CNN host Lou Dobbs — the anti-illegal immigration “advocacy journalist” who has likely done more than anyone in America to popularize false claims about immigrants’ diseases, criminality and incarceration rates — is at it again. This time, he’s plugging the case of two Border Patrol agents who attacked an unarmed border-crosser who was trying to surrender, shot at him 15 times and wounded him as he fled, then tampered with the crime scene and failed to report the shooting as required to their supervisors.

Dobbs thinks “these two outstanding Border Patrol agents,” as he describes the men who were sentenced to terms of 11 and 12 years by a federal jury last October, should be free — so much so, in fact, that he has featured their case 131 times on his CNN show in the last year, including an hour-long special called “Border Betrayal.” That’s because the man shot by Ignacio “Nacho” Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean turned out to be a drug smuggler (although Ramos and Compean didn’t know that when they opened fire on Feb. 17, 2005). These details and many others are offered up in an excellent article in this month’s Texas Monthly by Pamela Colloff. ( continue to full post… )

Earlier this month, Ted Hayes, a right-wing African-American street activist from Los Angeles, was presented on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” as the leader of a group of prominent black activists opposed to undocumented immigration.

Trouble was, his group, Choose Black America (CBA), doesn’t really represent black people at all. It is the creation of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a white-dominated and mainly white-led organization that has been agitating for years for lower levels of immigration. FAIR, in fact, has accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that funds writers seeking to prove that black people aren’t as smart as whites. ( continue to full post… )

Despite being reprimanded for his political activities by Navy officials recently, Lt. Comdr. John Sharpe’s extremist organizing continues. Sharpe spoke earlier this month at the 2007 Saint Benedict Conference, a gathering of “radical traditionalist Catholics” in Nashua, N.H. The Aug. 17-19 event was hosted by the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a virulently anti-Semitic group that has been in a heated dispute with its neighbors recently. A sense of the group’s views comes from listening to one of its officials, Brother Anthony Mary, who has said that “the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation” and suggested that Jews should be dealt with using “blood and terror if it’s required.”

Those views dovetail nicely with Sharpe’s own. Sharpe is on record blaming the 9/11 attacks not on Al Qaeda but on “Judeo-Masonry.” He believes that “the current and historical mortal enemy of Christian civilization is Judeo-Masonry.” Sharpe is cool with hate groups, too. Attending the 2006 conference of American Renaissance, a racist magazine specializing in theories of race, intelligence and eugenics, Sharpe sold his two-volume set Neo-CONNED!, which has several articles by racists and anti-Semites. Next to his booth was a man selling “White Power” T-shirts. ( continue to full post… )

When neo-Nazi Curtis Allgier allegedly shot and killed a corrections officer who was transporting Allgier to a hospital in Salt Lake City June 25, media accounts of the murder invariably focused on the 27-year-old skinhead’s most recent mug shot, showing Allgier’s totally tattoo-covered face. As his wife put it, Allgier had the “courage to put his beliefs on his entire body.”

Here’s an explanation of the meaning behind some the arcane symbols inked on the alleged cop-killer’s visage: ( continue to full post… )

MSNBC commentator and former Reagan aide Pat Buchanan is citing racist sources again — and mislabeling them as “right-leaning.”

In “The Color of Crime,” an Aug. 21 column posted on his blog and the white nationalist hate site vdare.com, Buchanan attacked The Washington Post for not telling the truth about black criminality in two different stories about race and crime (here and here). Buchanan was incensed that the Post did not say that blacks are more criminal than whites and didn’t mention “white victims” of black crime.

To make his point, Buchanan cited approvingly a report by the white supremacist New Century Foundation, “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America”, which purportedly proves that blacks are vastly more criminal than others. Buchanan uses this racist “research” to attack blacks, writing, “The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder — is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community.”

