The head of Britain's leading anti-fascist organisation has said the English Defence League has replaced the British National Party as the major force on the far right of British politics.
Nick Lowles of Searchlight said the BNP had become a "sideshow" since the crushing defeat of its leader Nick Griffin in Barking at this year's general election. In recent months, he said, the EDL's anti-Muslim message had given the party a wider appeal. At the same time, the violence EDL rallies attracted meant the organisation received a great deal of media attention.
He added that the BNP were stuck with an old-fashioned neo-fascist image which alienated many who were prepared to back the EDL.
Mr Lowles has made it clear that Searchlight will no longer limit its operations to the fight against traditional neo-Nazi organisations. In the new year it will launch a think tank to examine new forms of extremism such as the anti-Muslim politics of the EDL and totalitarian Islamism.
Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Centre in Gainesville, Florida, is the controversial cleric who was first invited and then "uninvited" by the EDL, allegedly on the grounds of his racism and homophobia. In August this year, giving a deposition in a court case in which he was a witness, Mr Jones described Judaism as "a religion of the devil", along with Hinduism and Buddhism.
Gainesville is best known as the home of the University of Florida, where there are about 2,000 Jews in the year-round community with three congregations, Conservative, Reform and Jewish Renewal to serve them. On the campus itself, Hillel and Chabad-Lubavitch cater for nearly 7,000 Jewish students.
According to Rabbi Berl Goldman, co-director of the Lubavitch Chabad Jewish Centre on campus, Pastor Jones is not even on the local community's radar. He said: "I've been here 10 years and I don't know of any formal ties or relationship between Jones and faith-based organisations. I've never seen him at any meetings of the Campus Ministry Co-operative which has representatives of all different faiths and denominations in Gainesville. The Jewish community is very distressed at his provocative actions."
Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Centre (the Montgomery, Alabama-based civil rights organisation) confirmed that Pastor Jones is extremely isolated. "I very much doubt if he has connections with anyone except a dozen or so followers."
Jewish Chronicle
Showing posts with label Southern Poverty Law Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Southern Poverty Law Center. Show all posts
December 19, 2010
March 04, 2010
US facing surge in rightwing extremist and militia groups
• Civil rights report shows 250% rise in extremist patriot groups
• Groups fuelled by economy and media conspiracy theories
The US is facing a surge in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias, driven by deepening hostility on the right to Barack Obama, anger over the economy, and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US's most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist "patriot" groups "came roaring back to life" last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics.
The SPLC report, called Rage on the Right, said the rise in extremist groups was "a cause for grave concern" given their propensity to use violence during their heyday in the 90s, most notably with the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. It added that the issues driving support for such groups were increasingly populist and that "signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere".
"Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents," the report said.
"Already there are signs of … violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."
The report says the patriot movement has "made significant inroads into the conservative political scene" in part driven by a growing view of the US administration "as part of a plot to impose 'one-world government' on liberty-loving Americans".
"The Tea Parties and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism," the report says.
The SPLC notes that the rise comes as part of a deepening disillusionment with government in which just one quarter of Americans think government can be trusted. It said that a recent poll found that the anti-tax Tea Party movement is viewed in more positive terms than the Democratic or Republican parties.
"The signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the 'tree of liberty' needs to be 'watered' with 'the blood of tyrants'. The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps," the SPLC said.
The report says that, unlike during the 1990s, the patriot movement's core ideas are more widely propagated and accepted by prominent politicians and some in the mass media, such as the Fox News presenter Glenn Beck.
"As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream," said the report. "Beck, for instance, reinvigorated a key patriot conspiracy theory – the charge that the federal emergency management agency is secretly running concentration camps – before finally 'debunking' it."
How far such language is now part of the mainstream political discourse was confirmed by Politico today, which reported that it had obtained a Republican national committee document detailing plans to raise election funds with "an aggressive campaign capitalising on 'fear' of President Barack Obama" and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism".
In the presentation, the administration is portrayed as "the Evil Empire", and Obama as the Joker in Batman.
Patriot groups and militias are planning a march on Washington next month ostensibly in defence of the right to carry guns.
Guardian
• Groups fuelled by economy and media conspiracy theories
The US is facing a surge in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias, driven by deepening hostility on the right to Barack Obama, anger over the economy, and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre, the US's most prominent civil rights group focused on hate organisations, said in a report that extremist "patriot" groups "came roaring back to life" last year as their number jumped nearly 250% to more than 500 with deepening ties to conservative mainstream politics.
The SPLC report, called Rage on the Right, said the rise in extremist groups was "a cause for grave concern" given their propensity to use violence during their heyday in the 90s, most notably with the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. It added that the issues driving support for such groups were increasingly populist and that "signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere".
"Patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents," the report said.
"Already there are signs of … violence emanating from the radical right. Since the installation of Barack Obama, rightwing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the nation's first black president. One man from Brockton, Massachusetts – who told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites – is charged with murdering two black people and planning to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Most recently, a rash of individuals with anti-government, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases."
The report says the patriot movement has "made significant inroads into the conservative political scene" in part driven by a growing view of the US administration "as part of a plot to impose 'one-world government' on liberty-loving Americans".
"The Tea Parties and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism," the report says.
The SPLC notes that the rise comes as part of a deepening disillusionment with government in which just one quarter of Americans think government can be trusted. It said that a recent poll found that the anti-tax Tea Party movement is viewed in more positive terms than the Democratic or Republican parties.
"The signs of growing radicalisation are everywhere. Armed men have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the 'tree of liberty' needs to be 'watered' with 'the blood of tyrants'. The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a communist agent, and Oath Keepers, a patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps," the SPLC said.
The report says that, unlike during the 1990s, the patriot movement's core ideas are more widely propagated and accepted by prominent politicians and some in the mass media, such as the Fox News presenter Glenn Beck.
"As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream," said the report. "Beck, for instance, reinvigorated a key patriot conspiracy theory – the charge that the federal emergency management agency is secretly running concentration camps – before finally 'debunking' it."
How far such language is now part of the mainstream political discourse was confirmed by Politico today, which reported that it had obtained a Republican national committee document detailing plans to raise election funds with "an aggressive campaign capitalising on 'fear' of President Barack Obama" and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism".
In the presentation, the administration is portrayed as "the Evil Empire", and Obama as the Joker in Batman.
Patriot groups and militias are planning a march on Washington next month ostensibly in defence of the right to carry guns.
Guardian
February 21, 2009
America unmasked. New President, old problem - the Ku Klux Klan
America unmasked: The images the reveal the Ku Klux Klan is alive and kicking in 2009. The photographer Anthony Karen gained unprecedented access to the ‘Invisible Empire’.The USA has a new president but an old problem - and nothing typifies it like today’s Ku Klux Klan.
These images show members of the Ku Klux Klan as they want to be seen, scary and secretive and waiting in the wings for Barack and his colour-blind vision for America to fail. Anthony Karen, a former Marine and self-taught photojournalist was granted access to the innermost sanctum of the Klan. He doesn’t tell us how he did it but he was considered trustworthy enough to be invited into their homes and allowed to photograph their most secretive ceremonies, such as the infamous cross burnings.
When he talks about the Klan members he has encountered he tends not to dwell on the fate of their victims. Karen’s feat is that he takes us to places few photojournalists have been before, into the belly of the beast. The scenes he presents portray a kinder, gentler Klan. The mute photographs present an organisation that is far less threatening than the hate group of our popular imagination. Consciously or otherwise, his photographs hold our imagination in their grip while doing double duty as propaganda for the extremist right, much as Leni Riefenstahl’s work did for the Nazis.
Today the Klan is a mere shadow of what it used to be and there are at least 34 differently named Klan groups. “They are a fairly low-rent bunch of people, many of whom use their local organisations as a way of raising money for themselves,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
Photographs of the Klan folk in their hooded regalia aren’t all that rare. The archives of America’s newspapers contain plenty of front-page photographs of lynchings throughout the past century. Three years ago, James Cameron, the last survivor of an attempted lynching died, thankfully of natural causes.
The older generation of Black Americans grew up hearing about Klan lynchings whispered over the dinner table but never mentioned outside the home. At the Klan’s height, around the turn of the 20th century, some 30 to 40 lynchings a year were being recorded. It is believed that there were in fact many more unrecorded deaths, especially in the cotton-growing south where the deaths of black field-hands were often not recorded.
Karen’s photographs show an entirely different side of the far right. He presents a 58-year-old, fifth-generation seamstress he calls “Ms Ruth” and he has photographed her running up an outfit for the “Exalted Cyclops” or head of a local KKK chapter. She gets paid about $140 for her trouble. Karen tells us that she uses the earnings to help care for her 40-year-old quadriplegic daughter, who was injured in a car accident 10 years ago.
Karen’s images of the Klan and its supporters regularly appear on the recruiting websites of the far right. Out of context, the images of hooded Klansmen and their families tell us little of the real story – the inexorable rise in the number of extremist organisations in America.
The number of hate-crime victims in the US is also rising and as America’s middle and working class gets thrown out of work, the hate groups behind the crimes are flourishing. As people lose their homes to foreclosure and, without the benefit of a safety net, find themselves slipping into poverty, there is already a search for scapegoats underway. Immigrants from central and South America have become particular targets as the grim economic times take hold.
