neither a racist nor an anti-Semite but, as he put it, "a warrior for my race." Putting war and race together is neither new nor, it is worth pointing out, something that requires much effort. Carnegie Mellon has a history department that could probably help to explain it. Let us hope the lights have not gone out there, too.