At noon today, five members of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a press conference at the House Triangle with Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR has been listed as an anti-immigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2007.

Stein will discuss “loopholes” in pending health care legislation that he claims will allow benefits to go to “illegal aliens.”

All five House members meeting with FAIR — Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) — are members of the hard-line House Immigration Reform Caucus (IRC). The IRC is headed by U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), who is a former lobbyist for FAIR. In 2002, Bilbray told a group of anti-immigrant activists, “We are creating a slave class that criminal elements breed in.” He also warned, “We could have a terrorist coming in on a Latin name.”

FAIR has a decades-long history of anti-immigrant hatred. The group has employed key staff members with ties to white supremacist groups, accepted more than $1 million from a racist foundation dedicated to the study of racial differences in intelligence, and promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico’s secretly coveting the American Southwest. In 2006, a top official of FAIR in met with former members of a Belgian political party banned by that country’s highest court for “racism and xenophobia.” For more on FAIR’s long track record of hate, read here. ( continue to full post… )

A Detroit man fatally shot last week by FBI agents was a high-ranking leader of a nationwide separatist group that advocated violence and denigrated Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims, according to an FBI complaint.

Luqman Ameen Abdullah (also known as Christopher Thomas), 53, was killed during a government raid on Oct. 28 when he refused to surrender and fired his weapon, according to an FBI news release. A convicted felon, Abdullah helped lead what the FBI characterized as a “radical fundamentalist Sunni group” called Ummah (“the brotherhood”). The group consists mostly of African Americans, some of whom converted to Islam while in prison. Its main goal is to create a sovereign state within America’s borders that would be governed by Islamic law and ruled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (the former H. Rapp Brown), who’s serving a life sentence for murdering two police officers in Georgia. Abdullah was among 11 men linked to Ummah who were charged with conspiracy to commit an array of federal crimes, including theft from interstate shipments and illegal possession and sale of firearms.

Last week’s raid followed the eviction in January of Ummah members from their former mosque after they failed to pay property taxes. Inside that building, Detroit police found two firearms, roughly 40 knives and martial arts weapons, empty shell casings, and a concrete wall that had served as a shooting range.

Abdullah’s death led to criticism from several Muslim groups who say he was not the violent extremist that the FBI claimed. More than 1,000 people attended Abdullah’s funeral on Saturday at Detroit’s Muslim Center, where some speakers demanded an investigation into the shooting. Abdullah was imam (leader) of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit, which called the FBI allegations “utterly preposterous,” according to The Associated Press. ( continue to full post… )

Why is it a bad idea for local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration cops? Because it undermines public safety.

William J. Bratton, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, explains why in this op-ed essay that ran last week in the Los Angeles Times. He also explains his decision not to have the Los Angeles Police Department participate in the program known as 287(g), which gives local law enforcement agencies the powers of federal immigration agents by entering into agreements with Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“Americans want a solution to our immigration dilemma, as do law enforcement officials across this nation,” Bratton writes. “But the solution isn’t turning every local police department into an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Bratton brings to the immigration debate a few things the immigrant-bashers lack, namely credibility and a track record. As he prepares to step down as LAPD chief, he is drawing praise from officers, politicians and the public for reducing crime — in a city with a huge immigrant population.

“Keeping America’s neighborhoods safe requires our police forces to have the trust and help of everyone in our communities,” he writes. “Yet every day our effectiveness is diminished because immigrants living and working in our communities are afraid to have any contact with the police. A person reporting a crime should never fear being deported, but such fears are real and palpable for many of our immigrant neighbors.”

Bratton notes that the Police Foundation, a law enforcement research group, issued a report earlier this year concluding that when local police enforce immigration laws, it “undermines their core public safety mission, diverts scarce resources, increases their exposure to liability and litigation, and exacerbates fear in communities that are already distrustful of police.”

The former leader of a violent racist skinhead group will serve nearly 3½ years in federal prison on a racketeering charge.

Jeremy Robinson, 37, was sentenced on Oct. 15 after pleading guilty to a felony charge of interstate transportation in aid of a racketeering enterprise, according to court documents. Though Robinson did not deal drugs, he tried to help his cousin distribute a large amount of marijuana. In court documents, Robinson acknowledged renting a car for another man to bring marijuana from Texas to Indiana. The man, a courier in the cousin’s large-scale drug business, picked up the load but failed to get far before he was pulled over by Texas police, who found 90 pounds of marijuana in the trunk. Robinson also let his cousin use his tattoo shop in Valparaiso, Ind., to receive shipments of marijuana from Texas.

Robinson was a founder of the now-defunct Outlaw Hammerskins, the group whose challenge in 1999 to the nationwide dominance of Hammerskin Nation signaled the beginning of the end of any unified skinhead movement. The Outlaw Hammerskins emerged after the Dallas-based leadership of Hammerskin Nation ordered an Indiana chapter of Northern Hammerskins to remove the “colors” (insignia) of a wayward member. Several Northern Indiana Hammerskins proceeded to beat the offender with a pool cue and threatened to burn off his Hammerskin tattoos with a blowtorch. The Dallas leaders ordered them to turn in their patches. A dozen or so of the Indiana crew left the Hammerskins to form their own renegade group, the Outlaw Hammerskins. ( continue to full post… )

In what may be the latest sign of simmering tensions in Florida between two prominent racist skinhead groups, two men suffered knife wounds this week during a speech by Holocaust denying historian David Irving at a luxury Palm Beach County hotel.

Irving spoke to about three dozen invited guests in a conference room he booked at the Ritz-Carlton hotel south of Palm Beach. During his talk on “decoding the Nazi message,” two men, Christopher Nachtman and John Kopko, stepped outside to argue and one of them pulled a knife, police say. A fight ensued. Furniture was broken and a carpet was bloodied. Both men were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment of knife wounds. No charges have been filed yet.

