American huge compensation lawsuits after racist crimes

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Roddy Newman. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Some mainstream European politicians have been agonising recently about the growth of racist far right parties, which have recently entered parliament for the first time in Europe's least racist country, Sweden, which are currently propping up, or part of centre-right coalitions in Europe's most liberal countries, Holland and Denmark, and which have recently been part of right wing coalitions in more conservative countries like Italy and Austria.

However, there is a simple solution to the problem of racist far right organisations which could consign the heavily in debt BNP, and also the NF, EDL, SDL, WDL, EFP, BPP, etc. to the history books: The huge compensation award lawsuits after racist crimes which the USA's Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama civil rights law firm, have been using for decades to bankrupt numerous American racist organisations and activists.

For example, after White Aryan Resistance skinheads beat an Ethiopian man, Mulugeta Seraw, to death with a baseball bat, SPLC successfully sued WAR, and its leader, Tom Metzger, for $12.5 million compensation. As a result, Metzger was forced to sell his home, and was bankrupted. WAR continued, but like Metzger, it still has to make regular payments to Seraw's family, in Metzger's case out of his welfare cheques.

In another case, SPLC successfully sued the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, its state leader, and 4 other individual members for $37.8 million compensation (later reduced to $21.5 million on appeal) after they burned down an African American church. As a result of the compensation award, the Christian Knights immediately went from being one of the most active KKK groups in the US, to effectively ceasing to exist.

You can read about these, and other hate and extremism lawsuits on the SPLC website. All of them have been funded by donations from SPLC supporters, as the SPLC do not take any money from the people who they sue on behalf of.

If the BNP, NF, EDL, SDL, WDL, EFP, BPP, etc., and their leaders all faced huge compensation award lawsuits after every racist or religious crime which they or their members engaged in, for engaging in, or inciting racist or religious criminality, or for using malicious and deliberate lies to incite racist or religious criminality, they could all obviously be bankrupted very quickly.

Nick Griffin was of course successfully prosecuted for inciting racial hatred after he denied the Holocaust in an article, but unfortunately, he was not sued for a huge compensation award, which could have been paid to Holocaust survivors.

The USA has no racial or religious hatred incitement laws, which is why so much Holocaust denial literature is printed in the US, and why SPLC lawsuits cannot sue on those grounds, but British laws, and European laws in general, are much stricter, as they should be.

Hitler and the Nazis would have been bankrupted long before they got into power if Weimar Republic Germany had had such laws, and if an SPLC type law firm had used them rigourously.

For example, the Russian Tsarist secret police (Okhrana) forgery, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", which the Okhrana created to turn the hatred which much of the Russian public felt for the Tsar into hatred of Russia's Jews, incited people to vote for the Nazis, who popularised the document, and who were later incited by "The Protocols" to organise the Holocaust.

You can buy Norman Cohn's book about "The Protocols" inciting people to vote for the Nazis, and inciting the Holocaust here.

Today, racist organisations are in some cases far more extreme than the Nazis, as I explained in an earlier article which discussed the current or past BNP and EFP leaders who admire, or admired a now dead American fascist party leader who was far more extreme than the Nazis, as he openly advocated killing all of the world's billions of non-white people and Jews, so it is very important that huge compensation award lawsuits are used to destroy racist organisations which have used "Protocols" type malicious and deliberate lies in their propaganda to win votes, and whip up racial hatred, and thus racist criminality.

Anti-racist lawyers could thus contact the SPLC for advice, and could then begin bankrupting all British far right organisations and leaders, by suing them because of racial or religious hatred inciting malicious and deliberate lies in past leaflets, articles, and other propaganda which would have led to past racist or religious crimes by them, or their members.

Anti-racist lawyers could also contact any lawyer friends they have in other European countries, to suggest the same tactic to them.

"Searchlight" magazine, and other anti-fascist organisations, have long been documenting the remarkably large numbers of criminal convictions for terrorism, hard drug dealing, paedophilia, gang rape, inciting racial hatred, racist violence, football hooliganism, etc. which racist activists have, so the law, and a deluge of huge compensation demand lawsuits, are the correct way to deal with the criminals who are responsible for organised racist activism once and for all.

Do the BNP and EFP leadership still believe in the mass slaughter of billions?

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Roddy Newman. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

In November 1995, the guest speaker at the BNP's annual rally in London, was the most extreme fascist party leader that the world has ever produced since Hitler, the late William Pierce (1933-2002), who led the National Alliance splinter group from the American Nazi Party. In Pierce's 1978 novel, "The Turner Diaries", which he wrote under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, fascists use nuclear weapons, terrorist bombings, and other methods to wipe out all of the world's Jews and non-white people, or, in other words, billions of people. The novel can be read online though if you want to read it, you'll have to find it yourself because we're not linking to it.

