Gunman may have white supremacist link

The gunman who shot a US congresswoman in the head might have links to a US white supremacist group that has hosted the British National Party leader.

The US Department of Homeland Security is investigating whether Jared Loughner, who has been charged over the attack, in which six people died and 13 were wounded, was connected with the racist and antisemitic organisation American Renaissance.

Founded in 1991, American Renaissance, which holds biennial conferences, is dedicated to propagating the pseudo-scientific “research” of racial and racist scientists obsessed by a belief in the innate mental and moral inferiority of blacks to whites. The conference is a central event for white nationalists, neo-nazis, Klansmen and Holocaust deniers, who form a large part of the audience.

It also produces a newsletter of the same name, edited by its founder and conference organiser Jared Taylor, which focuses on the discredited subject of racial science and argues repetitively that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. It described the recent success for the Republican party during the US mid-term elections as the “great white wave”, a view that corresponds with Taylor’s “clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites”.

Nick Griffin featured on the list of speakers for last February’s American Renaissance conference, where he was hoping to celebrate his election as an MEP with an address entitled “Victory against all odds”. However the conference was cancelled after four successive hotels cancelled bookings.

Taylor had also hoped to bring over the BNP ideologue and website editor Arthur Kemp, author of the monumental racist tome March of the Titans, but Kemp was unavailable.

It was not Griffin’s first invitation. In 2002 he spoke on “Nationalist Movements and the Crisis of the Liberal Elite”. In 2006, fresh from his acquittal at Leeds Crown Court, he opened the conference with a 45-minute speech entitled “What is left of free speech in Britain”, in which he attacked Britain’s “bastardised, mongrelised democracy” and told delegates “we have had enough of this ghastly multiracial experiment that has been forced upon us”. He concluded: “people are going to be killed before we de-Islamify Europe”.

Afterwards Griffin spent time networking with racists such as Don Black, the former Alabama Ku Klux Klan leader who now runs the world’s largest white supremacist website under the slogan “white pride, world wide”.

This year American Renaissance has invited Jonathan Bowden, the former BNP “cultural officer”, to address the restaged ninth conference in North Carolina early next month. Bowden remains a regular speaker at BNP events despite his leading role in the New Right group led by the former National Front “political soldier” Troy Southgate.

At a New Right meeting last October Bowden sang the praises of the infamous nazi Savitri Devi. A close associate of the British nazi leader Colin Jordan and the US nazi leader Lincoln Rockwell, Devi was one of the founders of the World Union of National Socialists in 1962 and wrote a number of books that hardline national socialists and pagan mystics see as the ultimate expression of their world view.

Devi, who died in England in 1982, visited Germany after Hitler’s fall in 1945 to expound his beliefs and was imprisoned by the British occupation authority. She spent time with SS prisoners and tried to facilitate their escape but failed. Her ashes were carried to the headquarters of the US nazi party by Tony Williams, an old colleague of Griffin and leader of the National Socialist Movement, the group that encouraged David Copeland to embark on his terror bombing spree in London in 1999.

American Renaissance has denied any knowledge of Loughner. “No one by the name of Loughner has ever been a subscriber to American Renaissance or has ever registered for an American Renaissance conference,” Taylor stated yesterday. He went on to deny, improbably, that his organisation was racist and antisemitic.

However its mission statement repeats the standard racist claim that white people are suppressed. “One of the most destructive myths of modern times is that people of all races have the same average intelligence,” it reads. “Racial loyalty or racial consciousness is normal and healthy. All non-white groups instinctively pursue their own interests, and legitimately so. It is only whites who have been taught that it is immoral to take even the most basic steps to ensure their survival.”

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