A Nashville, Tenn., sheriff who’s been criticized for his crackdown on undocumented immigrants recently spoke at a white supremacist gathering.

Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall addressed the Middle Tennessee chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white nationalist hate group, at a dinner meeting last Nov. 22. Descended from the pro-segregationist White Citizens’ Councils (also known as the uptown Klan), the CCC has described blacks as a “retrograde species of humanity” and “genetically inferior,” compared pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape, and condemned “race-mixing.”

Hall’s appearance at the Middle Tennessee CCC meeting was reported in the latest issue of the Citizens Informer, the CCC’s in-house publication. “The meeting drew the largest attendance in 12 years, with many youth in attendance,” the newsletter noted.

Karla Weikal, spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said the Middle Tennessee CCC asked Hall to talk to the group about his immigration enforcement program. She said Hall often speaks to private groups about issues related to the sheriff’s office and was not aware of the CCC’s racist beliefs. “Those views would certainly not be views that Sheriff Hall would support. Absolutely not,” Weikal said. “He went before that group to provide information about a program that the sheriff’s office participates in. Period. It was not an endorsement of this organization.”

But critics of the sheriff’s handling of immigration enforcement said Hall should have known better. “I am shocked that he would appear before such a group,” said Nashville immigration lawyer Elliott Ozment. “Any claim that he might make that he did not know the nature of this group is really no excuse. He has staff that should be checking out these things.”

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The American Cause, a think tank started by MSNBC commentator and veteran immigrant-basher Pat Buchanan that promotes “traditional American values,” is hosting a symposium at the National Press Club on Thursday for the release of its new report, “Immigration and the 2008 Republican Defeat.” The panel, which features a prominent anti-immigrant hate group leader and others with extremist views, will discuss “how immigration control is vital to future Republican Success.”

The group’s press release warns that “the Demographic changes made by mass immigration have been disastrous to Republicans and [will be] fatal if not halted.” Making an argument popular in white nationalist circles, The American Cause suggests the GOP concentrate on white voters. “Whatever gains, if any, pandering to Hispanics gives is greatly outweighed by loss of the White Vote, which is more important.”

Angela “Bay” Buchanan, who serves as president of The American Cause, is one panelist. She is not known for her tempered remarks about immigration. In 2004, Buchanan told a far right conference featuring anti-government patriots, tax protesters and a prominent Holocaust denier that Americans will be “forced into a New World Order.” “They took the jobs and sent them overseas and now they’re bringing [immigrants] here to take our jobs. Who takes care of us?” Buchanan demanded. “I believe we must have a revolution. Hopefully, it will be a bloodless one.”

Joining Bay Buchanan is Peter Brimelow, the owner of the anti-immigrant hate site, Vdare.com, which is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World in 1587. Vdare has published several prominent white supremacists, including Jared Taylor, owner of the racist newsletter American Renaissance, and Kevin MacDonald, an anti-Semite who argues Jews are driven by uncontrollable evolutionary impulses to undermine white political control.
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Saturday’s decision by Pope Benedict XVI to revoke the excommunication of four schismatic bishops affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has ignited a firestorm among Jewish community leaders here and abroad. SSPX was founded in 1970 by the late French archbishop, Marcel-François Lefebvre, after Lefebvre rejected the Vatican II reforms that enacted several liberalizing and modernizing reforms within the church.

The anger has centered on the Pope’s decision to lift the excommunication of Holocaust denier and SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson, an Englishman who runs the SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina. Just a few days before the Pope issued his decision, Williamson appeared on Swedish television claiming that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to murder people. “I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” he said in the interview. “I believe there were no gas chambers,” he added.

This is not something new for Williamson, even if the Nazis’ use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews and others is universally accepted by all credible World War II historians. In 1989, Williamson gave a speech to a Canadian church in which he decried the alleged persecution of Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel by the Canadian government. Williams, who was then rector of SSPX’s main North American seminary in Winona, Minn., told his audience: “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.” (More videos of Williamson expressing his extremist views can be found at the online Huffington Post here). ( continue to full post… )

The 22-year-old man who allegedly carried out a racially motivated rape and murder spree in Brockton, Mass., on the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated as America’s first black president told investigators that he drew his inspiration from the white nationalist website Podblanc, according to a police report.

Keith Luke, the man arrested Wednesday after a shootout with police in the Boston suburb, allegedly told police he wanted to kill blacks, Latinos and Jews because he had learned on racist Internet sites “about the demise of the white race.”

American neo-Nazi Craig Cobb runs Podblanc from Estonia, where Cobb moved in 2007 after decades of neo-Nazi activism in America with groups such as World Church of the Creator, White Revolution and the National Alliance. Podblanc features videos detailing combat handgun tactics, offers instructions in how to make Molotov cocktails and other improvised explosive devices, and explicitly celebrates and encourages “lone wolf” terrorism, up to and including hate crime murders of non-whites and Jews.

One Podblanc video entitled “Sniper Bags Negress,” for example, heralds the January 2008 random killing of a black woman in Omaha, Neb., by 19-year-old Kyle Bormann, who told police he targeted the victim because he was “pissed off” at black people. The website also glorifies the actions of Asa Coon, a troubled high school student who opened fire in a multicultural studies classroom in Cleveland in October 2007, wounding two teachers and two students before committing suicide.

“We need a martyr’s section for guys like Bormann and Asa Coon,” Cobb wrote in the “Sniper Bags Negress” comments section. “I’ll work on getting that installed.” ( continue to full post… )

More than eight months after promoting nativist falsehoods in a booklet about illegal immigration, the American Legion has discreetly removed the most egregious inaccuracies from an updated version of its report.

But America’s largest veterans group has failed to publicly acknowledge the errors, which Hatewatch detailed last July. Furthermore, the new edition of the report continues to perpetuate derogatory myths about undocumented immigrants. “The security, economy and social fabric of the United States of America is [sic] seriously threatened by individuals who are illegally in this country,” the booklet states.

The legion first released A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States last April 28. Two months later, the legion announced the booklet was “being updated” after two organizations — the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American GI Forum, a Hispanic veterans group — repeatedly expressed concerns. Nonetheless, in an October 2008 letter to the editor of the Intelligence Report, legion Commander Dave Rehbein dismissed the Intelligence Report’s debunking of factual errors in the booklet, arguing they merely reflected differing “perspectives” on immigration.

But that doesn’t explain why six statements the Intelligence Report identified as false disappeared from the updated booklet, which was released last week on the legion’s website.

For instance, the report no longer contends that “non-citizens make up fully 30% of the American prison population.” (The real number is roughly 6%.) Nor does it falsely claim that undocumented immigrants infected 7,000 people in this country with leprosy during a recent three-year period. (The actual figure of all leprosy cases in the U.S. during that time is about 400, and it’s unknown how many were attributable to immigrants, undocumented or otherwise.) Also gone is the assertion — for which the original report provided no source — that “more Americans are killed by illegal aliens than died in the Iraq War.”

The “updated” report also asserts at the outset that its opposition to illegal immigration is not based on race, religion or nationality.

Despite these changes, the booklet still presents a misleading and defamatory portrait of undocumented immigrants.

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A coalition of hate groups, nativist extremists, the California American Legion, Christian Right organizations and prominent members of Congress, including the head of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, have endorsed a punishing anti-immigrant ballot initiative now gathering signatures for California’s June 2010 ballot, according to the website of Taxpayer Revolution.

The initiative aims to “bring an END to ‘birth tourism’” by requiring an “illegal alien birth mother to apply in person for a ‘Birth to Foreign Parent’ document, pay an additional fee, submit full identity [and] means of support [information] with photographs and fingerprints, all of which is transmitted to the United States Department of Homeland Security.” It would also create an entirely new “California Birth Certificate” for all other births. The group claims that ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States, which it considers “a feudalistic, uncivilized practice rooted in Medieval England,” is “critical toward reducing the crime problem.” (This claim ignores numerous studies that show that immigrants are, in fact, significantly less criminal than native Americans.)

Called the California Taxpayer Protection Act, the initiative would end pre-natal and non-emergency care and child welfare checks “deposited into illegal aliens’ bank accounts for the anchor babies” (meaning children born in the United States and who are therefore American citizens). “It is time to stop the proliferation of the Third World in the United States,” Taxpayer Revolution concludes.

