FIRE IN THE HOLE: The double-wide mobile home of imprisoned Klan leader Charles Barefoot, who was recently declared incompetent to stand trial for allegedly arranging the murder of a fellow Klansman, burned to the ground on Tuesday in Dunn, N.C. “When I got home, ammunition was exploding everywhere and flames were shooting through the roof of his house,” one neighbor told the local newspaper, The Daily Record. “There were bullets going off, shotgun shells exploding and popping everywhere.” Barefoot’s Klan group and its many alleged crimes were detailed in a 2007 article in the Intelligence Report. Barefoot is being held indefinitely until his competency is restored. Local authorities say their investigation into the cause of the fire at his home is ongoing.

THE POOP ON POOP: Janis Dzelme, an assistant to a Latvian member of parliament, has been convicted of throwing a “stinking substance” at the car of a gay-rights demonstrator in July 2006 in Riga, the Latvian capital. And what was that stinking substance? That same month in 2006, members of Watchmen on the Walls, a U.S.- and Latvia-based virulently anti-gay outfit, gathered in Riga to “protect the city from a homosexual invasion.” As the Intelligence Report has noted, gay rights supporters at that rally were met by “a gauntlet of ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing ‘I Love New Generation’ T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.” Alexey Ledyaev, leader of the Riga-based New Generation Church and co-founder of the Watchmen on the Walls, attended Dzelme’s sentencing. Dzelme, along with his boss, parliamentary deputy Dainis Turlais, are members of Ledyaev’s New Generation Church. Dzelme was sentenced to 100 hours of “compulsory labor,” which is widely seen in Latvia as a more severe punishment than the alternative of paying a $3,400 fine.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON HIGHWAY OF HATE: Earlier this week, Hatewatch reported that the San Diego Minutemen (SDMM), a nativist extremist group, had been allowed to “adopt” a stretch of I-5 for cleanup that included the Border Patrol’s busy San Clemente checkpoint. No way, the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) says now, following a rash of negative publicity. Instead, officials say the SDMM will be offered a stretch of State Route 52, more than 30 miles north of the border checkpoint. Caltrans District Director Pedro Orso-Delgado told The San Diego Union-Tribune that he was concerned about public safety, not about the appearance of having favored the Minutemen by giving them that particular stretch of I-5 to keep clean. “It basically creates a lightning rod. … Really, we don’t need that kind of issue on a freeway where we have so many cars traveling and there’s potential for having an accident or getting into a safety issue,” he explained. Howard Kaloogian, a former state assemblyman who is legal counsel for the SDMM, called the decision political and vowed to challenge CalTrans in court.

Roanoke, Va., neo-Nazi leader Bill White has become embroiled in yet another investigation by the federal government. U.S. attorneys recently issued a subpoena ordering the Yahoo! Internet service provider to turn over any E-mail exchanges between White and John Crockett Henry, a Virginia Beach landlord accused in a complaint filed in May 2007 of violating the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against African-American tenants. A lawsuit, filed by the Department of Justice based on the complaint, is scheduled for trial in federal court on May 19.

The civil rights lawsuit against Henry, which stems from a complaint made to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was brought on behalf of five African Americans who say Henry insulted them with racial slurs and imposed strict tenant rules on the basis of race. White inserted himself into the matter by mailing to the tenants copies of his American National Socialist Workers Party newsletter. The newsletter referred to African Americans as “niggers” and made other derogatory references. White also mailed personal letters to the tenants that said, in part: “[K]now that the white community has noticed you and we know that you are and will never be anything more than a dirty parasite — and that our patience with you and the government that coddles you runs thin.”

“Bill White sent very threatening letters to our clients,” Jason Manning, one of the tenants’ attorneys, told Hatewatch. “We just want to know the extent of the relationship between Mr. White and Mr. Henry.” Manning and other plaintiffs’ attorneys believe there may have been collusion between White and Henry. ( continue to full post… )

California’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has approved an application by the in-your-face San Diego Minutemen (SDMM) group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a “nativist extremist” group, to “adopt” a stretch of highway for cleanup on I-5. That might not be so extraordinary — if it weren’t for the fact that the section the group was awarded responsibility for includes the Border Patrol’s San Clemente checkpoint, an area where undocumented immigrants have been killed crossing the freeway to avoid being detained. El Grupo, a coalition of several civil rights organizations including the North County chapter of the NAACP and the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, is protesting the decision.

Jeff Schwilk (right), the SDMM’s leader, was thrilled about the stretch of highway his group was awarded. In a gloating message to his members, he put it like this: “How great is that!” ( continue to full post… )

Hollywood writers may be on strike but the characters in front of the LaSalle Parish Courthouse in Jena, La., on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, were straight out of Central Casting. Klansmen and other white supremacists wore nooses, toted weapons and chanted, “If it ain’t white, it ain’t right.” Beret- and sunglasses-wearing members of the New Black Panther Party marched in military formation and faced off with police. And a loose leftist confederation — so-called Black Bloc anarchists, anti-racist skinheads, African-American activists and college students from Chicago and Houston, to name just a few — shouted, “KKK go away,” middle fingers thrust upward into the air.

( continue to full post… )

Yesterday, longtime assistant national editor Robert Stacy McCain resigned from The Washington Times. McCain was particularly close to managing editor Fran Coombs, who had assigned him to write the paper’s “Culture, Et Cetera” section.

McCain, who was once a member of the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, often filled these briefs with items from hate sites. A foe of interracial marriage, McCain regularly quoted neo-Confederate activists favorably in his stories. In 2005, stories freelanced by McCain to the website of the conservative newspaper Human Events were scrubbed after that publication’s editor, Thomas Winter, was given information by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report about McCain’s racism.

This Tuesday, Hatewatch contacted McCain for comment about the managerial changes at the Times. McCain, who then seemed upbeat, told Hatewatch that he felt that newly named executive editor John Solomon was a “stand-up guy.” McCain added, “Of course, the newsroom was shocked by the back-to-back announcements that both Wes Pruden and Fran Coombs were leaving,” and called both men “excellent newspapermen.” He especially praised Coombs — who has his own history of ties to white supremacy — for being “the cog that turned the wheel, the straw that stirred the drink” at the Times.

But, apparently, the changes proved to be too much. In his Wednesday resignation letter, which was posted to his personal blog, McCain writes that with the exit of Pruden and Coombs, “I suppose now is as good a time as any for me to go.”

The hard-right Washington Times has appointed a new executive editor, Washington Post reporter John Solomon (right), marking a major change in direction for the perennially money-losing paper that is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Solomon, who is taking over a paper with a long history of shoddy journalism, replaces Wesley Pruden, who was editor in chief for 16 years.

Solomon’s appointment marks the end of a tumultuous period for the Times, which included a spate of extremely bad press, including an extensive piece on racism and sexism at the paper by Max Blumenthal. That seemed to take its toll on the newspaper’s professional employees. Several prominent staffers, including Washington insider Tony Blankley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor and former press secretary for then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), and FOX News contributor Bill Sammon, left the organization in the past year.

The appointment of Solomon means Pruden’s vision for the Times’ future will not come to pass. Pruden told C-SPAN in 2005 that his managing editor, Francis Booth Coombs, who claims on his personal web site to have been “in many ways the chief architect of Washington Times news coverage,” should replace him. Coombs, whose white supremacist thinking has been reported on in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report several times (here and here) and who has been accused of racism by former Times employees, announced his retirement yesterday. ( continue to full post… )

Last year, Hatewatch brought you the story of James Stabile, a 19-year-old gay man who, in a segment aired on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club,” claimed to have been converted to heterosexuality during a church’s “purity siege” outside a Dallas gay bar. The bar was located near Interstate 35, a route that an evangelistic group of churches including Heartland World Ministries wanted to reclaim as a “highway to holiness” by eradicating all manner of sin in its environs.

It’s too bad “The 700 Club” never brought us Part II. On its November segment, Heartland Ministries’ Rev. Joe Oden described how his Las Colinas, Texas, ministry had “saved” Stabile from homosexuality. What Oden didn’t mention is that Stabile had a history of mental illness and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And what the hosts of “The 700 Club” didn’t tell their audience after the segment aired was what happened in the next four months of Stabile’s life — wherein the young man was shipped off to an unlicensed “ex-gay” live-in center in Kentucky, with barely a phone call to his parents allowed. Financed in part with $2,100 raised by the Rev. Oden’s church, Stabile lived at Pure Life Ministries, where he was told his homosexuality would be “cured,” in a room with 15 other men. Among the center’s many bans: no handshakes, no talking to other men, no exposed skin from the neck down (even while sleeping), and no radio or television.

Oh, and one other thing. No medication, according to Stabile, for bipolar disorder.

