Update: The subject of this story, the man formerly known as Vince Bertollini, comments below that the article is a “typical Jew ploy,” among other things.

Recently released after several years in federal prison, Richard Vincent Bertollini has moved across the country and changed his name in order to make “a fresh start.” But the energetic propagandist of yesteryear is still peddling his same brand of vitriolic hatred directed at Jews and the U.S. government.

Bertollini — an ordained minister of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, formerly based in North Idaho — now calls himself “Vince Bert,” Hatewatch has learned. The would-be stealth racist, aiming to shed his Idaho reputation and remain under the radar, recently moved to Albuquerque from Santa Fe, N.M., where he maintains a post office box.

Prison hasn’t changed his thinking much. In a recent Internet posting, the former confidant and key financial supporter of the late Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler calls for a “revolution” and the “shedding of blood” in the United States. Bertollini re-started his Internet hate ministry and book publishing operation in the Southwest just days after being released from prison last year after serving a sentence on a federal firearms charge.

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A top aide and international representative for the Nation of Islam has been detained in Guyana, where police are questioning him about alleged ties to terrorism and drug trafficking.

Akbar Muhammad claimed to be in Guyana to give lectures and appear on television. He was expected to attend a rally yesterday afternoon in the mining town of Linden, just south of the capital. Defense attorney Nigel Hughes, however, told several news agencies that Muhammad was questioned about his relationship to opposition leaders and other black activists.

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Two American Muslims, one of whom complained that Muslims were treated like “dogs,” have been charged with plotting to kill Jews by blowing up synagogues in Manhattan.

Ahmed Ferhani, 26, an aspiring fashion model who once sold cosmetics at Saks Fifth Avenue, and his accomplice, Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, a taxi service dispatcher, were arrested Wednesday after purchasing three semiautomatic pistols, 150 rounds of ammunition and a hand grenade from an undercover police officer.

They are charged under state law with second-degree conspiracy as a crime of terrorism, second-degree conspiracy as a hate crime and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism. ( continue to full post… )

David Irving is no historian, as his official biography would have the world believe. The reality is that he a propagandist who has probably done as much as anyone to promote Holocaust denial and to lionize Adolf Hitler, who Irving once said was “not at all anti-Semitic by the time the war began.”

In recent months, Irving has been on a whistle-stop tour of the United States giving a lecture titled, “The Life and Death of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s lieutenant/44 years in 44 minutes.” The talks and their venues have not been publicly advertised – a ploy Irving has used repeatedly to avoid an unwelcome presence of protesting anti-racists. But Hatewatch has learned Irving will speak at 7 p.m. tonight at The Museum at Central School in Kalispell, Mont.

Museum officials said they do not support Irving’s message, but their lawyers had advised them they were constitutionally prohibited from discriminating against Irving’s talk based on his viewpoint, no matter how distasteful it may be. “You can’t refuse somebody the ability to use a public space based on ideological content,” said Gil Jordan, the museum’s executive director. ( continue to full post… )

Update: Cyndi Steele was allowed to meet privately with her husband before the defense rested its case at midday without Edgar Steele taking the stand. The case was expected to go to the jury after the reading of jury instructions and closing arguments.

As early as today, a federal jury in Idaho will begin determining the fate of Edgar Steele, a volatile attorney who represented leading racists before becoming an anti-Semitic writer, lecturer and icon of the radical right.

During his two-week criminal trial in Boise, Idaho, federal prosecutors used witnesses to depict Steele as the mastermind behind a failed pipe bomb-murder plot aimed at his wife and her mother. He is accused of hiring Larry Fairfax, a handyman-turned-hitman-turned-FBI-informant, who actually planted a pipe bomb on Cyndi Steele’s car without telling his FBI handlers.

