Defining Alliances by Defining An Enemy

gretavo's picture

Surprising that they didn't mention 9/11 Truth! Of course the implication here in case anyone missed it is that black people should support Israel. Because you see, white supremacists hate black people and jewish people equally, and since white supremacists therefore hate Israel, black people should follow Obama's lead and declare undying love and support for the apartheid--er, for the Jewish state.

October 21, 2008
Hate Groups Mostly Quiet in Election
By JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON — A tall, extra-hot mocha in his hand and a .380-caliber pistol on his hip, Bill White sat near the window of a Starbucks in Roanoke, Va., last month and discussed his political predicament as the leader of one of the nation’s more established neo-Nazi groups.

“Right now,” said Mr. White, the head of the American National Socialist Workers Party, “we’re facing the potential of a half-black candidate financed by Jewish money going up against a white candidate financed by Jewish money, who are both advocating the same policy. So you’ve got two terrible choices.”

On Friday, about three weeks after that interview, Mr. White was jailed on suspicion of making threats against a juror who was on a panel in 2004 that convicted a white supremacist of plotting to kill a federal judge.

So stands the state of organized racism in 2008, paralyzed and at a crossroads in what would presumably be a pressing moment of action — the possibility that Senator Barack Obama will become the first black president — but has so far not been.

There have been sporadic reports throughout the country of Obama signs vandalized with swastikas, windows smashed at local Obama campaign offices and racist pamphlets dropped on doorsteps. Overt and thinly veiled racist comments about Mr. Obama have been caught on camera at rallies, and a Republican women’s group in California — the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated — has made headlines for a flier that showed Mr. Obama’s face on a faux food stamp that also included watermelon and fried chicken.

But party officials and organizations that monitor hate groups, always concerned about the specter of violence, report far less activity from the more traditional sources of open racism late in the race than they had expected.

“What we really haven’t seen is white supremacists really rallying over an Obama presidency,” said Mark Potok, the director of intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. “Hate groups are in a more or less stunned position right now; they haven’t been able to figure out how to proceed just yet.”

Some attributed the relative lack of activity so far from white supremacist groups and other sources of racial attacks to the same cultural shifts that led the Democrats to become the first major party to choose a black presidential nominee.

“It’s not like we’re finally reaching Martin Luther King’s promised land,” said Michael Gehrke, the research director for the Democratic National Committee, whose unit monitors such activity, “but as a political force, they’ve been marginalized.”

In one sign of shifting mores, James Knowles, a former Ku Klux Klan member who was convicted in a 1981 lynching, said in a Discovery Channel documentary by Ted Koppel that Mr. Obama was a potentially acceptable candidate. “People need to vote for him because of his ideas and the veracity that he displays in what he does, and not because he’s African-American,” Mr. Knowles said.

There have been only sporadic reports of racist mailings, though Democrats say they are on the lookout for more. And there has been scant evidence that Mr. Obama’s candidacy has helped hate-group recruitment, unlike the recent debates over immigration policy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

White supremacist leaders, while threatening some political action before Nov. 4, similarly attribute their relative lack of activity this year to demographic and societal changes they cannot stop. But they also point to a Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, whose liberal immigration views and staunch support for Israel are against everything they stand for.

On top of that, the leadership is plagued by scandal and infighting in the absence of a unifying group like the Ku Klux Klan, which is no longer pre-eminent even among open racists, or figures like the former K.K.K. leader David Duke, whose power waned after he was convicted on fraud charges early this decade. (Mr. Duke has, in fact, written positively about the prospect of Mr. Obama’s being elected, though arguing it would stir a white backlash and “result in a dramatic increase in our ranks.”)

“There’s a real problem,” Mr. White said in the interview last month, “in what’s called the ‘white movement.’ One, there’s a lot of people who are just mentally ill, and we deal with those a lot. No. 2, there are people who have serious sexual problems.”

Mr. White, 31, who says he has a following of at least 1,200 people, considers himself a reformer in the white movement. A landlord of low-income tenants of all races, he devotes as much of his energy to attacking rival leaders he hopes to purge from the supremacist leadership as he does attacking Jews and blacks.