The initiative appears to be the handiwork of Ted J. Hilton, who claims on Taxpayer Revolution’s website to have held “the first daytime demonstrations along the border … beginning in 1990” and to have spent 17 years studying “14th Amendment’s original intent.” Hilton says he has “worked closely” with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) to prepare the initiative’s text. IRLI is the “public interest law affiliate” of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hard-line nativist group that has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2007. FAIR is listed because of the racist and eugenicist views of its founder and principals, along with a number of other reasons. ( continue to full post… )

With the Tuesday inauguration of Barack Obama drawing nearer by the hour, threats against the first black man to be elected U.S. president are growing more heated.

On Friday, neo-Nazi threatmeister Hal Turner, amplifying on an earlier posting suggesting that it would be a good thing to use an unmanned drone carrying explosives to attack inaugural crowds, said a mass murder of those attending the festivities “would be a public service.” “I won’t say what may happen Tuesday but I will say this,” Turner wrote on his blog. “After Tuesday, the name Hal Turner may live in infamy. Let it be known that I saw what was necessary and decided to do what had to be done. I make no apology to those affected or their families.”

Earlier, on Jan. 11, Turner had posted photos to his blog, under the headline “My Inauguration Dream,” of a small, unmanned aerial drone, an electronic guidance system and sticks of dynamite as he laid out one method of attack. He also discussed the possibility of sending up balloons filled with helium and a “payload” and fitted with fuses that would explode the balloons over the crowds. And he displayed a grainy video that purported to show that method being tested. “Too far fetched?” Turner asks of a possible balloon attack. “It got tested and it worked! … Watch the video and imagine what payload, other than the index cards taped to the outside of the test balloons, might be substituted? HMMMMMM. Might be something messy? Something contagious? Something deadly? Ahhhh, such possibilities!” Then, last Thursday, he posted an update, saying: “All the assets that need to be in-place for next week are now in-place; deep within the security perimeter. Everything is a ‘go.’ We have crossed the Rubicon; let history judge us well.”

Turner, a North Bergen, N.J., man who in years past has been paid as an FBI informant even while making threats over the Internet (a relationship that ended after it was revealed on this blog and harshly criticized by law enforcement experts), said the attacks were deserved because of a whole series of government misdeeds. He added that it would be “a public service” to kill African Americans (“sub-human simians”) and white people (“mentally-ill Whites”) who attend the festivities. “Wouldn’t it be a great day for American and the world to see our federal government dealt with in such a fashion?” Turner asked. “Stay tuned…..”

Also on Friday, federal authorities arrested a Wisconsin man for threatening to assassinate Obama in a posting to an Internet site about UFOs and extraterrestrial aliens. Steven Joseph Christopher, 42, was arrested in Brookhaven, Miss., because of a Jan. 11 posting that read: “Yes, I have decided I will assassinate Barack Obama. It’s really nothing personal about the man. … But I know it’s for the country’s own good that I can do this. Barack Obama, I view more as a sacrificial lamb… .” ( continue to full post… )

Glenn Spencer, who heads the hate groups American Patrol and American Border Patrol, loves showing off the high-tech gizmos he uses to track “illegal aliens.” Last April, Spencer set up remote control Internet cameras controlled from his home along the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona — “Operation Virtual Vigilance,” in the paramilitary parlance Spencer favors. At the time, he promised he would start sending unmanned aerial drones into the air to monitor border fence construction.

On Thursday, Spencer will trot out the results of his drone project, or what he calls Operation B.E.E.F. (Border Enforcement Evaluation First), at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. On his website, he says he’s been sending a drone up every two months along a route stretching “from Texas to the Pacific Ocean, documenting the construction of the border fence.”