Not surprisingly, when the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, found out about Pierce's 1995 visit to London, he banned him from visiting the UK for life. See an obituary of Pierce here, which was written by the late John Tyndall (1934-2005), the BNP leader who invited him to London, to read about Howard's lifetime ban.

Pierce also wanted to kill many white people. In his July 26, 2002 obituary in "The Independent" newspaper, you can read:

When writing The Turner Diaries, he recounted in a radio broadcast in 1997,

"I wanted to take all of the feminist agitators and propagandists and all of the race-mixing fanatics and all of the mass media bosses and all of the bureaucrats and politicians who were collaborating with them, and I wanted to put them up against a wall, in batches of a thousand or so at a time, and machine-gun them."

Pierce's novel, which is very well known in international far right circles, has sold nearly 500,000 copies, which is why the FBI has described it as "the bible of the racist right" (see an April 3, 2000 article on the website of "The Guardian", "Gospels of hate that slip through the net", to see how many copies the novel has sold, and the FBI quote), and which is why a prominent American Jewish anti-fascist group, the Anti-Defamation League, has described the novel as,

"One of the most widely read and cited books on the far-right".

So, is it conceivable that John Tyndall did not know about Pierce's pro-murdering billions of people views when he asked him to be the guest speaker at the BNP's November 1995 annual rally, seventeen years after Pierce's novel had been published, and did Tyndall also secretly wish that he could kill billions of Jews and non-white people?

Pierce's National Alliance does not stand in elections like the BNP, so Pierce did not have to worry about his insane ideas putting voters off his party, but the BNP does stand in elections, which may explain why Tyndall never openly said that he shared Pierce's views.

The British anti-fascist magazine "Searchlight" has said of the popularity of "The Turner Diaries" in Tyndall era BNP circles:

"The growing influence of US nazi ideas was illustrated in November 1995 when William Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, addressed the BNP annual rally. Pierce was also the author of The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of a race war which, it has been claimed, inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma bombing. By the mid-1990s The Turner Diaries was better known on the British right than Mein Kampf."

(Searchlight feature, "A century of British fascism", "1990 to 1999: Ballot box to bomb - fighting on all fronts").

In the earler mentioned "Independent" obituary of Pierce, you can read:

"His influence on Britain was incendiary: after reading another novel of his called Hunter [in which the hero travels around killing various types of people who fascists do not like, for example, interracial couples, journalists, and politicians]...[Tyndall era] British National Party members began a sticker campaign against "mongrelisation", and attacked a mixed-race couple in a London pub."

"Hunter" was dedicated to an American racist serial killer, Joseph Paul Franklin, a former American Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan member who has been accused of 20 racist murders. Franklin also confessed to shooting the American pornographer Larry Flynt, plotted to assassinate the African American politician Jesse Jackson, and threatened to assassinate US President Jimmy Carter because of his pro-black civil rights views.

Nick Griffin, who was famously convicted for inciting racial hatred after he denied the Holocaust in a 1998 article for the BNP magazine "The Rune", claims that the BNP has become a respectable democratic political party since he took over its leadership from its hardline pro-Nazi founder, John "Mein Kampf is my bible" Tyndall, who led the BNP from when he founded it in 1982 until 1999, but I will show in a moment that respectable Holocaust-denier Nick Griffin's claim may be as incorrect as his view of the Holocaust.

See the Conservative Party blog webpage here to see a picture of Tyndall in a Nazi uniform, and to see the "Mein Kampf is my bible" quote.

Tyndall stayed at Pierce's home in 1979 when he was in the US, and put Pierce up at his home when he visited Britain in 1995, as Tyndall admitted in his 2002 Pierce obituary, "A Great Man Passes On", so personally I really do not have much doubt that Tyndall secretly shared William "Great Man" Pierce's wish to kill billions of people.

If Holocaust denier Nick Griffin's claim that the BNP has become respectable since the Tyndall era is correct, he must have at least distanced himself from Pierce, because of his murderous views, but a "Searchlight" webpage has alleged that Griffin was close to Pierce: "Dr. William Pierce, who before his recent death was one of the world's foremost neo-Nazis and [allegedly] a close ally of Nick Griffin."

That webpage, which is here, also states that Griffin's pamphlet, "Who Are the Mindbenders?", which listed Jews in the British media, was inspired by a Pierce article and pamphlet about Jews in the American media, "Who Runs America?"

A Northamptonshire Racial Equality online article, also alleges that Griffin based his pamphlet on Pierce's article and pamphlet: "Mindbenders is [allegedly] based on Who Rules America?, a similar pamphlet written by Dr. William Pierce, one of the world's foremost neo-Nazis and a self-confessed ally of Nick Griffin."

The same article also said: "The BNP has a long relationship with William Pierce...In August 1999, Pierce addressed an American Friends of the BNP meeting in Arlington, Virginia...Pierce's articles regularly appeared in Spearhead when it was the official BNP magazine, and in 1995 he addressed a BNP rally in London."