His Web site recently featured a blog post reporting that a fellow white supremacist, Curtis Maynard, was “married to a mestizo and raising half-breed children.” (Mr. Maynard, in turn, has written that Mr. White is “a Jew and an agent of the A.D.L. and S.P.L.C.,” the initials of the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

Mr. White’s Web site abruptly went offline this month. On Friday, The Roanoke Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had seized his computer equipment as part of the investigation that led to his arrest. Mr. White told the newspaper he had posted the address of a juror who served on the panel that convicted the white supremacist Matthew Hale of plotting to kill a federal judge in Chicago. But the newspaper quoted him as saying he had not called for any particular action against the juror. Arrested late Friday, he is being held without bail.

Another leader, Alex Carmichael of the League of American Patriots, has sued Mr. White for linking him in an article to what Mr. White called the “pedophile sex network” of Kevin Alfred Strom. Mr. Strom, the head of the now-defunct white supremacist group National Vanguard, was released from prison this fall after serving time for possessing child pornography.

Last month, Mr. Carmichael’s group became the first to deliver racist leaflets about Mr. Obama, distributing them to homes in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in a small effort that drew wide news coverage.

In the interview last month, Mr. White said his group was planning a similar but larger effort. With a donation of about $8,000 from a supporter in Michigan, he said he was planning to print and distribute to white working-class neighborhoods 20,000 copies of his party’s latest magazine, The Nationalist Socialist. The newest edition has on its cover a photograph of Mr. Obama with a rifle’s crosshairs focused on his head and a headline using a racial slur and seemingly calling for his assassination. Mr. White said the cover was satirical and pointed to a subheading that read, “Negro Deification and the ‘Obama Assassination’ Myth.”

As of last week, there were no reports that the magazine had been distributed, and it was unclear how Mr. White’s arrest would affect his plans.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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juandelacruz's picture

there is no article when i

there is no article when i click on the link, just a blank page below the header

juandelacruz's picture

thanks, worked like a charm

thanks, worked like a charm

gretavo's picture

laying the ground for the Obama-era right wing menace narrative

Daily Kos

The next McVeigh is on McCain

Fri Oct 10, 2008 at 09:52:22 AM PDT

I hoped, perhaps, it was just me.

I saw the hateful crowds at at McCain and Palin rallies. I heard the weak denials (they can't hear the threats, I watched a mouthpiece tell a talking head, though it's clear on one video that McCain reacts when some yells 'terrorist'.) I waited for the candidates to at least say that calling for violence is uncalled for. Still waiting.

It worried me. But perhaps, I told myself, I worry too much.

I grew up in violent times. My earliest political memories are watching on TV the processions that brought Bobby and MLK to their graves. But that couldn't happen again, could it?

Of course, it has.

I've visited several times the site of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It happened when political divisions and hatreds inspired a community of vigilantes armed against their own country, which helped hide a couple of even crazier extremists -- who made their statement by blowing up a building of innocent workers including 19 children.

When you start calling people traitors, or calling Obama a terrorist -- the modern equivalent of calling MLK a communist -- you help people excuse these sort of acts.

So Mr. McCain, if one of these crazies turns to violence, you share the blame.

If you've never been to the Oklahoma City memorial, it's sobering place. Monuments freeze forever the time -- 9:01 a.m., on April 19 -- that the bomb went off.

On a grassy lawn are 168 chairs representing the victims. Nineteen of those are tiny, for the children who's only crime was being in a day care center when the blast occured.

Among President Clinton's statement at a the time blaming hate speech for inspiring the blast -- which got conservatives and talk-radio folks up in arms. But he was right.

This was not long after the GOP takeover of Congress, through campaigns that often fed off conspiracy theories and outright hatred of anything democratic. I covered one as a journalist, of a woman named Helen Chenoweth, who courted militias.

At the time, you could go onto Phyllis Schafley's Web site (she an inspiration for conservative women like Sarah Palin) that suggested the Clintons were about the hand the country over to the UN. There were secret messages on the backs of road signs, and black helicopters in the air. As crazy as that sounds now, the video featured a number of GOP lawmakers.

On talk radio, they insisted Clinton and Reno killed the followers of David Koresh, actually the victims of a murder/suicide by their leaders. Forgotten was the fact that the Koreshis opened fire on cops.

But then again, the right wing entirely forgot the old Republican committment to supporting law officers. The NRA christened them jackbooted thugs. G. Gordon Liddy, friend to Republicans like John McCain, instructed listeners to shoot them in the head because they wore vests. Rush Limbaugh said "The second violent American revolution is just about--I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart--is just about that far away," according to the Washington Post.

A lesser talk radio head circulated a bumper sticker that read "Lee Harvey Oswald: Where are you now that we really need you?"

