I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way." Ellison replied that his constituents, "know that I have a deep love and affection for my country. There's no one who's more patriotic than I am, and so you know, I don't need to — need to prove my patriotic stripes." When asked by Beck for his opinion on Muslim extremists, Ellison replied, "They're criminals. But I think that people who commit criminal acts should be treated like criminals, regardless of their faith." Ellison has also said, "Osama bin Laden no more represents Islam than Timothy McVeigh represented Christianity." Asked about the incident later, Ellison dismissed it, saying, "It's just shock TV. Some pundits think they have to ask the most outrageous questions." On January 2, 2007, Beck said on his radio program that Ellison did not take offense at the comments and the two had a friendly chat off the air. On January 9, 2007, at the Television Critics Association's semiannual press tour, Beck said it was "Quite possibly the poorest-worded question of all time." He clarified by saying, "My point to Keith Ellison ... is the same point that I make to my own faith, and that is — you must stand up before things get out of control ... And it's important for people of all faiths, when someone is hijacking their religion, to stand and say, 'That is not what we do. That is not who we are."' Nation of Islam affiliation As a law student in 1989 and 1990 Ellison wrote several columns under the name "Keith E. Hakim" in the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. He defended Louis Farrakhan against claims of racism, and further wrote that Farrakhan "is also not an anti-Semite" and called affirmative action a "sneaky" form of compensation for slavery, suggesting that white Americans instead pay reparations to blacks. Mother Jones reported that, under the name "Keith X Ellison," he wrote defenses of Farrakhan against accusations of anti-semitism after the 1995 Million Man March, and again in 1997. Minister James Muhammad, a former leader of the Nation of Islam's Twin Cities study group, has said that Ellison served for several years as the group's "chief of protocol", in which capacity he acted as a liaison between Muhammad and local communities. Denunciation of the Nation of