Anyone who doubts the capacity of the modern KKK for violence need look no further than the recent case of 43-year-old Cynthia Lynch of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had never been out of her home state before she travelled to Louisiana to be initiated into the Klan. She was met off the bus by two members of a group that calls itself the Sons of Dixie and taken to a campsite in the woods 60 miles north of New Orleans.
There, Lynch’s head was shaven and after 24 hours of Klan boot camp, including chanting and running with torches, she had had enough and asked to be taken to town. After an argument, the group’s “Grand Lordship”, Chuck Foster, is alleged to have shot her to death. He was charged with second-degree murder and is awaiting trial. Just as shocking is that the event happened in Bogalusa, a backwoods Louisiana town that was once known as the Klan capital of the US.
In the 1960s the Klan operated with impunity in Bogalusa and once held a public meeting to decide which black church to burn down next. Local Klan members were suspected of ambushing two black policemen in 1965, killing one and wounding the other. No one was ever tried for the crimes.
Despite all its notoriety the Klan has been a spent force for decades with nothing like the clout it once wielded. At its peak the KKK boasted four million members and controlled the governor’s mansions and legislatures of several states. Since the 1930s the KKK has been in a state of disorganisation and today it probably has 6,000 members. But the economic crisis is swelling their ranks and already, a month after the inauguration of the first black president, the tidal wave of interracial harmony that greeted Obama’s election is starting to recede.
“Things are certain to get worse,” says Potok. “The ingredients are all there: a dire economy that is certain to get worse; high levels of immigration; the white majority that is soon to turn into a minority and a black man in the White House.”
More than 400 hate-related incidents, from cross-burnings to effigies of President Obama hanging from nooses have been reported, according to law-enforcement authorities and Potok’s organisation, which files lawsuits against hate groups aimed at making them bankrupt.
Late last year, two suspected skinheads who had links to a violent Klan chapter in Kentucky were charged with plotting to kill 88 black students. They were then going to assassinate President Obama by blasting him from a speeding car while wearing white tuxedos and top hats. They were never going to succeed, given the huge security net around Obama, but the fact that they had planned such an outlandish attack may be a harbinger of things to come.
“There is a tremendous backlash to Obama’s election,” says Richard Barrett, the leader of the Nationalist Movement, another white supremacist group. “Many people look at the flag of the Republic of New Africa that was hoisted over the White House as an act of war.
Independent
More pictures here.
November 17, 2008
White rage: The rednecks out to kill Obama
When millions watched Barack Obama give his history-making victory speech in Grant Park on election night, one thing stood out starkly – the bulletproof screen surrounding him. But just how serious is the threat of assassination to the President-elect?
Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell fancied that 28 August, 2008 would be a good day for the next president of the United States to die. They had the guns – Gartrell was later caught with a Ruger Model M77 Mark II bolt-action rifle with an attached scope and bipod, and a Remington Model 721, also with a scope. They were believers in a radical white supremacist ideology that gave them the motivation they needed to risk their own lives, if necessary, to prevent a black man from entering the Oval Office. (Or, as a friend reported Adolf as saying: "No nigger should ever live in the White House.")
And they had at least the outlines of a plan. They checked into the downtown Denver hotel where they believed Barack Obama was staying, and talked about the ways they could try to gun down the Democratic nominee on the day he was due to accept his party's nomination at an outdoor sports arena before an adoring crowd of more than 70,000 people.
Like many assassins before them, both the successful ones and the idle fantasists, Adolf and Gartrell took their inspiration from popular culture. They considered hiding a rifle inside a hollowed out television camera – an idea they borrowed from the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard. (It is also similar to the way al-Qa'eda operatives posing as a news crew assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, on 9 September, 2001, but it is far from clear whether Adolf and Gartrell had any notion of this.)
They toyed with the idea of hitting Obama from as far away as 750 yards, using one of their high-powered rifles; according to their friend Nathan Johnson, who may or may not have been part of the plot, they had in mind the conspiracy theory that President Kennedy was not shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, but rather by professional assassins stationed on the "grassy knoll" above Dallas's Dealey Plaza.
None of these plans was ever remotely realistic, however. Adolf and Gartrell may have had some fearsome weaponry, and a vague affiliation with a white supremacist biker gang called the Sons of Silence, which disavowed them the moment they were arrested. But they were also rank amateurs living in a crystal methamphetamine-induced haze of paranoia and race hatred. (One can't help thinking Adolf's name went to his head, at least a little, as he fingered the swastika ring on his finger.) They had no clue how to circumvent the security surrounding Obama – prosecutors who examined their plans laughed them off as ludicrously naïve. And they couldn't even figure out what every half-interested member of the press corps knew, that Obama was not staying at the Hyatt Regency, the temporary HQ of the Democratic National Committee, but at a different hotel altogether.
Four days before Obama's acceptance speech, Gartrell was pulled over for drunk-driving in the Denver suburb ' of Aurora after a patrol officer spotted his rented Dodge Ram truck swerving erratically, and the whole plot, such as it was, fell apart almost instantly. Certainly, the officer found plenty inside the truck to sound alarm bells – the two high-powered rifles, a silencer, a bulletproof vest, camouflage clothing, and three fake identification cards. But it was also clear that Gartrell was high on meth as well as drunk. The truck contained enough drug-making equipment to be considered a mobile meth lab.
Gartrell ratted out Johnson and Adolf almost as soon as he was taken in and photographed for his singularly striking mugshot. (With his bleached blonde hair, heavy silver earrings and pierced lip, he looks like the neo-Nazi from central casting.) Johnson was in the room at the Hyatt Regency, and wasted no time in talking himself – insisting he had no idea about any assassination plot while almost simultaneously telling the world Adolf was planning to "go down in a blaze of glory" and take Obama with him.
Adolf was a tougher proposition, the only one of the three with a serious criminal record, including burglary, forgery, drugs and weapons raps. At the time of his arrest he was wanted on eight outstanding charges and had recently skipped out on a $1 million bail payment. He was staying at a different hotel in the Denver suburbs. When the police arrived, he jumped out of his sixth-floor room on to the roof of the hotel kitchen four floors below, then jumped again to the ground, breaking his ankle as he landed. He didn't make it far. He, too, was found to be high on meth. When asked why he was wearing a bulletproof vest, he said he was convinced someone wanted to kill him.
We will no doubt learn more colourful details about the trio of would-be assassins when their trial begins this week. Intriguingly, though, they are being prosecuted on drugs and weapons charges only. Their prosecutor, Troy Eid, has said he is absolutely confident the "meth heads", as he calls them, never posed a risk to Obama or anyone else.
Not everyone is happy with this decision. After all, marginal people have hatched assassination plots before, and sometimes succeeded – one thinks of John Hinckley hitting President Reagan in 1981. And Barack Obama was never just another presidential contender; as the first African American to come even close to the highest political office on the planet, in a country whose history is spattered with the blood of racial animus, he is, by common consent, a target several orders of magnitude more tempting than the average for an extremist fringe of kooks, crazies, anti-government militia types, Ku Klux Klan members and other white race warriors, all of whom tend to be unforgiving in their ideological fervour, not to mention armed to the teeth.
He was granted 24-hour Secret Service protection just a few months into his campaign, in May 2007, after his friend and fellow Illinois senator, Dick Durbin, raised the alarm on his behalf. (Usually candidates receive that protection far later in the election cycle, after they have their party primaries sewn up.) We don't know exactly how hard the Secret Service has had to work on his behalf, although we do know that two men from the old confederate South – one from North Carolina, the other from Florida – were arrested and charged with making threatening statements against him in July. We know that effigies of Obama being lynched, or sliced through the head with a hatchet, have popped up periodically around the country – one on the campus of the University of Kentucky, another in Orange County, California in the run-up to Halloween.
We also know that Obama's supporters have been almost maniacal in their desire to prevent him sharing the tragic fate of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. On a couple of occasions during primary season, when security ' guards at Obama campaign events stopped searching people's bags because of the backlog of people trying to get in, sympathetic reporters, bloggers and ordinary members of the public complained as loudly as they knew how. Likewise, when someone at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Florida in early October reacted to a mention of Obama's name by shouting "kill him!", there was such a clamour on the internet that the Secret Service made a rare public announcement saying it was launching an official investigation.
How much of a risk of assassination does Obama face? The most immediate, comfortable answer to that is: not much. The Secret Service has vastly improved its procedures and protocols since the spate of political assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s. No president would now be allowed to drive at a snail's pace in an open-top car through the centre of a major city, as John Kennedy did in Dallas on 22 November, 1963. The sheer numbers of Secret Service members assigned to presidential protection has increased dramatically since the attempt on Reagan's life – we don't have exact figures on how much, but we do know that when one unhinged man toyed with the idea of tossing a grenade at President Bush in Atlanta in 2005, he never got remotely close enough to give it a real try.
The more worrying answer is that Obama will almost certainly inspire a large number of assassination plots because of the colour of his skin, and that it only takes one of them to be blessed with luck, proper organisation and a little official incompetence to pose a serious threat. When asked how much of a risk he faces, he has acknowledged that the color of his skin will be a problem for some people. And he knows that Colin Powell, the only other African American of significant stature in recent times to consider a run at the White House, decided not to pursue the presidency in part because his wife, Alma, feared for his safety.
"There's not any question he's under more threat than most politicians," said Mark Potok, one of America's leading researchers into hate groups who edits a monthly Intelligence Report for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. "I think we are seeing a kind of perfect storm of conditions that might well help white supremacist movements grow, and grow rapidly.
"We have changing demographics, and the Census Bureau projection that whites will lose their majority status in America by 2040. We have the tanking economy, and now... a black man in the White House. This makes some Americans feel they are losing their world – the sense that the country their forefathers built is slipping away from them."
The number of racist hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Centre has grown by almost 50 per cent during the Bush administration years, from about 600 in 2000 to almost 900 now. In contrast to the 1990s, when the "angry white man" phenomenon fuelled the militia movement and led to the white-supremacist inspired Oklahoma City bombing, much of this new growth has been triggered by virulent hostility to immigrants pouring in from Mexico.
It is entirely possible, though, that the emphasis will change now that Obama is about to enter the White House. Certainly, the neo-Nazi movement senses an opportunity: to judge by the endless chatter on far-right websites, they see a President Obama as the best recruiting tool they've had in years. "Obama will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people," the former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader and erstwhile candidate for governor, David Duke, wrote earlier this year in an essay he called A Black Flag for White America. "Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. ... Obama is the pain that let's [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong... Millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it."
That logic suggests the far right is not, in fact, itching to pull the trigger on Obama. Except that we are hardly dealing with rational people. The neo-Nazi magazine National Socialist wrote a cover story in September purporting to debunk the "myth" that Obama might be assassinated. But the cover also showed a photograph of the candidate in the crosshairs of a rifle (altered to look like a swastika) under the headline: "Kill this NIGGER?" And the piece went on to suggest that Obama, backed by Communists and Jews, planned to commit genocide against working white people.
Likewise, the "imperial wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an Indiana railway worker who calls himself Ray Larsen, denied any intent to attack Obama when interviewed on television a few months ago. But he added: "If that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell."
If that doesn't have the Secret Service worried, it should. Some security experts have already started drafting memos with ideas on how to keep Obama better protected using state-of-the-art technology – for example, hand-held TeraHertz scanners that would-be assassins could not spot. Martin Dudziak, a Virginia-based security specialist who has worked on counter-terrorism issues, pointed out glumly that it is unusually difficult to profile would-be attackers. As he put it in a memo drafted in October: "There are frankly and very unfortunately, a lot of people in the USA who have deep-rooted 'phobic' hatred of an African American... being president. We should not try to deny this sombre reality."
If the inept Denver plot was not warning enough, news of another planned anti-Obama assault broke at the end of last month with the arrest of two White Power advocates in Tennessee. Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman didn't appear to be any more competent than Adolf and Gartrell. They had grand schemes to kill more than 100 African Americans, and fantasised about killing Obama dressed in white dinner jackets and top hats, but they couldn't so much as rob a house – they gave up on their intended target after spotting a guard dog out back and got picked up after shooting out the windows in a church.
Still, they had some serious weapons: a sawn-off shotgun, high-powered rifles and a couple of handguns. And Cowart appears to have been a founding member of a hate group called the Supreme White Alliance. While their dreams of killing Obama might have been fanciful, some of their other plans might not. "They might well have shot up a black high school, or hurt a group of black children," Potok said.
And it is entirely conceivable that other, more competent criminals will follow them. Obama may not have appeared remotely daunted when he delivered his victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, but it is worth remembering that he was also speaking behind a bulletproof glass shield. Such precautions, one suspects, will be the rule rather than the exception over the next four or eight years.
"There is a boiling rage just beneath the surface," Potok added. "We're talking about a minority, clearly, of whites. It's hard to say how large that group of people is. But I think this represents the beginning of a real white backlash in a certain quarter of the population."
Independent
Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell fancied that 28 August, 2008 would be a good day for the next president of the United States to die. They had the guns – Gartrell was later caught with a Ruger Model M77 Mark II bolt-action rifle with an attached scope and bipod, and a Remington Model 721, also with a scope. They were believers in a radical white supremacist ideology that gave them the motivation they needed to risk their own lives, if necessary, to prevent a black man from entering the Oval Office. (Or, as a friend reported Adolf as saying: "No nigger should ever live in the White House.")
And they had at least the outlines of a plan. They checked into the downtown Denver hotel where they believed Barack Obama was staying, and talked about the ways they could try to gun down the Democratic nominee on the day he was due to accept his party's nomination at an outdoor sports arena before an adoring crowd of more than 70,000 people.
Like many assassins before them, both the successful ones and the idle fantasists, Adolf and Gartrell took their inspiration from popular culture. They considered hiding a rifle inside a hollowed out television camera – an idea they borrowed from the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston vehicle The Bodyguard. (It is also similar to the way al-Qa'eda operatives posing as a news crew assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, on 9 September, 2001, but it is far from clear whether Adolf and Gartrell had any notion of this.)
They toyed with the idea of hitting Obama from as far away as 750 yards, using one of their high-powered rifles; according to their friend Nathan Johnson, who may or may not have been part of the plot, they had in mind the conspiracy theory that President Kennedy was not shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, but rather by professional assassins stationed on the "grassy knoll" above Dallas's Dealey Plaza.
None of these plans was ever remotely realistic, however. Adolf and Gartrell may have had some fearsome weaponry, and a vague affiliation with a white supremacist biker gang called the Sons of Silence, which disavowed them the moment they were arrested. But they were also rank amateurs living in a crystal methamphetamine-induced haze of paranoia and race hatred. (One can't help thinking Adolf's name went to his head, at least a little, as he fingered the swastika ring on his finger.) They had no clue how to circumvent the security surrounding Obama – prosecutors who examined their plans laughed them off as ludicrously naïve. And they couldn't even figure out what every half-interested member of the press corps knew, that Obama was not staying at the Hyatt Regency, the temporary HQ of the Democratic National Committee, but at a different hotel altogether.
Four days before Obama's acceptance speech, Gartrell was pulled over for drunk-driving in the Denver suburb ' of Aurora after a patrol officer spotted his rented Dodge Ram truck swerving erratically, and the whole plot, such as it was, fell apart almost instantly. Certainly, the officer found plenty inside the truck to sound alarm bells – the two high-powered rifles, a silencer, a bulletproof vest, camouflage clothing, and three fake identification cards. But it was also clear that Gartrell was high on meth as well as drunk. The truck contained enough drug-making equipment to be considered a mobile meth lab.
Gartrell ratted out Johnson and Adolf almost as soon as he was taken in and photographed for his singularly striking mugshot. (With his bleached blonde hair, heavy silver earrings and pierced lip, he looks like the neo-Nazi from central casting.) Johnson was in the room at the Hyatt Regency, and wasted no time in talking himself – insisting he had no idea about any assassination plot while almost simultaneously telling the world Adolf was planning to "go down in a blaze of glory" and take Obama with him.
Adolf was a tougher proposition, the only one of the three with a serious criminal record, including burglary, forgery, drugs and weapons raps. At the time of his arrest he was wanted on eight outstanding charges and had recently skipped out on a $1 million bail payment. He was staying at a different hotel in the Denver suburbs. When the police arrived, he jumped out of his sixth-floor room on to the roof of the hotel kitchen four floors below, then jumped again to the ground, breaking his ankle as he landed. He didn't make it far. He, too, was found to be high on meth. When asked why he was wearing a bulletproof vest, he said he was convinced someone wanted to kill him.
We will no doubt learn more colourful details about the trio of would-be assassins when their trial begins this week. Intriguingly, though, they are being prosecuted on drugs and weapons charges only. Their prosecutor, Troy Eid, has said he is absolutely confident the "meth heads", as he calls them, never posed a risk to Obama or anyone else.
Not everyone is happy with this decision. After all, marginal people have hatched assassination plots before, and sometimes succeeded – one thinks of John Hinckley hitting President Reagan in 1981. And Barack Obama was never just another presidential contender; as the first African American to come even close to the highest political office on the planet, in a country whose history is spattered with the blood of racial animus, he is, by common consent, a target several orders of magnitude more tempting than the average for an extremist fringe of kooks, crazies, anti-government militia types, Ku Klux Klan members and other white race warriors, all of whom tend to be unforgiving in their ideological fervour, not to mention armed to the teeth.
He was granted 24-hour Secret Service protection just a few months into his campaign, in May 2007, after his friend and fellow Illinois senator, Dick Durbin, raised the alarm on his behalf. (Usually candidates receive that protection far later in the election cycle, after they have their party primaries sewn up.) We don't know exactly how hard the Secret Service has had to work on his behalf, although we do know that two men from the old confederate South – one from North Carolina, the other from Florida – were arrested and charged with making threatening statements against him in July. We know that effigies of Obama being lynched, or sliced through the head with a hatchet, have popped up periodically around the country – one on the campus of the University of Kentucky, another in Orange County, California in the run-up to Halloween.
We also know that Obama's supporters have been almost maniacal in their desire to prevent him sharing the tragic fate of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. On a couple of occasions during primary season, when security ' guards at Obama campaign events stopped searching people's bags because of the backlog of people trying to get in, sympathetic reporters, bloggers and ordinary members of the public complained as loudly as they knew how. Likewise, when someone at a Sarah Palin rally in Clearwater, Florida in early October reacted to a mention of Obama's name by shouting "kill him!", there was such a clamour on the internet that the Secret Service made a rare public announcement saying it was launching an official investigation.