It was against that background that Timothy McVeigh acted. Oh, he was much crazier than anyone on talk radio, a race hater from a far-right christian sect. But he clearly thought he would inspire a revolution.

What I see today is eerily similar. Just as Newt and his closest allies didn't officially say Clinton was a traitor, McCain and Palin don't say exactly say Obama is a terrorist. They're just 'raising the question' about his 'associations,' with a wink and a nod. Other people say it for them.

Drill down just a little from them and you find the conspiracy theorists and haters. Drill on down and you'll find the crazies.

Again, I had hoped it was just me. This couldn't be real. John McCain is at heart an honorable man, he wouldn't play this game. Then again, he did pick Palin -- whose husband until recently belonged to a secessionist party of kooks -- to be his attack dog.

As I read this morning, I see sober people like David Gergen seeing the same things I do. A former governor of Michigan and the son of William Buckley denounce McCain. It's not just me.

I pray nothing happens, but this is a scary moment in politics. I've never seen major candidates for president and vice president stoop so low.

And I think of those tiny chairs on a lawn in Oklahoma. McCain, the next time, it could be on you.

Tags: John McCain (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

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Permalink | 25 comments

gretavo's picture

more "right wing" rumblings!

Now, before anyone gets too worried let's remember, as wikipedia itself shows us, that sometimes people attack themselves in order to blame an enemy.  See, it's called a "false flag attack":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

Ideological

Political or religious ideologies will sometimes use false flag tactics. This can be done to discredit or implicate rival groups, create the appearance of enemies when none exist, or create the illusion of organized and directed opposition when in truth, the ideology is simply unpopular with society.

In late 2007, a rash of Swastikas and other anti-semitic vandalism appeared on a Jewish student's door at George Washington University.[16] Police subsequently placed a hidden camera, and discovered that the vandalism was perpetrated by the victim herself.[17] The student claimed that the first incident of vandalism was real (committed by an unknown person), but she perpetrated the remaining incidents to draw attention to the university's inaction.

 

Up to 200 graves in the Jewish community's biggest cemetery in Bucharest have been vandalized, Romanian authorities said Friday.

A spokesman for the Jewish community, Sergiu Rogosinschi, said that the
destruction affected some of the most valuable monuments in the sprawling
cemetery in Bucharest.

He said the vandalism was discovered early Thursday. Romanian authorities are investigating, and have condemned the vandalism.

The Jewish cemetery in south Bucharest holds 35,000 graves and more than 40,00 Jews are buried there, some victims of the Holocaust. None of the Holocaust victims' graves were damaged.

Related articles:

  • Vandals paint swastikas on Jewish graves in south Hungary
  • Four teens held in U.S. after 499 Jewish graves vandalized
  • gretavo's picture

    fool me a million times, shame on, um...

    Ex-Employee Held in Arson First Linked To Neo-Nazis

    Police arrest Jewish former employee in connection with recent arson attack on Jewish community center in Paris, suggesting that attack was not neo-Nazi act as originally assumed; if man is found guilty, it would be third case in under two months in which apparently anti-Semitic acts turned out to be work of disturbed individuals seeking attention, rather than neo-Nazis or others pursuing anti-Semitic agenda; hoaxes threaten to overshadow hundreds of real acts of anti-Semitism that have occurre...

     

    August 31, 2004
    Ex-Employee Held in Arson First Linked to Neo-Nazis

    The police arrested a Jewish former employee in connection with a recent arson attack on a Jewish community center in Paris.

     

    August 31, 2004
    Neo-Nazis in Paris Vandalize and Burn a Jewish Community Center

    Fire sweeps through Jewish community center in eastern Paris after arsonists break into building and scrawl swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans inside; this is latest in wave of neo-Nazi acts across country; Pres Jacques Chirac is quick to issue statement comdemning attack and vowing to find and punish those who carried it out; Mayor Bertrand Delanoe of Paris visits scene, as does Prime Min Jean-Pierre Raffarin; Jews of France fear growth of anti-Semitism by both neo-Nazi groups and country's Ar...

     

    August 23, 2004
    Inquiry in French Attack

    A Frenchman told investigators he desecrated a Jewish cemetery and attacked a man of North African origin because he craved media attention.

     

    August 17, 2004
    Thwarted in Germany, Neo-Nazis Take Fascism to France

    Neo-Nazism, strictly repressed in Germany, has found breathing space in France where the fringe movement is tolerated.

