Two days after the New Jersey General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to abolish the state post of poet laureate, an angry Amiri Baraka vowed to press a far-reaching lawsuit against legislators he said had moved against him illegally.

Speaking to an audience in the basement meeting room of Newark's Abyssinian Baptist Church on July 3, the veteran author and activist insisted he was being punished for criticizing Israel, and denied being an anti-Semite.

In a rambling address whose emotional content ranged from impassioned harangues to comic one-liners, Baraka called the legislators' action "an attack on the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens.

"This illegal vote is a violation of the Constitution that neither Congress nor the states can pass ex post facto. They want to make something that happened in the past illegal. You can't do that," he said.

For nearly an hour, the 68-year-old poet spoke to a friendly multiracial meeting of the People's Organization for Progress, a Newark-based organization dedicated to "organize the grassroots community" in struggle on behalf of human rights, world peace, and an end to poverty, sexism, and racism.

Baraka defended the widely criticized words he wrote in the days after Sept. 11 and read nearly a year later at a poetry festival in Waterloo, after he was named poet laureate. The poem, "Somebody Blew Up America," advances a widely debunked Internet rumor that Israel had advance knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks and that Israelis working there heeded warnings to stay away. Baraka insisted the attacks on him and the U.S. Constitution have been led by lobbyists for a foreign power. They cite three lines of a 244-line poem as proof of the poet's anti-Semitism. What are the lines? 'Who told 4,000 Israeli workers to stay home that day? Who told [Ariel] Sharon to stay away?'

"They never defend the part about Sharon. That was Israel Day. He was supposed to speak in New York. That was Israel Day. You hear what I'm saying? He cancelled."

But sources at the Israeli consulate in New York told NJJN that "Baraka's claim that Sharon cancelled is untrue."

The Jerusalem Post reported on Sept. 13, 2001, that an Israel Now and Forever rally scheduled for Sept. 23 in Manhattan featuring a guest appearance by the Israeli prime minister was cancelled a day after the World Trade Center's devastation.

The poet claimed his words about Israelis had been misunderstood.

"When I said 'Israeli workers,' they continued to say I said 'Jews', Baraka claimed. "The State of Israel is not Judaism in the first place, and if you look on the central list of people who were tenants in the World Trade Center, you will find that there were hundreds and hundreds of Israeli nationals working for Israeli companies. That's what I'm trying to say. How many died? Five. Two died in the airplane. Three Israelis died in the World Trade Center."

But according to an Oct. 5, 2001, article by Slate associate editor Bryan Curtis, the figure of 4,000 Israeli workers at the World Trade Center was a "hoax" originated by the terrorist group Hezbollah, which has "free access" to a Lebanese television network, Al-Manar.

Al-Manar's story, billed as a "special investigative report," was repeated on an American-based Web site called Information Times and spread rapidly through cyberspace. As a result, newspapers as diverse as Pravda, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times carried reports that the rumor was being widely circulated in the Arab world.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the figure of 4,000 Israelis emanated from the Israeli embassy, which spoke of concern on Sept. 11, 2001, for the 4,000 Israeli nationals living in New York City. Very few of them worked at the Twin Towers.

Baraka apparently ignored that distinction.

"They said the mention of Israeli nationals was an attack on Jews. They can't understand the difference between the religion Judaism and reactionary nationalism," said Baraka. "American Jews were killed in the World Trade Center. Jews died in the World Trade Center. American Jews died with American blacks, American Italians, Irish, Jordanians. They died with us."

Baraka turned from a defense of his work to an attack on the Bush administration, mixing political rhetoric with comic one-liners.

Amid cheers and occasional laughter from more than 100 supporters, Baraka segued into an attack on the ADL and its national director, Abraham Foxman. ADL was a prime mover in the fight to abolish the NJ poet laureate position after labeling the controversial poem anti-Semitic.

"Recently Abraham Foxman said American Jews should make an alliance with right-wing evangelical Christians because they support Israel," said Baraka.

"He said we know they only support Israel because they believe that that's the beginning of the biblical Armageddon Ñ that when Israel is cleansed of the dark folk that Jesus will descend through the clouds on a white horse and Jews will disappear. Now Foxman has been saying, 'We have to make an alliance with them because they support Israel.'

"Now that means that it's like asking black people to support the Ku Klux Klan or the skinheads. So how can you do that? It is because Israel is their raison d'etre, and that is why they are so frenzied about that 244-line poem."

To Foxman, such statements show that "Baraka is off the wall."

"What I said was, as long as the Christian evangelicals support Israel we have no reason not to accept that support, provided it has no quid pro quos attached. We continue to oppose a number of their positions, especially on issues dealing with separation of church and state," Foxman told NJ Jewish News

The ADL leader said it was absurd to compare Christian conservatives with the skinheads and Ku Klux Klan, "two groups that have shed both black and Jewish blood."

Arguing that his words and intentions were misunderstood by his adversaries, Baraka cited another portion of his poem, which reads: "Who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it? Who said 'America First' and ok'd the yellow stars? Who? Who?"

"The only time I mention Jews is to ask who did the Holocaust, who killed the people?" said Baraka. "So, the point is, to accuse me of anti-Semitism is to completely reverse the situation."

Not so, argued Foxman. "The fact that he cries for the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust doesn't change the fact" that by suggesting that Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack and alerted only one another, Baraka voiced "one of the most classical canards of anti-Semitism –  that Jews only care about themselves."

Baraka called the accusation of anti-Semitism "slander" and a "bias crime," two alleged offenses he said he plans to include in his lawsuit.

He said the battle against him opened him up to "psychological and possibly physical attack," including threatening phone calls before dawn and the removal of his books from school libraries, citing the one in his alma mater, Newark's Barringer High School. The high school is closed until September and NJ Jewish News was unable to verify the allegation.

The poet also claimed the controversy has impaired his ability to earn a living and has severely damaged his reputation.

"Remember, when somebody calls you a name, you've got to carry that all your life. People will be asking am I an anti-Semite when I'm 90 years old. It will be written in books after I die. They're gonna demean your character into the grave. That's slander. That's character assassination."

Robert Wiener can be reached at .