Howard Kurtz, media critic of The Washington Post, offers up a story today about the other Washington daily, The Washington Times, and its search for a new executive editor to replace Wesley Pruden.

The only candidate mentioned in Kurtz’s piece is Fran Coombs, who Kurtz says has been interviewed for the job. But what Kurtz doesn’t report on is Coombs’ long history of racism. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report has reported on Coombs and his wife’s extremism several times. You can read about it here, here and here. For more on general extremism at The Washington Times, read here.

On Oct. 23, Farai Chideya interviewed for NPR’s “News & Notes” program J. Philippe Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario who heads the Pioneer Fund, which Chideya incorrectly referred to as the Pioneer Group (that error is still in NPR’s website promo today). The topic, “Race and Intelligence: Is There a Link?” was selected in the aftermath of DNA pioneer and Nobel Prize winner James Watson’s recent statement that Watson was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” (Met with a firestorm of academic criticism, Watson later said that race does not control IQ differences, but he did not retract his earlier comments).

Getting the Pioneer Fund’s name wrong wasn’t the only thing problematic about Chideya’s interview. Chideya also failed to mention several key facts about Rushton and the fund. Started in 1937 by textile magnate Wycliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund’s original mandate was to pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic stock of those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.” Today, it still funds extremely controversial studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the “science” of breeding superior human beings. Pioneer, which has been listed as a hate group for many years by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has funded many of the leading Anglo-American race scientists of the last several decades as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform. ( continue to full post… )

David Horowitz, the radical leftist-turned-radical rightist who runs the FrontPage online magazine, wants to create a national movement to stand up to “the coalition between Islamo-fascists and American liberals at home who are running interference for the terrorists.” He thinks his fellow citizens should know that the pronouncements of Osama bin Laden are “increasingly cribbed from the work of the American Communist Michael Moore,” as he describes the liberal filmmaker who has criticized President Bush and American health care. And so, Horowitz has designated this week as “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” a period in which he is traveling to American university campuses to attack those who criticize the “War on Terror” and — parenthetically — those who see global warming as a major world threat.

And how is Horowitz publicizing his latest crusade against “anti-Americanism”? He’s circulating a press release that was captured in screen shots (right and below) by the enterprising folks at the Sadly, No! blog. The photo, Horowitz declares angrily, “shows a teenage girl buried before being stoned to death for alleged sexual offenses, [and] will serve as the poster for the protest Week. The stoning took place in Iran.”

Except it doesn’t, and she wasn’t. The photograph in question, as pointed out by Sadly, No!, actually comes from “De Steen” (”The Stone”), a 1994 Dutch indie film directed by Mahnaz Tamizi. Actress Smadar Monsinos plays the teenage girl.

Culturally sanctioned violence against women unquestionably remains a real and present danger in many different societies around the world. If, as Horowitz states, he really hopes to encourage “sit-in[s] outside the offices of Women’s Studies Department[s]” to end the violence, he might start by using real evidence instead of aging movie stills.

An anti-immigration website is advertising a special edition of the hate journal The Social Contract entitled “Mass Immigration and the ‘National Question,” boasting that the issue is entirely devoted to reprinting articles from the site. Vdare.com, which is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate site, is apparently raising money from the sale of the Winter 2006-2007 edition of the quarterly journal. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the quarterly’s publisher, The Social Contract Press (TSCP), as a hate group. Vdare is named for Virginia Dare, said to be the first white baby born in the New World, and the site has published racist and anti-Semitic articles.

The Social Contract Press is run by John Tanton, who has been dubbed “The Puppeteer” for his 25 years of work building up America’s anti-immigrant movement. Tanton’s dislike of immigration is racial — he has an extensive track record of making anti-Latino and anti-Catholic comments and has published works bemoaning the dwindling numbers and power of whites in America. In an infamous series of memos penned by Tanton in 1986, he questioned the “educability” of Latinos and worried about the impact of the breeding habits of Latin American immigrants on the U.S.

Tanton, based in Petoskey, Mich., is a leader in the largest American anti-immigrant organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which is currently leading the battle against the DREAM Act, a widely supported bipartisan bill that would provide a path to citizenship for immigrant students accepted to college. Tanton founded and currently serves on FAIR’s board of directors. FAIR has substantial connections to Vdare. FAIR board of directors member Donald A. Collins publishes often on Vdare.com and his article on a “culture war” is included in the anthology. Another former FAIR board member, Peter Gadiel, also penned one of the republished articles.

Peter Applebome of The New York Times wrote a feature the other day on an interesting topic — the Second North American Secessionist Convention, held early this month in Chattanooga, Tenn., and attended by members of local secessionist movements from Hawaii to Vermont to Alabama. The piece centered on Kirkpatrick Sale, a well-known leftist intellectual who is the director of something called the Middlebury Institute, a New York-based group dedicated to secessionism.