     

    August 13, 2004
    Chirac Condemns Desecration of Jewish Graves, Latest in a Wave

    President Jacques Chirac called the desecration of 60 Jewish graves an act of cowardice and vowed to find and prosecute the vandals.

     

    July 19, 2004
    On Bastille Day, France Buzzes Over a Hoax and Racism

    President Jacques Chirac was forced to address an account of an anti-Semitic attack that turned out to be a hoax.

    gretavo's picture

    more on anti-semitic hoaxes

    gretavo's picture

    "The neo-Nazi skinhead plot to assassinate Obama"

     

    Althouse: The neo-Nazi skinhead plot to assassinate Obama (and ...

    Oct 27, 2008 ... The neo-Nazi skinhead plot to assassinate Obama (and shoot/decapitate 88 black people). Disrupted. [T]he legal documents show, ...
    althouse.blogspot.com/2008/10/neo-nazi-skinhead-plot-to-assassinate.html - 1 hour ago -
    casseia's picture

    Those dangnab white supremacists...

    2 men arrested in alleged assassination plot aimed at Barack Obama
    Authorities say two white supremacists planned to shoot 88 blacks and decapitate 14 others, with the presidential candidate as their final target.
    By Richard A. Serrano
    3:18 PM PDT, October 27, 2008
    Reporting from Washington -- Federal authorities in Tennessee announced today that they have arrested two alleged white supremacists in an alleged plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama by driving their vehicle at top speed and firing high-powered rifles at him from their car windows.

    The plotters also allegedly discussed shooting 88 African Americans to death and decapitating 14 others in a killing spree across the country -- choosing the numbers 88 and 14 because, officials said, "they have special significance within the White Power movement."

    Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena, Ark., were charged in U.S. District Court in Nashville with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a gun store and making threats against a major presidential candidate.

    According to Jim Cavanaugh, special agent-in-charge of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Obama was to be their final target.

    "They said that would be their last, final act," Cavanaugh said. "That they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama. They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

    The Obama campaign declined comment on the alleged plot, as it typically does when safety matters are involved.

    Brian A. Weaks, an ATF special agent and a lead investigator in the case, said in a court affidavit unsealed today that the two men had told authorities they had hoped to carry out the assassination in a grand style.

    "Both individuals stated that they would dress in all white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt," Weaks said. "Both individuals further stated they knew they would and were willing to die during this attempt."

    In preparation, the two men allegedly shot out the window of a church and then wrote chalk marks -- including swastikas -- on their car. On the hood they scribbled the numbers 88 and 14.

    The eighth letter of the alphabet is "H," and the number 8 twice signifies "HH." It is shorthand for the Nazi greeting "Heil Hitler." And 14 comes from the number of words in a White Power slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

    Serrano is a Times staff writer.

    richard.serrano@latimes.com

    Times staff writer Seema Mehta, traveling with the Obama campaign, contributed to this report.

    casseia's picture

    Just crazy talk

    that sounds like it's out of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy what with the numbers and the letters and the tuxedos.

    However, it did serve as the impetus, after she came racing downstairs to tell me, to explain to the kidlet 'race war', 'white trash', and 'riot.'

    gretavo's picture

    this is scripted shlock...

    no question in my mind... no doubt these clowns exist and made of themselves a very obvious "threat"--the question is are they genuine "neo-Nazi skinheads" or provocateurs? in either case it is still part of the meta-narrative being developed in advance of the next administration...

    gulu's picture

    Dead on

    All part of the scripted narrative.
    But whats with the new avatar Greveto? I like it.Is that a penis or a pelvic tumor?

    casseia's picture

    omg, gulu

    I'm not sure a post of yours has ever made me bust out laughing like that. Keep up the good work!

    casseia's picture

    My guess is one of each

    or possibly two provocateurs. It's so freakin' over the top, however... is it aimed at Obama supporters?

    dicktater's picture

    BATFE agent's affidavit speaks for itself

    Theatre. BATFE is the eVil, "spawn of Satan" kind of wicked sister of the IRS. I don't doubt for a second that the affidavit is fabricated garbage.

    The pair's "final act of violence" would be an attempt to kill Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee. In separate interviews with investigators, the men said that they planned to speed their vehicle toward Obama while "shooting at him from the windows." Apparently befitting the historic assault, Cowart and Schlesselman "stated they would dress in all white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt."

    http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1027081obama1.html

    "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."
    ~~ attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen