This week on the podcast, Mark Potok and I revisit his popular post from last month, “President Obama? Many White Supremacists are Celebrating.” We’ll discuss how the reaction in racist circles to the first African-American presumptive major-party nominee for president has been quite surprising. Listen in and find out why.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Washington Post is reporting that four board members of the Institute for Turkish Studies (ITS) have resigned in protest over the apparent forced resignation of former ITS board of governors chairman Donald Quataert, who says he was ousted under pressure from Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy after Quataert reversed his position on whether the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 fits the definition of genocide.

“State of Denial,” a story in the current issue of the Intelligence Report, details the key role that ITS plays in promoting denial of the Armenian genocide. Founded in 1982 with a $3 million grant from Turkey, ITS is housed at Georgetown University, which offers the nonprofit institution space on campus in exchange for its executive director teaching an International Affairs course at the university.

Quataert told the Post that a few years ago, he and other board members were surprised to learn that what they had been led to believe was a blind trust in fact “turned out to be a gift that could be revoked by the Turkish government.” Then, in late 2006, Quataert published a scholarly book review in which he declared, “What happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide.”

As a result, according to Quataert, he was pressured to quit his ITS post by Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy, who told him that political leaders in Ankara were angered by his book review and were threatening to revoke the institute’s funding unless he either resigned or retracted his statement. ( continue to full post… )

Thomas H. Naylor, the founder and leader of the secessionist Second Vermont Republic (SVR), has called on his former allies in the racist League of the South (LOS) to unequivocally distance themselves from racism and hatred. The LOS (see related recent post), which among other things believes slavery to be “God-ordained” and is against interracial marriage, has participated in two SVR meetings that gathered together secessionists of all stripes. SVR has also participated in LOS meetings.

In a letter dated July 4, Naylor writes, “[s]o long as the albatross of racism hangs around its neck, the LOS can never be a truly effective partner for SVR.” He adds that SVR “risks being tainted by the scourge of racism simply by associating with the LOS.”

Naylor’s letter comes in the wake of a recent Intelligence Report exposé, “North Meets South,” that examined SVR’s budding relationship with the LOS. In March, Naylor hotly defended the LOS, telling the Report that though the LOS is “not perfect,” it is “not racist.” He also told the Report, “I don’t give a shit what you write,” and that, “If someone tells me that I shouldn’t associate with the League of the South, it guarantees that I will associate with the League of the South.”
( continue to full post… )

Listen this week as Heidi Beirich and I discuss an article she wrote on the last man still donating money to the racist Pioneer Fund, which pays for controversial studies on race and intelligence, among other things. What you hear may genuinely surprise you.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Michael Hill (right, with convicted “Aryan” terrorist Michael Tubbs), president of the neo-secessionist League of the South, has long claimed angrily that his is no racist group and that he is no white supremacist — this despite his repeated calls for a return to “general European hegemony” in the South, his description of slavery as “God-ordained,” and, in a particularly tasteless attack on African Americans, his mocking of his former black university students’ names and people helped by affirmative action (“A quote from a recent affirmative action hire: ‘Yesta-day I could not spell ‘secretary.’ Today I is one”).

Now, Hill has returned to the kind of vulgar racist humor he apparently has a particular taste for. In the latest edition of his League of the South tabloid The Free Magnolia, Hill publishes a charming item bylined by one “LeShawn Jones” that reports a fantasy marriage between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as if it were fact. It then goes on to describe Obama, the first major party black presidential nominee in American history, as attending the “wedding” wearing “only the simple leather thong of an African tribe” with a single “accessory” — “a large, rubber spear.”

Despite being listed for years as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and even including a convicted “Aryan” terrorist in its leadership ranks, the league has managed to make some surprising allies of late — the allegedly “progressive” secessionists of the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), who have gone so far as to co-sponsor a major conference with the league. SVR leader Thomas Naylor has angrily denied that the league or its leader — who regularly describes egalitarianism as a left-wing “Jacobin” horror — are racist in any way. In the same breath, Naylor has claimed that he was always opposed personally to racism. ( continue to full post… )

Alabama State Sen. Charles Bishop (R-Jasper; photo at right) was the keynote speaker at the 2008 Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) Leadership Conference held on June 21 in Sheffield, Ala. The CCC was founded in 1985 using the mailing lists of the pro-segregationist White Citizens Councils that fought integration during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The CCC’s website and publications are filled with crude, racist attacks on immigrants, blacks and gays. The CCC is so extreme that in 1998 the then-head of the GOP, Jim Nicholson, took the unusual step of asking party members to resign from the group because of its “racist views.”

Bishop rose to national infamy last summer when he punched (above) Sen. Lowell Barron (D-Fyffe) on the Alabama Senate floor on June 7, 2007, the last day of the legislative session. Bishop told the CCC that his mother was the “sweetest, most wonderful woman” he ever knew and, when Barron called him a “son of a bitch,” he just lost it. Bishop told the CCC that he regretted punching out Barron on the floor of the legislature. Instead, he said, “I should have taken him outside and kicked the hell out of him.” Barron denied calling Bishop a son of a bitch.

Bishop was invited to the white supremacist conference by longtime racist activist and Alabama CCC chieftain Leonard “Flagpole” Wilson, who earned his nickname in 1956 when he was a key figure in violent demonstrations against the admission of Autherine Lucy as the first black student at the University of Alabama. Leading chants of “Keep ’Bama white!” from atop a flagpole and shouting racist jokes, Wilson led riotous students through two terrifying nights of racial unrest. Wilson’s activism didn’t stop there. He was prominent in the White Citizens Councils and, in 1985, became a founder of the CCC. ( continue to full post… )