How much of a risk of assassination does Obama face? The most immediate, comfortable answer to that is: not much. The Secret Service has vastly improved its procedures and protocols since the spate of political assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s. No president would now be allowed to drive at a snail's pace in an open-top car through the centre of a major city, as John Kennedy did in Dallas on 22 November, 1963. The sheer numbers of Secret Service members assigned to presidential protection has increased dramatically since the attempt on Reagan's life – we don't have exact figures on how much, but we do know that when one unhinged man toyed with the idea of tossing a grenade at President Bush in Atlanta in 2005, he never got remotely close enough to give it a real try.
The more worrying answer is that Obama will almost certainly inspire a large number of assassination plots because of the colour of his skin, and that it only takes one of them to be blessed with luck, proper organisation and a little official incompetence to pose a serious threat. When asked how much of a risk he faces, he has acknowledged that the color of his skin will be a problem for some people. And he knows that Colin Powell, the only other African American of significant stature in recent times to consider a run at the White House, decided not to pursue the presidency in part because his wife, Alma, feared for his safety.
"There's not any question he's under more threat than most politicians," said Mark Potok, one of America's leading researchers into hate groups who edits a monthly Intelligence Report for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. "I think we are seeing a kind of perfect storm of conditions that might well help white supremacist movements grow, and grow rapidly.
"We have changing demographics, and the Census Bureau projection that whites will lose their majority status in America by 2040. We have the tanking economy, and now... a black man in the White House. This makes some Americans feel they are losing their world – the sense that the country their forefathers built is slipping away from them."
The number of racist hate groups tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Centre has grown by almost 50 per cent during the Bush administration years, from about 600 in 2000 to almost 900 now. In contrast to the 1990s, when the "angry white man" phenomenon fuelled the militia movement and led to the white-supremacist inspired Oklahoma City bombing, much of this new growth has been triggered by virulent hostility to immigrants pouring in from Mexico.
It is entirely possible, though, that the emphasis will change now that Obama is about to enter the White House. Certainly, the neo-Nazi movement senses an opportunity: to judge by the endless chatter on far-right websites, they see a President Obama as the best recruiting tool they've had in years. "Obama will be a signal, a clear signal for millions of our people," the former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader and erstwhile candidate for governor, David Duke, wrote earlier this year in an essay he called A Black Flag for White America. "Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. ... Obama is the pain that let's [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong... Millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it."
That logic suggests the far right is not, in fact, itching to pull the trigger on Obama. Except that we are hardly dealing with rational people. The neo-Nazi magazine National Socialist wrote a cover story in September purporting to debunk the "myth" that Obama might be assassinated. But the cover also showed a photograph of the candidate in the crosshairs of a rifle (altered to look like a swastika) under the headline: "Kill this NIGGER?" And the piece went on to suggest that Obama, backed by Communists and Jews, planned to commit genocide against working white people.
Likewise, the "imperial wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an Indiana railway worker who calls himself Ray Larsen, denied any intent to attack Obama when interviewed on television a few months ago. But he added: "If that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell."
If that doesn't have the Secret Service worried, it should. Some security experts have already started drafting memos with ideas on how to keep Obama better protected using state-of-the-art technology – for example, hand-held TeraHertz scanners that would-be assassins could not spot. Martin Dudziak, a Virginia-based security specialist who has worked on counter-terrorism issues, pointed out glumly that it is unusually difficult to profile would-be attackers. As he put it in a memo drafted in October: "There are frankly and very unfortunately, a lot of people in the USA who have deep-rooted 'phobic' hatred of an African American... being president. We should not try to deny this sombre reality."
If the inept Denver plot was not warning enough, news of another planned anti-Obama assault broke at the end of last month with the arrest of two White Power advocates in Tennessee. Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman didn't appear to be any more competent than Adolf and Gartrell. They had grand schemes to kill more than 100 African Americans, and fantasised about killing Obama dressed in white dinner jackets and top hats, but they couldn't so much as rob a house – they gave up on their intended target after spotting a guard dog out back and got picked up after shooting out the windows in a church.
Still, they had some serious weapons: a sawn-off shotgun, high-powered rifles and a couple of handguns. And Cowart appears to have been a founding member of a hate group called the Supreme White Alliance. While their dreams of killing Obama might have been fanciful, some of their other plans might not. "They might well have shot up a black high school, or hurt a group of black children," Potok said.
And it is entirely conceivable that other, more competent criminals will follow them. Obama may not have appeared remotely daunted when he delivered his victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park on election night, but it is worth remembering that he was also speaking behind a bulletproof glass shield. Such precautions, one suspects, will be the rule rather than the exception over the next four or eight years.
