On Wednesday, the Vatican made a dramatic move to tamp down growing worldwide furor over its late January decision to revoke the excommunication of Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) Bishop Richard Williamson, who has a 20 year track record of vocal Holocaust denial.

What the Vatican has not yet addressed is SSPX’s clear record of anti-Semitism. The SSPX as a whole, which has chapels and schools across the United States and in several other countries, is a font of anti-Semitic propaganda. It is in The Angelus, published monthly by the SSPX, and on SSPX’s website, that the radical anti-Semitism of the order is most evident. One example now on the website is an Angelus article by two SSPX priests that calls for locking Jews into ghettoes because “Jews are known to kill Christians.” Further examples of the group’s anti-Semitism can be found here. 

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This afternoon in Maricopa County, Ariz., more than 200 Latino immigrants were chained, dressed in prison stripes and forced to march down a public street from a county jail to a detainment camp in a desert industrial zone outside Phoenix.

Along the way they were filmed by television news crews and guarded by at least 50 Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) deputies, wearing body armor and combat fatigues, armed with shotguns and automatic rifles. At least two canine units were present; a Sheriff’s Department helicopter hovered overhead.

The massive show of force was pure stagecraft for a blatant and dehumanizing publicity stunt orchestrated by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The MCSO gave no indication that any of the immigrant prisoners were particularly violent or presented a grave danger to the public.

According to a MCSO press release, 220 immigrants were transferred to a “Tent City” surrounded by electrified fencing. “This is a population of criminals more adept perhaps at escape,” Arpaio stated in the press release. “But this is a fence they won’t want to scale because they risk receiving a shock – literally.”

The press release further detailed how the immigrants will be treated like any other prisoners, “with two exceptions.” First, “Arpaio wants them to be instructed in American immigration laws, as a way to help them understand that the violation of these laws has serious consequences not only to them but to society as a whole.” Second, immigrants who violate jail rules will be put on a desert chain gang. “This chain gang will work to clean the areas [of the nearby desert] which have been impacted by human trafficking trade,” the release stated.

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It’s not easy being a white supremacist these days.

Already reeling from Obama’s win in November, believers in white superiority were dealt another blow last week when former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele became the first African-American to head the Republican Party.

Extremists view Steele’s election to the helm of the Republican National Committee as a betrayal by the party that many considered, in their words, “the lesser of two evils.” On blogs and online forums, they excoriated the Republican Party for supposedly pandering to minorities while abandoning what they see as its white base.

No one professed more outrage than David Duke, the ex-Klan boss and former Louisiana state legislator. “GOP traitors appoint Obama Junior as Chairman of the Republican Party,” proclaimed the sub-headline on his website.

Yet ever the optimist, Duke saw a silver lining in Steele’s election, just as he had in Obama’s win. “I am glad these traitorous leaders of the Republican Party appointed this Black racist, affirmative action advocate to the head of the Republican Party because this will lead to a huge revolt among the Republican base,” he wrote. “As a former Republican official, I can tell you that millions of rank-and-file Republicans are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore! We will either take the Republican Party back over the next four years or we will say, ‘To Hell with the Republican Party!’ And we will take 90 percent of Republicans with us into a New Party that will take its current place!”

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Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center is releasing a new report, The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance, examining the three Washington, D.C., organizations standing in the way of comprehensive immigration reform. The report shows that they are part of a network of groups created by a man who has been at the heart of the white nationalist movement for decades.

The Nativist Lobby describes how the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and NumbersUSA were founded and funded by John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist who operates a racist publishing company and has written that to maintain American culture “a European-American majority” is required. The report reveals that Tanton, who still sits on FAIR’s board of directors, founded the racist Social Contract Press and has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, white nationalist intellectuals and Klan lawyers for decades – correspondence documented by his own writings stored at a University of Michigan library.

The report shows that FAIR has been aware of Tanton’s views and activities for years.

FAIR, whose members have testified frequently before Congress, has hired as key officials men who also joined white supremacist groups. It has promoted racist conspiracy theories. And it has even accepted more than $1 million from the Pioneer Fund, a racist foundation devoted to proving a connection between race and intelligence, the report found. In 2007, FAIR was designated as a hate group by the SPLC.

The report also examines how the Center for Immigration Studies – which bills itself as an “independent” scholarly think tank – began its life as a FAIR program and continues to produce dubious and sometimes completely false studies furthering FAIR’s anti-immigration agenda. It’s a vision described by Tanton in a 1985 letter in which he wrote that CIS would produce reports “for later passage to FAIR, the activist organization, to remedy.”

Similarly, NumbersUSA, a group that has achieved dramatic policy successes, began its life as a Tanton foundation program, the report found. NumbersUSA Executive Director Roy Beck has even been described by Tanton as his “heir apparent.” He also edited The Immigration Invasion, a book by Tanton and a colleague that was so raw in its immigrant bashing that Canadian border authorities have banned it as hate literature.

As Hatewatch first reported last November, the prevailing post-election wisdom in academic racist and white nationalist circles is that John McCain lost because he was soft on immigration, and that future Republican victories hinge not upon courting non-white and moderate-on-immigration swing voters, as mainstream GOP strategists like Karl Rove argue, but upon vilifying Latino immigrants and fanning the flames of racial tensions in America with renewed gusto.

The New York Times Editorial Board eloquently condemned such regressive thinking in last Sunday’s lead New York Times editorial, “The Nativists Are Restless.”

“The relentlessly harsh Republican campaign against immigration has always hidden a streak of racial extremism,” it began. “Now after several high-water years, the Republican tide has gone out, leaving exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be a wedge issue.”

The editorial was published three days after America’s Voice, a pro-immigration reform advocacy group, put on a press conference for top-tier media outlets, including the New York Times. The press conference [MP3 here] relayed information from Hatewatch’s recent exposé of the racist and anti-immigrant extremist views and backgrounds of several panelists who participated in a symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the American Cause, a far-right think tank. The event promoted a new American Cause report making the case that, as the New York Times editorial put it, “…anti-immigration absolutism was still the solution for the [Republican] party’s deep electoral woes, actual voting results notwithstanding.”

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Scott Pontzious, 28, was charged with battery and committing a hate crime after he allegedly told a Hispanic man talking in Spanish to learn English and then assaulted him.
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“The Republican tide has gone out, leaving exposed the nativism of fringe right-wingers clinging to what they hope will be a wedge issue.”
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A trial is underway for a federal lawsuit charging Cochise County rancher Roger Barnett, who has boasted of detaining thousands of border crossers at gunpoint, with violating the civil rights of a group of immigrants Barnett encountered in 2004.
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Seven teenagers accused of taking part in the racially motivated killing of an Ecuadorean immigrant last November were charged with randomly attacking eight other Hispanic immigrants over 14 months.
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