YOU WOULD NOT ask Paul Tsongas to donate money to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. You would not expect Iraq's United Nations representative to vote for the resolution condemning his country in the Gulf War. You would not count on a sane squirrel to stop mid-stride to let a dog catch him in a mad dash across the Yard.

These occurences just don't happen and few assume that they should.

Surprise, surprise. Right here on campus, a student-run group bucked such expectations and sponsored and event that directly contradicts the organization's mandate. The Student Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations funded a speech two weeks ago by Conrad L. Muhammad, national student representatives of the Nation of Islam.

This is no sudden discovery. The Foundation's funding was announced before the talk and reported in The Crimson the following day. What is surprising is the absolute silence that has greatest the Foundation's actions.

What should people be upset about?

The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, a group whose stated goal is "to improve relations among racial and ethnic groups within the University," granted money and brought to Cambridge one of the most racially divisive speakers this campus have seen all year. This guy makes Leonard Jeffries look like a pussycat.

Muhammad didn't limit himself to divisions along racial lines. He made sure to lash out at women, Jews and sell-out Blacks of the "White establishment"--few groups escaped the minister's vitriol.

BILLED AS A PANEL talk on rap with Chuck D, Muhammad's lecture was more of a diatribe by a Louis Farrakhan protege than a statement about current music trends. Muhammad minced no words when discussing America's white people.

Directing his words to Blacks in the audience, Muhammad said of whites, "They would stab you, stick a knife in your back in a minute. "Saying "We must fight the evil of the white man," Muhammad told Black students to "go into the sewers and the subways and actually carry out guerrilla warfare."

Blacks too involved with "white society," Muhammad said, were guilty of "selling out" and therefore "worthy of death." Blacks, the minister said, should not be at Harvard, studying "the curriculum of the enemy." With such talk, the Foundation certainly succeeded in bringing "a view which is absent or lacking on campus," one of the group's criteria for receiving a student grant. But fostering dialogue is different from sponsoring a call for violence and racial warfare.

Muhammad's comments about women were perhaps the most offensive of the evening. "Woman's nature is to submit and to find comfort in a man," Muhammad stated, and further asserted that "the Black woman is the field of the Black man. If the Black man would be what God made him to be, Black women wouldn't resist."

Muhammad saved his words about Jews until the very end. He held up a Nation of Islam book titled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks And Jews, a tract filled with Jeffries-esque assertions about Jewish domination of the African slave trade. Muhammad then began defending his mentor, Louis Farrakhan, from accusations of anti-Semitism, saying "The criminal has turned it around on the good citizen."

When a Jewish `member of the audience asked the speaker, "Who's the criminal?" Muhammad shot back, "You and your people have a history of crime as long as the highways of America."

"Israel is an outlaw nation," Muhammad continued. "Zionism is a racist philosophy. I don't believe if there is a God anywhere in the universe that he will acquit you and Israel and your brothers in America and Europe of the crimes you have committed against humanity."

But that's not all. Muhammad had more to say: "We don't stop with humanity. Because if you think your crimes are limited to humanity, just ask the ozone layer, the rivers, the streams, the oceans, the land." I guess Jews have worse body odor and all that extra deodorant has ripped a whole in the atmosphere above Greenland. I'll have to start buying extra strength Rite Guard.