So, does Nick Griffin secretly wish that he could also kill billions? He became the BNP leader in September 1999, the month after Pierce spoke to the AFBNP meeting, but he was allegedly a "close ally" of Pierce, and allegedly based his pamphlet on an article and pamphlet which was written by Pierce.

Does Nick Griffin also have the same kind of kill mass media owners fantasies that Pierce had, because on August 11, 1996, Griffin was quoted in the "Wales on Sunday" newspaper as having said: "The politicians, those in charge of the mass media, police chiefs and others responsible for creating this multi-racial hell hole must face trial and pay the ultimate penalty."? That quote is also in the just cited Nothamptonshire Racial Equality Council online article noted above.

What about Mark Cotterill, the founder, and original leader of the England First Party splinter group from the BNP, who was an EFP councillor in Blackburn from 2006 to 2007, and an EFP candidate for Preston City Council in 2009? He went to see William Pierce, and said that he spent three of the most enjoyable and interesting days of his life talking to him, so does Cotterill secretly wish that he too could kill billions of people?

In "Hands Across the Water", an article about the American Friends of the BNP group which was published in the Fall 2001 issue of "Intelligence Report", the quarterly magazine of the American civil rights law firm the Southern Poverty Law Center, you can read:

"His [Cotterill's] networking in the United States began in 1993, when he visited neo-Nazi William Pierce at his National Alliance headquarters in West Virginia.

"'I managed to talk to Dr. Pierce in depth", he wrote later. 'I had three of the most interesting and enjoyable days of my life there, and I hope to make a return visit in the near future.'

"In 1995, Cotterill moved to the United States. He was the U.S. distributor of the British far right publication Right Now! and corresponded with future BNP leader Nick Griffin."

Go here to read the full article about the AFBNP, which was founded by Cotterill. As the article points out, Pierce's "The Turner Diaries" was sold at AFBNP meetings.

According to an Anti-Defamation League webpage in 1999, Pierce gave a speech in Thessaloniki, Greece to members of far right parties from Greece, Portugal, Romania, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, and South Africa, and given how well known "The Turner Diaries" is in far right circles, is it conceivable that the leaders of those parties also did not know about Pierce advocating multiple genocides, 21 years after his "bible of the racist right" novel had been published? Do the leaders of those far right parties secretly wish that they too could kill billions of people?

Pierce's novel is not simply a far right fantasy which will never inspire violence, because it is no secret that a number of fascist terrorists were inspired by it (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, London nail bomber David Copeland, and three American terrorist groups, the Order, the New Order, and the Aryan Republican Army). See the already cited "Guardian" and "Independent" articles, a webpage of the already mentioned and highly respected American civil rights law firm, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and especially the already cited Anti-Defamation League webpage, to read about "The Turner Diaries" inspiring those terrorists.

The SPLC is highly respected because of its tolerance education, because of its informative quarterly magazine about hate groups, "Intelligence Report", which is widely read in American law enforcement circles, and because its compensation for racist violence lawsuits have bankrupted a number of American fascist organisations and leaders in recent decades.

For example, after the White Aryan Resistance skinhead gang killed an Ethiopian student, an SPLC lawsuit against the group and its leader, forced it to pay over $12 million compensation to the student's son, which led to the seizure of all of the assets of the group and its leader.

Another SPLC lawsuit bankrupted the Aryan Nations group by forcing it to pay over $6 milion to a woman and her son who AN members had shot at and beaten up. AN was forced to sell its famous compound to pay the compensation award.

It would be a good idea if European lawyers began using SPLC type lawsuits to bankrupt the BNP, Nick Griffin, and other European fascist organisations and leaders. No doubt the SPLC would be happy to tell European lawyers how to sue fascist groups and leaders, who could also be sued after homophobic violence, or after other types of violence. This SPLC webpage which discusses some of their lawsuits might be helpful.

It is also no secret that "The Turner Diaries" inspired the most notorious American racist murderers of modern times, John William King, Shawn Allen Berry, and Lawrence Russell Brewer, who battered a black man, James Byrd, Jr., and then shackled him to a truck and drove off. When he was shackling Byrd to the truck, King allegedly said: "We're starting "The Turner Diaries" early." See the ADL webpage to read more about Byrd's murder.

David Copeland said that he planted his three nail bombs in London to spark off a race war which would make white Britons vote BNP, and more "Turner Diaries" inspired fascist terrorism could be round the corner, because if you go to the website of the "Searchlight" magazine, and put the word "terrorism" into its search engine, you will find articles which discuss a number of British would-be terrorists who were members of the BNP, or other British far right groups.

See a HOPE not hate anti-fascist group webpage at to read more about former BNP member David Copeland and his attempt to create a race war to make white Britons vote BNP. The HOPE not hate page has a link to a BBC News profile of Copeland which discusses his BNP membership, and his involvement with them.