As an article in the Intelligence Report pointed out seven years ago, that argument is fundamentally flawed, ignoring decades of real research that shows that poverty is intimately related to crime rates. In fact, race, unlike income, has little, if any, predictive value. The New Century article also conflates interracial crime with interracial hate crime to claim blacks commit vastly more hate crimes than others. ( continue to full post… )

For the first time, Robert Crooks, leader of California’s nativist extremist Mountain Minutemen, has admitted to filming and posting videos (here and here) that seem to depict an undocumented immigrant being shot on the border. But Crooks now says the video was staged.

“Who in their right mind is going to shoot a smuggler, videotape it, then post it to YouTube?” Crooks asked KGTV 10News in San Diego.

That’s a change from last week, when Crooks, in an E-mail to the Intelligence Report, insisted he neither filmed the video nor posted it to a video-sharing site. A local police spokesman told 10News the video did appear to be fake. ( continue to full post… )

A man who has run a virulently anti-Semitic “Catholic” group for 14 years has been told to clean up his act by church officials contacted by the Intelligence Report.

Robert Sungenis, who founded and heads Catholic Apologetics International (CAI), was profiled in the magazine edition released in January, along with other anti-Semitic individuals and institutions involved in the “radical traditionalist Catholic” movement, whose precepts are rejected by the Vatican. The Report later sent a letter to Sungenis’ bishop in Harrisburg, Pa., detailing Sungenis’ anti-Semitic activities. Many other concerned Catholics and organizations have done likewise.

The church responded with alacrity. According to a July 31 essay he posted on CAI’s website entitled “Catholic Apologetics International and its Teachings on the Jews”, Sungenis was contacted by Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades and later met with Rhoades’ vicar general, the Very Rev. William J. King, and the Rev. James Massa, executive director for ecumenical and inter-religious affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Afterward, Sungenis wrote that CAI’s “hard-line positions regarding the Jews” had been “often expressed in an ill-advised manner” and promised to change.

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Members of the San Diego Minutemen (SDMM), including leader Jeff Schwilk, were captured pulling down migrant workers’ tents and makeshift huts in a video apparently shot in McGonigle Canyon in San Diego. Earlier this week, the Voice of San Diego posted the video shot by Christie Czajkowski, a former member of SDMM who told the online newspaper it was filmed last November.

The video surfaced as police continue to investigate a similar attack on the migrant camp last winter. On Jan. 27, migrants returned to their shantytown to find their tarp homes sliced to ribbons and their clothes slashed. This spring, police searched the homes of Schwilk, Czajkowski and an anti-illegal immigration activist named Julie Adams in connection with that investigation. No arrests have been made. ( continue to full post… )

This morning, the Intelligence Report obtained a video that purports to show a vigilante murdering a Mexican immigrant just inside the U.S.-Mexico border.

It’s unclear at this point whether the video is authentic. It is strikingly similar to another video, posted on this blog late last week, that appears to show a nativist yelling threats and firing a shotgun at migrants crossing the U.S. border, but apparently hitting no one.

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The video, filmed with night-vision equipment and low in quality, is not always easy to understand. Here is a detailed description:

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The Intelligence Report has obtained a chilling video that Robert Crooks, the leader of the nativist extremist group Mountain Minutemen, recently E-mailed to several other prominent nativist leaders, including Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the original Minuteman Project. In the E-mail, Crooks suggests that Gilchrist is a weakling who can “Talk the Talk” but not “Walk the Walk.”

“This video shows how to keep a ‘Home Depot’ parking lot empty,” Crooks (right) wrote in his sneering July 26 E-mail, titled “Homeland Defence.” Gilchrist, whose organization had earlier provided Crooks’ group with supplies, responded by banning Crooks from contact with his own group.

Filmed through a night-vision scope, the four-minute video shows two or three men standing on a hill that appears to be on the Mexican side of the border, beyond a barbed-wire fence. “All right, come on across, motherfuckers,” a man says off camera in a quiet voice. “Yeah, go that way. I dare you to go that way. That’s my fucking trail, bitch!”

Then, after muttering about the distant figures being “cockroaches,” the man shouts out loud, “Hey putos [“faggots”], one, two, three!” Next comes the distinct sound of a shotgun shell being chambered, followed by a sudden flash of light and the sound of a shotgun blast. The direction of the gunfire is unclear.

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