Trouble is, Applebome missed a few key facts.

The Oct. 18 Times article is essentially a pillow-soft feature that paints a picture of Sale as a father figure to the somewhat goofy but nevertheless endearing secessionists. It quotes Sale saying that the movement has “brought right and left together” and mentions the participation of the League of the South (LOS), a neo-Confederate group in favor of Southern secession. But that’s where the enlightenment stops.

What Applebome never says is that Sale arranged a co-sponsoring agreement for the Oct. 3-4 convention with the League of the South. He doesn’t note that most people familiar with LOS consider Sale’s new partner a white supremacist hate group — its leader, who calls for a return to “European cultural hegemony” in the South, has described slavery as “God-ordained” and vigorously opposes interracial marriage, and other LOS intellectuals have defended segregation as protecting the “integrity” of both blacks and whites. And Applebome doesn’t note that Sale, quoted in a national Associated Press article just two weeks earlier, argued against all the evidence that LOS has been “wrongly declared” (by the Southern Poverty Law Center) to be racist.

Applebome may have a soft spot for Southern secessionists. Author of the 1997 book Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics and Culture, Applebome in the Times article describes the secession movement that led to the Civil War as “a movement now seen as racist, violent and a loser.” Now seen? As every serious scholar of the Civil War knows, there is no question that the war was fought to defend slavery and the system of white supremacy.

Nick Griffin (right), the head of the whites-only British National Party (BNP), will speak on three American college campuses in late October. That news comes courtesy of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a U.S. hate group that has described blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.”

Griffin, whose white supremacist party angrily opposes immigration and especially Muslim immigration, will speak at Clemson University on Oct. 24, Texas A&M on Oct. 25, and Michigan State University on Oct. 26. According to the anti-racist YAF Watch blog, the Michigan State chapter of Young Americans for Freedom is sponsoring Griffin’s visit to MSU. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the MSU chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, which has also hosted other extremist speakers, as a hate group. It is unclear which campus organizations are sponsoring Griffin’s lectures at Clemson and Texas A&M. ( continue to full post… )

The Watchmen on the Walls, a multinational anti-gay organization that declares, “There is a war between Christians and homosexuals,” expects more than 700 followers to attend a three-day WOTW conference in Lynnwood, Wash., beginning Oct. 20. One of the speakers will be Watchmen co-founder Scott Lively, author of The Pink Swastika, which claims that gays helped to orchestrate the Holocaust.

In August, Lively spoke at a WOTW conference in Novosibirsk, Russia. He discussed the murder of Satender Singh, a 26-year-old gay Indian man who was beaten to death by Russian-speaking gay bashers in a park near Sacramento, Calif., a hotbed of militant anti-gay activism among Slavic immigrants.

The audience laughed and applauded as Lively described the killing.

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More than 60 members and associates of a Latino street gang carried out a campaign of racially motivated violence targeting African Americans in South Los Angeles, according to a 53-count federal racketeering indictment unsealed Oct. 17.

Leaders of the Florencia 13 street gang, which operates in a racially mixed district of South Los Angeles, engaged underlings in “cleansing their neighborhood of … members and associates of African-American street gangs,” according to federal prosecutors.

“The most disturbing aspect of the case is that … gang members allegedly engaged in a series of attacks on rival African-American gangs that extended to innocent citizens who ended up being shot simply because of the color of their skin,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien.
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On Saturday, Oct. 13, about 100 New Black Panther Party members from all over the country gathered at a Holiday Inn in downtown Atlanta for the National Black Power Summit, co-billed as “The Attack on Black America.”

Malik Zulu Shabazz, the NBPP national chairman, gave a scalding keynote address in which he noted defiantly “our rise is co-dependent on the white man’s demise.”

“Who do I mean when I say, ‘the white man’?” asked Shabazz, pacing back and forth in a small ballroom. “Well, I mean the goddamn white man.”

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The first week of October was a rough one for World Pastor Tony Alamo, the cult leader who for decades has claimed “homosexuality is caused by demon possession” and the U.S. government is an agent of the “satanic” Catholic Church.

On Oct. 2, Tony Alamo Christian Ministries member Leslie Ray “Buster” White was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tyler, Texas, on charges of trafficking in 1,475 pairs of counterfeit Nike tennis shoes as well as illegally copied CDs. (White has been described as the associate pastor of Alamo Ministries, although Alamo denied that to the Texarkana [Texas] Gazette.) During an FBI raid of White’s Great American Outlet Mall — where the counterfeit goods were allegedly sold — federal agents also seized nearly $110,000 in cash. ( continue to full post… )