Micky Mayon, white supremacist wanted by FBI, arrested in Israel

Where's the last place you would look for a white supremacist on the run?

Micky Mayon, a violent neo-Nazi on the FBI most-wanted list, decided it had to be Israel. So for two years, the suspected KKK member laid low in the Jewish State after fleeing the United States.

Today, Mayon's luck ran out after undercover Israeli immigration police raided his Tel Aviv flat in the early hours.

Even then they were unaware that the man in their grasp was wanted for allegedly burning the car of a US judge who had ordered that he stand trial on firearms charges.

Mayon, 32, fled the United States on November 1, 2007, boarding a Continental Airlines flight to Tel Aviv. After arriving on a one-month tourist visa, he stayed on illegally.

He was known for preaching white supremacist, neo-Nazi views around his home town of Steelton, Pennsylvania. Israeli authorities were told by Interpol that he belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.

"He was here because he thought this was the last place they would look for him," Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Interior Ministry, said.

Ms Haddad described how Israeli immigration police burst into the south Tel Aviv apartment where Mayon had been hiding.

“He said ... that he did not hold a job while in Israel but made some money by washing dishes and that his parents sent him money to make ends meet."

Manyon is said to have moved often to evade police, but undercover police from the National Immigration Authority's Oz unit staked out his apartment after a tip over his illegal status in the country.

"We didn't expect to partake in this kind of activity while enforcing immigration laws," Tziki Sela, the head of the Oz unit, said. "But the law is the law, and it applies to all illegal migrants — it is enforced in the same way."

American officers are expected to arrive in Israel in the coming days to escort Mayon back to the US, where he will await trial on charges of racist assault, setting fire to vehicles belonging to federal agents, and a host of violent incidents.

"The search for Mayon came to a successful conclusion today with the actions in Israel," said Marshal Michael R. Regan. "Locating and identifying Mayon in a foreign country sends a strong message that you can run, but you cannot hide."

The Klu Klux Klan

— The Ku Klux Klan is a racist, anti-Semitic movement committed to violence to achieve racial segregation and white supremacy

— The first klan was founded in 1866 in the aftermath of the American Civil War

— More than 40 klan groups exist in the US, many with multiple chapters or klaverns

— Membership is estimated at 5,000, mostly in the South and Midwest

— Members are headed by an Imperial Wizard and wear white robes, masks and conical hats

— The KKK initially focused on anger against African-Americans, terrorising them through race riots, lynchings and other killings

— It later attacked Jews, Catholics, homosexuals and immigrants. By the 1920s it had four million members

— In the 1960s the KKK systematically murdered at least 15 black civil rights leaders

— The KKK’s website claims that white people face genocide

— In November 2008 a jury awarded $2.5 million to a Kentucky teenager who was beaten severely by klan members who believed mistakenly that he was an illegal immigrant

Sources: Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Centre

The Times

‘Springtime for Irving’: The Video

Here’s a fresh treat for readers of Hatewatch — a brand new video, made by journalist Max Blumenthal and videographer Thomas Shomaker and co-produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, about convicted Holocaust denier David Irving. It’s an amazing, sardonic account of Irving’s visit this July 16 to a church in Manhattan, where Blumenthal presses him into a most remarkable interview.

Irving, of course, is the infamous British writer who penned numerous apologetics for Adolf Hitler and then sued American scholar Deborah Lipstadt after she called him a Holocaust denier. Irving ultimately lost his epic court battle in London, with the judge in the case concluding that he was a “pro-Nazi” polemicist. The court also found that the author of some 30 books had “persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” to promote his racist and anti-Semitic ideas.

We’ll save most of the good stuff for viewers of the video, but offer just a couple of teasers here. At one point, Irving tells his audience: “Adolf Hitler was being kept out of the loop and was probably not at all anti-Semitic… . He repeatedly held out his hand to stop things happening to the Jews.” Just as you’re digesting that incredible piece of neo-Nazi propaganda, the video recounts how journalist Christopher Hitchens, a former Trotskyist-turned-Iraq War cheerleader, has described Irving as “a great historian” and, in Irving’s words, remains “a good friend” to the man who once said that more people died in the back of Ted Kennedy’s car than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Although the video doesn’t make this point, Hitchens was named one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine of Britain in 2005, long after his paean to Irving’s swell talents as a “historian.”

Take a look at this remarkable video, which we offer here a day late as a birthday present from Hatewatch, which just completed its first year of existence. As the months unfold, we hope to bring you more along these lines.

Hatewatch

Hatewatch for the week of March 6th 2008

Ministers Accuse Police Of Destroying 'Greensboro Massacre' Records
Three ministers alleged that active duty Greensboro police officers in 2004 and 2005 destroyed 50 boxes of police files related to an infamous case of fatal shootings at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in 1979...