Glenn Spencer is no stranger to Hatewatch. For years, he’s peddled a racist conspiracy theory that suggests that the Mexican government is purposely sending undocumented immigrants northward in order to “reconquer” the American Southwest and, ultimately, transform it into a northern Mexican state to be called Aztlan. But in recent months, Spencer has expanded from his usual angry attacks on Latinos to furious, explicitly racist and anti-Semitic tirades that have caught the attention of many longtime Spencer observers. Consider:

• Just before Christmas, Spencer issued a nearly hysterical Web posting entitled “Obama Threatens Nation,” in which he described the incoming Obama Administration as “prepared to make a frontal assault on the sovereignty of the United States.” In fact, he said, “Barack Obama represents the greatest threat to the United States of America since the Civil War. Brainwashed Americans have just voted to commit national suicide.”
• The same month, Spencer wrote an article on his website with another provocative title: “Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?” In it, he assured readers that he had Jewish friends but added: “I fear, however, that this small handful of patriotic Americans are far outnumbered by liberal Jews who now have total control over our media.” He linked his posting to a report by well-known anti-Semitic theorist Kevin MacDonald, who Spencer has hosted as a guest on his radio show and whose work he recommends.
• Last fall, Spencer lamented the falling birthrate for whites and contrasted that to soaring Latino birth rates. The title of his posting (which was accompanied by the cartoon below): “White America Commits Suicide: The Coming Disunited States of America.”

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Four reputed white supremacist gang members have been arrested in connection with the vicious beating of a Latino man on Nov. 19 in Hemet, Calif. The victim, a 19-year-old whose name police would not release, was knocked unconscious and then repeatedly stomped and kicked in the head. He suffered permanent brain damage and has been placed in a long-term care facility. According to investigators, the attack was random, unprovoked and motivated purely by racial hatred.

Hemet is located in the region of California known as the Inland Empire, which, as the Intelligence Report documented in 2005, has become a hotbed of white supremacist activity during an ongoing phase of rapid demographic shifts.

But the attack is also part of a frightening national pattern of rising anti-Latino violence. Hate crimes targeting Latinos have increased 40% since 2003, according to the most recent FBI statistics, which are known to undercount total hate crimes but nevertheless do indicate real trends. Whatever its exact level, the sharp rise in violence against Latinos has paralleled the spike in anti-immigrant propaganda on both the right-wing extremist margins of society and within the so-called mainstream media. ( continue to full post… )

Nineteen-year-old Kyle Anderson wants the world to know that he’s out to change the image of white supremacists like himself. “People used to think of a guy with a beer belly spitting out tobacco and missing a few teeth,” Anderson told the Billings [Montana] Gazette earlier this week. “Now we think of people who are determined, energetic leaders, educated and idealistic, we’re the best creators. We’re the elite.”

Well, sort of. Anderson, a former associate of racist skinhead gangs, is now a member of the Montana Creators Assembly — one of several splinter groups that emerged from the wreckage of the neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator (WCOTC). And the history of that group (whose name was changed in 2002, after a non-racist Oregon church sued over copyright infringement) does not suggest that “Creators,” in the past or today, are the “elite,” let alone “educated and idealistic.”

Started as the Church of the Creator in 1973 by Ben Klassen, a former Florida state lawmaker who was state chairman of segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 run for president, WCOTC specialized in popularizing particularly guttural language, with Klassen ranting incessantly about “niggers,” “the goddamned mud races” and, in a cry that became a slogan, “Racial Holy War.” In 1991, a Creator “reverend” murdered a black Persian Gulf War veteran in Florida. Around the same time, a man who had served prison time for selling millions of pounds of tainted meat to schools was briefly named Klassen’s successor. Another man who led the group briefly was convicted of planting a bomb on a police officer’s porch. In 1993, after Klassen committed suicide, eight people with links to COTC were charged with plotting to bomb a Los Angeles church and assassinate Rodney King. The Washington state director of the group bombed an NAACP office the same year. And time didn’t soften the group’s taste for criminal thuggery. In 1999, a member went on a rampage, murdering two people and injuring at least nine. In 2005, its then-leader, Matt Hale, was sentenced to 40 years for soliciting the murder of a federal judge. Throughout, various Creators were arrested regularly for street violence, drug use and even shoplifting.

But Anderson, buttoned down in a burgundy dress shirt and clutching preparatory notes for his interview with the Gazette, complained that his group’s hopes — for a bloody national race war against blacks and Jews followed by the creation of an all-white country — are misunderstood. “A lot of people against us have never read, never looked into our program,” he said. “They’ve been brainwashed.” Kind of like Kyle Anderson.