"There is a boiling rage just beneath the surface," Potok added. "We're talking about a minority, clearly, of whites. It's hard to say how large that group of people is. But I think this represents the beginning of a real white backlash in a certain quarter of the population."
Independent
August 27, 2008
Plot to Assassinate Obama? White Supremacists are Worried
As news of a possible assassination plot against Sen. Barack Obama broke on Monday and Tuesday, white supremacists reacted overwhelmingly with suspicion that they were being set up by the federal government to take the fall.
Reports from Denver indicate that the three men arrested in the supposed plot on Sunday — Tharin Gartrell, Nathan D. Johnson and Shawn Adolf — may have been linked to a “white supremacy group,” possibly racist skinheads. One of the men was reportedly wearing a swastika ring when arrested, and one was said to be linked to a motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence. The Southern Poverty Law Center has no evidence linking the gang or any of the three men to white supremacism.
“Seems more like an attempt by ZOG to assassinate us,” wrote “DAglaff Wolfing” on Stormfront.org, the most important white supremacist Web forum, referring to the “Zionist Occupation Government” — white supremacist lingo for the federal government. Added “Ravening Wolf” in the same thread: “It wouldn’t surprise me if these people are jews [sic], or dumb patsies, involved in yet another false-flag Mossad operation … in order to conjure up yet more anti-gun legislation.”
“I completely predicted that they would do this,” “AZDane” wrote on Stormfront. “If Obama IS assassinated, it will be the gov’t doing it and we’ll take the blame. Like always.”
Many of those posting derided those arrested because police also found quantities of methamphetamine. (“Besides,” wrote one, “real white men wouldn’t have been stopped from completing their mission, whatever it may be. These people were fools.”) But they kept coming back to the idea of a government plot.
“It sounds like concocted BS,” wrote “General1812.” “Seriously, plots that are this serious don’t come to the surface so easily. The government law enforcement [agencies] may be expecting Obama to win, and so are getting ready to conduct a preemptive strike against WNist [white nationalist] organizations.”
Or, as “Alida302” put it in the Stormfront thread: “Sound like a bunch of wannabe small timers to me. They need to make sure that [Obama’s] black ass is protected. His death would bring down a s**tstorm of hell upon all of us.”
Earlier, long before the Democratic convention opened in Denver, many white supremacists were arguing that an Obama victory could actually be good for their movement. They predicted that such a victory would shock white Americans, drive millions of them into white supremacist groups and, ultimately, lead to a race war that would finally result in the much hoped-for final Aryan victory.
HateWatch
Reports from Denver indicate that the three men arrested in the supposed plot on Sunday — Tharin Gartrell, Nathan D. Johnson and Shawn Adolf — may have been linked to a “white supremacy group,” possibly racist skinheads. One of the men was reportedly wearing a swastika ring when arrested, and one was said to be linked to a motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence. The Southern Poverty Law Center has no evidence linking the gang or any of the three men to white supremacism.
“Seems more like an attempt by ZOG to assassinate us,” wrote “DAglaff Wolfing” on Stormfront.org, the most important white supremacist Web forum, referring to the “Zionist Occupation Government” — white supremacist lingo for the federal government. Added “Ravening Wolf” in the same thread: “It wouldn’t surprise me if these people are jews [sic], or dumb patsies, involved in yet another false-flag Mossad operation … in order to conjure up yet more anti-gun legislation.”
“I completely predicted that they would do this,” “AZDane” wrote on Stormfront. “If Obama IS assassinated, it will be the gov’t doing it and we’ll take the blame. Like always.”
Many of those posting derided those arrested because police also found quantities of methamphetamine. (“Besides,” wrote one, “real white men wouldn’t have been stopped from completing their mission, whatever it may be. These people were fools.”) But they kept coming back to the idea of a government plot.
“It sounds like concocted BS,” wrote “General1812.” “Seriously, plots that are this serious don’t come to the surface so easily. The government law enforcement [agencies] may be expecting Obama to win, and so are getting ready to conduct a preemptive strike against WNist [white nationalist] organizations.”
Or, as “Alida302” put it in the Stormfront thread: “Sound like a bunch of wannabe small timers to me. They need to make sure that [Obama’s] black ass is protected. His death would bring down a s**tstorm of hell upon all of us.”
Earlier, long before the Democratic convention opened in Denver, many white supremacists were arguing that an Obama victory could actually be good for their movement. They predicted that such a victory would shock white Americans, drive millions of them into white supremacist groups and, ultimately, lead to a race war that would finally result in the much hoped-for final Aryan victory.
HateWatch
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