Grandson Of Auschwitz Survivor Victimized In Anti-Semitic Attack
A Temple University student who grew up listening to his grandfather describe the horrors of Auschwitz suffered a broken nose and a fractured orbital bone when he was attacked by seven men chanting anti-Semitic slurs...

Former Campus Hate Group Leader Blasts 'Cowards' In Conservative Movement
Kyle Bristow, the former chairman of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, revealed that national YAF leaders threatened to revoke the group's charter if it went ahead with plans to host a lecture by white supremacist Jared Taylor...

White Supremacist Bank Robbery Fugitive Arrested
David McFarland, 29, who is suspected of robbing several banks in Oregon while on supervised released for illegally trying to purchase a firearm, was arrested in Alabama by members of the Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive Task Force...

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of Feb 27th 2008

Openly Gay Junior High Student Murdered By Classmate
Male classmates bullied 15-year-old Lawrence King after he started wearing make-up and high-heeled boots to school, then one of them shot King to death in what prosecutors are calling a premeditated hate crime...

Neo-Nazi, Wife Die In Murder-Suicide
Police found the body of prolific white supremacist blogger James "Yankee Jim" Leshkevich hanging in the garage of the home he shared with his wife, who was found beaten and strangled to death in the couple's bedroom...

Police Block Protesters From Disrupting Racist Conference
Fairfax County police stopped a crowd of three dozen anti-racist demonstrators from entering a hotel near Dulles International Airport where about 100 white supremacists had gathered for the American Renaissance Conference...

White Supremacist Allegedly Attacked Black Security Guard
According to police, self-professed white supremacist Ryan Lawrence Monfils, 20, yelled racial slurs while repeatedly punching a uniformed black security guard in an apparently random and racially motivated attack...

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of October 31st 2007

KKK Group To Protest Rival KKK Group
The Alabama Ku Klux Klan intends to stage a counter-demonstration at a National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rally November 10th in order to protest the "ignorance and stupidity" of racial slurs and threats...

White Nationalist Group Announces MLK Day Rally In Jena
The Nationalist Movement revealed plans to hold a "Jena Justice Day to Empower the Majority" demonstration on January 21st 2008...

Family of Fallen Marine Sues Anti-Gay Church
The parents of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq filed a lawsuit against the Westboro Baptist Church after WBC members cheered and waved "Thank God for dead soldiers" signs outside their son's funeral...

Croatian Neo-Nazi Rock Star To Perform in New York
Protests are rising against two upcoming concerts by Marko Perkovic, a Croatian heavy metal singer whose lyrics glorify the Holocaust and celebrate the Ustasha, Croatia's former Nazi-backed military regime...

Creator Skinhead Charged With Felony Assault
Jeffrey David Labor, a self-declared "reverend" for the Creator Skinhead Movement, allegedly stabbed a man less than a month after Labor was arrested for distributing skinhead fliers outside a Jewish-owned jewelry store...

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of August 15th 2007

National Alliance Leader Sentenced to 87 Months in Prison
Shaun Walker, the national chairman of the National Alliance, was sentenced to prison for conspiring to violate federal civil rights laws...

Aryan Brotherhood Expanding in New Mexico and Texas
Recent federal indictments show that the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison-based gang, is increasingly active outside of prisons in New Mexico and Texas...

Prussian Blue Documentary Contains 'Profoundly Creepy' Scenes
The new documentary "Nazi Pop Twins" is an equally revealing and unsettling look into the lives of Lynx and Lamb Gaede and their white nationalist stage mom April Gaede...

Police Increase Patrols After Racist Vandalism
White supremacist slogans and swastikas were spray-painted on the walls of a skate park in Fitchburg, Md...

New Trial Begins in Racially Motivated Baseball Bat Attack
Self-avowed white supremacist Brian Neilson, 29, will be retried for attacking a black couple with a baseball bat inside their home while they slept...

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of August 8th 2007

Neo-Nazi Group Posts Wrong Man's Home Information
The American National Socialist Workers Party got the wrong Brian Schwartz when they posted the home address of a man with the same name as the Mayor of Toledo's spokesman...

Duke Crony Elected to Louisiana GOP Governing Committee
Right-wing radio host and longtime David Duke supporter Keith Rush was elected to the governing body of Louisiana's Republican party...

Neo-Nazis Rally in Kalamazoo
More than 400 law enforcement officers kept the peace while passions ran high at a neo-Nazi rally organized by white supremacist Hal Turner...

Ex-Cop Linked to Aryan Nations After Bomb Blast
Investigators found a large amount of Aryan Nations "literature and items" in the home of a former Pittsburgh police officer who was injured when a homemade bomb exploded...

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of July 18th 2007

White Supremacist Gang Members Convicted of Murder
Two members of Public Enemy Number One were found guilty of assassinating a founder of the white supremacist organization in retaliation for his giving away gang secrets in a television interview...