All measures failed to convert Stabile, who is now home in Dallas and once again openly gay. Indeed, upon returning and being stabilized, Stabile said, “I’m here to say to people that I want to help prevent other young gay guys from experiencing what I experienced, because I don’t want them to be hurt, and I was hurt really badly.” He went on to tell The Dallas Voice that he spent his days in Kentucky working at a uniform rental company to pay his $150 weekly rent, plus food, laundry and transportation expenses. For his part, Stabile’s father said that he completely accepts his son’s sexuality and believes that being gay “is neither a choice nor sin.” And that’s not because he’s some kind of venomous Christian-basher. Stabile’s father is the reverend who heads the oldest Methodist church in Dallas.

Sadly, Stabile’s story isn’t all that unusual. Last fall, the Intelligence Report revealed that there are over 200 “ex-gay” ministries in operation the U.S. alone. Techniques vary wildly, from weekly prayer and counseling to extreme forms of fasting and exorcism. But nearly all therapies and ministries teach that gays and lesbians are sick individuals.

Kind of like James Stabile, back when the “ex-gay” folks had him in their power.

New Jersey radio host Hal Turner is well known as one of the most vicious neo-Nazis in America, a man who routinely suggests killing his enemies.

Railing against President Bush, he told his audience last June that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.” In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Hal Turner is one serious extremist. He may also be on the FBI payroll. ( continue to full post… )

In late December, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) reportedly let go Joseph Turner, its western region representative, who had been hired just 13 months earlier, in November 2006. Calls to Turner and FAIR officials seeking an explanation for Turner’s unannounced departure were not returned, but a Hatewatch call to the FAIR switchboard asking for Turner met with this hard-to-misunderstand response: “He’s no longer with the company.” This comes in the wake of an Intelligence Report story that detailed FAIR’s ties to white supremacy and designated FAIR a hate group, a move that garnered some national publicity. The Intelligence Report story pointed out that Turner was the founder and long-time leader of a group the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group —Save Our State, which developed a reputation for allowing neo-Nazis to participate in its rallies.

Although Turner has denied being a racist, he has defended white separatism. “I can make the argument that just because one believes in white separatism that that does not make them a racist,” Turner wrote in Save Our State’s Web forum in 2005. “I can make the argument that someone who proclaims to be a white nationalist isn’t necessarily a white supremacist. I don’t think that standing up for your ‘kind’ or ‘your race’ makes you a bad person.”

Some in the most radical sectors of the anti-immigrant movement have claimed publicly that FAIR fired Turner. A person identifying himself as “Al Lewis” of the Americans for Mass Deportation Yahoo group wrote: “Joe Turner has been fired from FAIR by [President] Dan Stein, apparently because of that pro-illegal outfit the southern poverty law center [sic] called [sic] FAIR a ‘hate group’ or some nonsense about Joe being a racist.” ( continue to full post… )

Four years ago, a 27-year-old Valley Springs, Calif., resident named Cory Burnell announced a project to eventually move tens of thousands of families to South Carolina in a bid to transform the super-conservative state into a kind of theocracy. It wasn’t long before questions came up about Burnell’s Christian Exodus group — Burnell had been a leader in the white supremacist League of the South, and was in fact pushing for the possible secession of South Carolina; he claimed that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the post-Civil War guarantee of the right to vote and equal protection for all Americans, had never been legally ratified and was not the law of the land; and he wanted to end public education, forbid the teaching of evolution, and enforce “Christian” morality through the power of government — but Burnell gamely continued to insist that he was carrying through on his admittedly ambitious project.

In ensuing years, Burnell told reporters that he and some 2,500 “Christians” would move to the state by 2006, and claimed that a half a dozen families had already done so. Later, he said that 15 families had moved, and that he would soon be joining them. After that, he said that the movement would concentrate on Anderson County, probably the most conservative county in the state, and that a dozen more families were heading that way. By early last year, he was saying he was planning an FM radio station that would start up any day. In June, he claimed another 15 Exodus families would arrive in the state by 2008 and repeated that he and his family were coming to South Carolina, only to concede days later that the job he’d found there had fallen through. Then, in July, he said that while he still wanted to move to the state, it was now up to God.

Apparently, the deity has spoken. According to the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail News, which has done most of the serious reporting on Christian Exodus, the group is now focusing on a totally different state — Idaho — because, it said, several of its families now “realize … they will not be moving to South Carolina.” Heading the effort in that northwestern state will be Paul Smith, who ran for Congress in 2006 on the ticket of the far-right Constitution Party of Idaho. Smith, the Independent-Mail reported, said during his campaign that the 9/11 attacks were the result of God’s judgment against America.

As to Cory Burnell, he and his family remain in California, where they’ve been throughout. No word yet from those Burnell followers who took their leader’s advice and moved to South Carolina. If the past is any guide, they may be waiting on their young leader for a good long time.