Irving is a longtime Holocaust revisionist. In 2000, he sued Emory University professor and Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt for libel in his homeland of Britain, after she accused of him of deliberate falsification. A London court declared Irving a pro-Nazi anti-Semite and “active Holocaust denier” and ordered him to pay all court costs. In 2006, he was imprisoned in Austria after pleading guilty to telling audiences that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. Irving subsequently backed off those claims. Earlier this year, he set up a website selling Nazi memorabilia. His visit to South Florida was the latest on a surreptitious speaking tour in the United States, in which Irving informs attendees of his venue at the last minute so as to thwart protestors.

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In a new documentary pitting atheism against faith, contrarian critic Christopher Hitchens debates evangelical pastor Douglas Wilson on the merits of Christianity. “Collision,” released today, has already generated buzz: Hitchens and Wilson have appeared on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” CNN’s “The Joy Behar Show” and Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends,” among other programs. Newsweek Religion Editor Lisa Miller devoted a column to the 90-minute film, which she thoroughly panned: “So uncinemetic is this picture — two middle-aged white men talking — that my attention insistently wandered toward anything humanizing and finally dwelled, for too long perhaps, on a fleck of something on Hitchens’s eyelash.” Hitchens responded in a column for this week’s Slate, writing that “the subject of religion is back where it always ought to be — at the very center of any argument about the clash of world views.”

What’s missing from the media hubbub are a few salient details about Wilson. The 56-year-old pastor from Idaho seems an odd booster for Christianity, considering that some of his views sound downright un-Christian. Wilson co-wrote a booklet called Southern Slavery, As it Was, which describes the institution in almost reverent terms. “Slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the [Civil] War or since,” Wilson wrote with co-author Stephen Wilkins, a founding member of the racist League of the South. “Slave life was to [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.”
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Of all the fantastic musings and mutterings about the H1N1 flu and vaccine, few are more outrageous than the pronouncements of retired Army Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine III and his psychiatrist wife, Rima Laibow. They run a nonprofit organization called Natural Solutions Foundation, which warns of the evils of vaccinations, pharmaceutical companies and genetically modified foods.

After President Obama declared a national emergency on Saturday to deal with the rapidly spreading illness, Stubblebine, a onetime intelligence officer, wasted no time e-mailing a dire warning to his members. The president’s declaration, he said, “is perhaps the most ominous domestic event I have ever encountered. We either take this hill, or we die on it.” He went on to state that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia declared war on their own people. “Has the United States declared war on the American people today? Sadly, tragically, it would appear so. I do not wish to see the American population corralled, controlled and killed.”

H1N1, or swine flu, has never been a serious illness, Stubblebine says. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a different take. The flu is spreading fast in at least 46 states, has caused the hospitalization of about 20,000 Americans and the deaths of more than 1,000 people, the agency says.

Obama’s action gives Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius frightening authority to trample the rights of American patients, Stubblebine maintained. “None of this makes any sense UNLESS the intention is to replicate Hitler’s actions in Germany which used the all too willing medical system as a means to eliminate individuals, segments of the population and anyone who dared to speak out (or whisper) against the regime,” he wrote. Indeed, Stubblebine contends, the swine flu is a genetically engineered virus that is part of a World Health Organization-United Nations-United States scheme to sterilize untold numbers of people.
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Shawna Forde, the anti-immigration crusader who has been accused of murder in the home-invasion killings of an Arizona man and his 9-year-old daughter, got the full treatment on Sunday from her hometown paper.

The full treatment — more than 5,000 words of it by reporter Scott North in The Herald of Everett, Wash. — provides the most extensive account to date of the lies, betrayals and self-promotions carried out over the years by Forde, 41, one of three people awaiting trial for the murders of Raul Flores, 29, and his daughter Brisenia on May 30 in Arivaca, Ariz., a town near the Mexican border. Police say she believed Flores was a drug smuggler and she planned to use any drugs or money she found in the home to support her Minuteman American Defense group.

The story provides example after example of how Forde, presenting herself as an energetic patriot with deep concerns about illegal immigration and border security, found a warm welcome in the Minuteman movement, “a loose-knit, fractious network that needed volunteers enough to set aside skepticism.”

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Neo-Nazi talk show host Hal Turner, arrested four months ago on charges of threatening to assault and murder three federal judges, was released on bail today in Newark, N.J.

Turner’s attorney, Michael A. Orozco, told the Hudson Reporter that his client will be under house arrest at his home in North Bergen, N.J., until his trial, which is scheduled to start Nov. 30 in Brooklyn. He is being electronically monitored and may not speak to the media or have Internet access.

Turner, 47, was arrested on June 24 after stating on his blog that three federal appeals judges that upheld a local Chicago handgun ban “deserve to be killed.” He is accused of listing their names, addresses, phone numbers and photos in subsequent online posts.

A few weeks after his arrest, Orozco confirmed that Turner had served as a paid FBI informant. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported Turner’s FBI connection a year earlier.

An appeals court today overturned the decision of a federal judge who had released neo-Nazi leader Bill White on bond after setting several conditions. In making its decision, the three-member panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals characterized White as “a highly intelligent person apparently dedicated to having various persons killed,” according to the Roanoke Times. White was ordered back to jail last month when the government appealed Judge James Turk’s decision to grant White bail. Turk reached that decision after a psychiatrist testified that White didn’t pose an imminent threat to the community.

White, who founded the American National Socialist Workers Party, has been charged with threatening a newspaper columnist, a civil rights lawyer and others over the Internet and by phone. His trial is scheduled for Dec. 9 in Roanoke, Va., where he lives.