Aryan Warriors Members Indicted
Fourteen members of Aryan Warriors, a white supremacist gang based in the Nevada state prison system, were indicted on federal racketeering charges...

Ex-Klan Leader Acquitted of Child Sex Charges
Former Ku Klux Klan leader Gordon Creal Young was found not guilty of sexual abuse of a minor...

Neo-Nazi Fliers Single Out City Councilwoman
Fliers mailed and tossed onto lawns by a neo-Nazi group use racial slurs and display the photo, home address and phone number of a Fairdale City Councilwoman...

'Ex-gay' Movement Scouts Miami Recruits
Fort Lauderdale-based Worthy Creations purports to cure same-sex attraction...

SPLC

New sex charge brought against neo-Nazi leader

Neo-Nazi leader Kevin Alfred Strom, arrested last January on charges of possession of child pornography and witness tampering, now faces a key additional accusation — that he "enticed" a 10-year-old girl to engage in sexual activity.

The new charge came in an April federal grand jury indictment that also formalized the other felony charges faced by the founder of National Vanguard, a neo-Nazi group that collapsed after Strom's arrest). In addition to the "coercion and enticement" charge, they include four counts of receipt of child pornography (via a computer); one count of possession of child pornography; and one count of obstructing justice by assaulting or threatening a witness.

It wasn't clear from the indictment what Strom is accused of with regard to the young girl, and officials have not publicly detailed their allegations. The charge says only that Strom enticed or attempted to entice or coerce the girl. In a widely circulated E-mail, meanwhile, Strom pleads for money for his jail "canteen fund," complains that he's being kept in solitary confinement, and asserts that he is "not guilty of the charges against me" — even though Strom apparently signed a notarized "contract" with his wife Elisha last year in which he promised to attend counseling until he "has been declared free of pedophilia." Elisha Strom posted a copy of the document on a neo-Nazi site after her husband's arrest.

Kevin Strom also allegedly said in his February E-mail that he had written "a long and detailed account of the spousal betrayal which has resulted in my current situation," but added that his lawyers had advised him not to circulate it. Elisha Strom has hotly denied that she had anything to do with Strom's arrest.

Strom, who long kept a collection of cheesecake photos of young girls on his website under the heading of "feminine beauty," ended his E-mail on an upbeat note. "I remain," he said, "dedicated to the cause of life and the ennoblement of man."

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of July 11th 2007

Christian Reconstructionists flock to 'Worldview Super Conference'
Several hundred Religious Right activists attended a four-day conference sponsored by American Vision, a radical ministry promoting a Christian theocracy that includes the death penalty for homosexuals, fornicators and those who spread "false religions."

Hate crime victim commits suicide
David Ritcheson, who was beaten unconscious and sodomized with a patio umbrella pole during a racially motivated 2006 attack that sparked widespread outrage, jumped to his death from a cruise ship...

'Cool Church' spreads anti-gay myths
Leaders of the Tucson Community Church, which promotes itself as hip and intellectually curious, are telling parishioners that homosexuality reduces life spans by 30 years, among other homophobic falsehoods...

KKK items discovered with bomb materials
Bounty hunters found KKK and neo-Nazi paraphernalia along with guns, ammunition and bomb-making materials in a storage unit rented by fugitive Christopher Reindeau...

Fox News hypes flimsy report on lesbian gangs
A "national underground network" of lesbians toting pink-colored pistols is terrorizing America, according to a recent segment on the popular Fox News Channel "The O'Reilly Factor."

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of June 27th 2007

Neo-Nazi soldiers charged with equipment thefts
Two 82nd Airborne paratroopers allegedly sold morphine, body armor, and a Humvee, and planned to sell a 105 mm Howitzer, to an FBI undercover agent posing as a white supremacist group contact...

White supremacist prisoner kills Corrections Officer
Curtis Michael Allgier, 27, stole a gun from a corrections officer and shot him to death during a medical appointment at the University of Utah, then carjacked an SUV and led police on a high-speed chase...

FBI investigates death threats against columnist
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts received hundreds of racist threats after white supremacist websites published his address, directions to his house, and a satellite image of his neighborhood...

Klansman convicted in 1964 slayings
A federal jury convicted James Ford Seale, 71, of kidnapping and conspiracy in the deaths of two black teenagers in Mississippi almost 43 years ago...

SPLC

Hatewatch for the week of June 13th 2007

Lessons of Waco applied to New Hampshire standoff
U.S. marshals engaged in a standoff with convicted tax evaders in Plainfield appear to have learned from the mistakes of Waco and Ruby Ridge...

White Supremacist sentenced for cross-burning
Kevin William Ridenour, who told investigators he's a member of a racist gang based in Chico, California, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to burning a cross in front of the home of an African Catholic priest...

Murders, immigration controversy invigorate hate groups
White supremacist groups in Tennessee are rallying around immigration and the recent brutal slayings of a young white couple...

KKK Publication Distributed in Virginia
The United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan distributed copies of "The Klansman's Voice" in two Charlottesville-area neighborhoods...

Southern Poverty Law Center

Hatewatch for the week of June 6th 2007

Vanguard Webmaster Arrested As Clowns Cheer
Counter-protesters in clown suits chanted "Go home Adolf!" when Alex Linder, head of the white nationalist website Vanguard News Network, was arrested for disorderly conduct at a rally Linder organized...

David Lane, Founding Member of The Order, Dies in Prison
David Lane, a leader of the murderous 1980s white supremacist revolutionary gang The Order, died after suffering an epileptic seizure while serving a 190-year prison term...

Hate Group Financier Dies
Michelle Ilse Weyher, the Chihuahua-loving Manhattan socialite who financially supported the Pioneer Fund, a racist pseudoscientific foundation, died of cancer...

Navy Officer Disciplined for Extremist Activities
Lt. Cmdr. John F. Sharpe was temporarily relieved of duty and placed under investigation after the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed his ties to anti-Semitic extremist groups...

SPLC

Hatewatch - for the week of May 30th 2007

Skinheads Sentenced For Stomping Murder
Samuel Compton, 27, and Christopher Whitley, 25, were sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for stomping a man to death outside a Phoenix pool hall in 2002...

Child Porn Charges Against Neo-Nazi Leader Detailed
A new court filing reveals sordid details of the federal government's child pornography case against disgraced National Vanguard leader Kevin Strom...

Idaho Shooter Was Aryan Nations Member
Jason Kenneth Hamilton, a card-carrying member of Aryan Nations, killed his wife, a church sexton and a police officer in a shooting spree that wounded three others...

KKK Group Holds Anti-Immigration Rally
More than 150 people gathered to hear a dozen robed members of the Alabama Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan hurl racial slurs and epithets at Mexican immigrants...

Anne Frank Memorial Vandalized
A memorial to Holocaust victim Anne Frank was toppled and damaged by vandals two months after being plastered with neo-Nazi stickers...

SPLC

Back from the dead and facing life - trial recalls horrors of the Klan

Ex-policeman, 71, accused of 1964 race killings
Victim's brother traced suspect said to be dead

Thomas Moore is looking forward to finally coming face-to-face with James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klansman who came back from the dead. "I want to look at him," he said. "I want to tell him about the pain he caused me and my family."

Mr Moore, 63, a retired sergeant-major, recalled the day he found out that Mr Seale was still alive. "I was so happy. We thought he was dead - and so did everyone else."

The trial opens here today of Mr Seale, 71, a former worker in a paper plant, crop-duster and policeman, accused of kidnapping and conspiracy in relation to the murder of two black teenagers in 1964, one of them Mr Moore's brother. According to the indictment, the two 19-year-olds, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and dumped in the Mississippi, Moore tied to a jeep engine block, and, according to an FBI informant at the time, still breathing.

The killings marked the beginning of a summer of madness, as the KKK responded to the civil rights movement with the fiery crosses, church bombings and murders depicted in Alan Parker's 1989 film Mississippi Burning.

The Seale prosecution could be among the last of the KKK trials. Although the justice department has promised to re-open cases, witnesses are dying off and files have been lost.

Now living in Colorado, Mr Moore had been brought up in Franklin County, one of the strongholds of the White Knights. He returned in 2005 with a Canadian film-maker, David Ridgen, to investigate the murders. Pulling up at a petrol station for an egg and sausage sandwich, he met by chance a distant cousin, Kenny Byrd.

Mr Moore explained why they were there and said it was a pity that Mr Seale, who had been one of the main suspects, was dead. His family had been saying so since 2000. The local Clarion-Ledger had reported it as fact: so too had the Los Angeles Times. Mr Byrd replied: "Hell no, he lives over there."

Mr Moore traced lost files, spoke to potential witnesses, harassed former Klansmen, mobilised the African-American community and successfully campaigned to have the FBI re-open the case.

Mr Seale is expected to plead not guilty in a trial expected to last about a fortnight. If found guilty, he faces life sentences.

Mississippi is different these days, at least on the surface. It is evident to anyone arriving at the airport at Jackson, now called Jackson-Evers International in recognition of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. It is evident, too, in the fact that the judge who will try the case is African-American, Henry Wingate.

But Heidi Beirich, deputy director of intelligence at a Jackson-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates hate crimes, cautioned that although the KKK and institutionalised racism is mainly a thing of the past, Mississippi still has problems. She noted that when the state voted in 2002 to retain the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for African-Americans, the divide was on racial grounds. African-Americans in the state continue to live in the poorest areas, with the worst schools.

"As far as the Klan is concerned, its heyday is definitely in the past. It hit its peak in the 1920s at 4 million. The number of Klansmen is way down: we estimate 5,000-6,000. It is not a cohesive organisation any longer: it is fragmented. They are no longer capable of the kind of terror they rained down on the South in the 1950s and 1960s," Ms Beirich said.

But the sense of dread inspired by the KKK has not gone completely. Ridgen, who put together a documentary Mississippi Cold Case, said: "The psychological threat was always there. There was fear every time in Franklin County. We never took the same route. We never told anyone in advance about coming."

At the trial, the key witness is likely to be a former Klansman, Charles Edwards, a suspect at the time, who is expected to give evidence against Mr Seale in return for immunity. Former FBI agents who carried out a fairly thorough investigation at the time are also scheduled to testify. After their investigation in 1964, they handed the case over to the local justice department who, as was not unusual at the time, quickly dropped it.

No real explanation has been given for the killings. Klansmen at the time told the FBI that Mr Dee had been peeping at one of their wives while others alleged gun smuggling into a black church. The indictment suggests otherwise: "The White Knights ... targeted for violence African-Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals."

Mr Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, who now lives in Louisiana, said yesterday she could not remember him being involved in any civil rights activity. "He was quiet, never said much," she recalled. She is saddened that the case has taken 43 years to come to court: "It is pitiful that those boys were killed and no one did anything about it."

Like Mrs Collins, Mr Moore will be given his chance to make a victim's statement in court. He said: "I want to tell how it is to go without a brother, my son without an uncle, how Charles never had the opportunity to make mistakes, to live his life."

Backstory

The reopening of racist murder cases from the 1960s in the South began in 1990 when a white supremacist, Byron La Beckwith, was indicted and eventually jailed for the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, then chairman in Mississippi of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This encouraged the FBI and local justice departments to look again at unsolved cases. Since then, there have been six prosecutions in Mississippi, including Mr Seale's today. Authorities in seven states have re-examined a total of 29 killings and made 29 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.

One of the most prominent was the trial and jailing in 2001 of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. The revulsion created by the bombing helped turn public opinion behind the civil rights movement. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was jailed for the murder of the three civil rights activists depicted in Mississippi Burning. But the reality is that there may not be many more cases brought to court: elderly witnesses are dying off and records of crimes have been lost.

Guardian

Hatewatch: for the week of May 23rd 2007

Public Enemy Number One Murder Trial Begins
Prosecutors plan to call more than 100 witnesses in a lengthy murder trial of two members of the growing white supremacist gang Public Enemy Number One...

KKK Banner Flown at Community Picnic
Organizers of a Rapid City Businessmen's Association cookout struggled to explain why a Ku Klux Klan "white power" Confederate battle flag topped a flagpole at the event...

Jewish Cemetery Vandalized
A swastika was carved into a mausoleum at a Jewish cemetery in Chicago where vandals also destroyed headstones and urns...

White Supremacist Pleads Guilty to Kidnapping
Wallace Eugene Woodard III, the alleged leader of a white supremacist group, pleaded guilty to felony charges stemming from a January incident in which two men were kidnapped, kicked with steel-toed boots and had their heads shaved...

SPLC

Hatewatch - for the week of May 16th 2007

Black Supremacist Sect Leader Dies
Yahweh Ben Yahweh, the self-professed "Black Messiah," who preached hatred of whites and drew followers into a murderous brotherhood, died of cancer at 71 after serving 11 years of an 18-year federal prison sentence...

'Aryans Club' Bomb Threat Shuts Down High School
The FBI is investigating a bomb threat and racist graffiti by members of a group calling itself the "Scotts Valley Aryan Club."

Gang Member Arrested for Hate Crime Shooting
A Latino gang member was charged with a hate crime for allegedly yelling a racial slur and firing a shot at a black man who was pumping gas...

U.S. Hate Groups Recruiting in Australia
The White Legion Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Stormfront last month distributed recruiting materials targeting "Aboriginal crime" and "Jewish control of the media" in three Australian cities...

Southern Poverty Law Center

Hatewatch: for the week of April 25th 2007

Former National Alliance leader convicted of hate crimes
Shaun Walker, the former national chairman of the neo-Nazi
organization National Alliance, was found guilty along with two other
NA members of conspiracy in racially motivated attacks.

Jury awards $9 million dollars in Billy Ray Johnson case
A civil jury in Linden, Texas, assessed $9 million in damages against
four white men who beat a mentally retarded black man and left him for
dead beside a garbage dump.

SPLC calls for investigation of professor
The Southern Poverty Law Center urged Cal State Long Beach officials
to investigate psychology professor Kevin MacDonald, whose writings
about Jews are widely used by white supremacists, including David
Duke.

City supervisor placed on leave for making Klan jokes
A Chicago Department of Transportation project director allegedly
referred to black employees as "mambo" and paraded around with a red
tablecloth over his head while calling himself the "Grand Wizard."

Southern Poverty Law Center