The murder plot allegedly was hatched while the 65-year-old Steele used Skype from his North Idaho horse ranch for Internet trysts with a young Ukrainian woman, described as his girlfriend by investigators. In videotaped testimony from the Ukraine, the 25-year-old woman recalled conversations about lovemaking and having babies once Steele’s wife was out of the picture. ( continue to full post… )

A prominent Christian direct-mail guru — who for years helped conservative groups market themselves to subscribers of a blatantly anti-Semitic publication — has been implicated for harboring a woman who ran away with her biological daughter after losing custody to a former lesbian partner.

According to an FBI affidavit, Lisa Miller and her daughter — missing since 2009 — have been living at a beach house in Nicaragua owned by Philip Zodhiates, who runs the marketing company Response Unlimited in Waynesboro, Va.

Miller’s custody battle with her former partner, Janet Jenkins, has received widespread publicity because of the questions it raised about the rights of non-biological parents in same-sex unions. Miller, who renounced homosexuality and became an evangelical Baptist, lost custody of her daughter after failing to grant Jenkins her court-required visits, citing her objections to Jenkins’ “homosexual lifestyle.” The two had been joined in a civil union in Vermont in 2000. Miller was artificially inseminated and gave birth to her daughter, Isabella, in 2002.

Zodhiates’ alleged involvement in the case was reported by The New York Times on Saturday. ( continue to full post… )

President Obama’s decision to intervene militarily in Libya to cripple dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s ability to combat rebels trying to topple his regime didn’t sit well with two American black nationalist leaders who consider the long-time strongman a friend and ally.

“Now you may laugh, but in a few days, something is going to wipe the smile and the laugh from your face,” Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI), warned Thursday during a rambling press conference at the group’s headquarters in Chicago. The uprisings in the Arab world coupled with the tsunami in Japan signify that divine spaceships waiting to avenge black suffering will soon arrive, Farrakhan said. “Brother Barack’s” decision to back the Libyan opposition against Qaddafi – who in 1972 lent NOI’s leadership $3 million to buy the headquarters from which Farrakhan broadcast his speech – is only going to hasten the UFOs’ arrival.

NOI theology has it that just before the biblical end of times, believers will be whisked away in small spaceships called “Baby Wheels” to a giant “Mother Wheel,” where they will live while other divine ships eradicate those who remain on earth with enormous bombs, explains Mattias Gardell in In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. ( continue to full post… )

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — The trial of former Aryan Nations attorney Edgar Steele was postponed and moved from North Idaho to Boise on Monday by a federal judge who earlier was steadfast in refusing additional delays.

Steele, 65, faces four federal charges in an alleged failed plot to hire a hit man to murder his wife, Cyndi Steele, and her mother last year.

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge B. Linn Winmill refused a request from defense attorneys Robert T. McAllister and Gary Amendola to delay Steele’s trial for a third time. ( continue to full post… )

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — The attorney who unsuccessfully defended Richard Butler — a civil case that led to the bankruptcy of the Aryan Nations more than a decade ago — goes on trial today in a murder-for-hire plot involving a pipe bomb apparently aimed at the lawyer’s wife.

Edgar Steele (left) and Larry Fairfax

The federal case against 65-year-old attorney Edgar Steele of Sagle, Idaho, is attracting the attention of hate groups throughout the United States who are supporting his legal defense fund and offering up assorted Internet rants and conspiracy theories.

A nonprofit organization, the Edgar Steele Defense Fund, was established in November by Deon Masker, the wife of anti-Semitic self-described “conspiratologist” Richard F. Masker, a former Butler devotee who lives in North Idaho. ( continue to full post… )

Veterans Today (VT) is a website that bills itself as a “military veterans and foreign affairs journal.” And, indeed, many of its contributors are military veterans or veterans’ advocates from across the political spectrum. VT also offers some information about veterans’ benefits (lifted from the Veterans’ Administration) and links to home and other loans for vets.

But start reading the posts, and you’ll find something else entirely: myriad claims that there was a conspiracy behind 9/11 (Israel orchestrated it, in cahoots with the American government), that the American government is a puppet (of Israel), that the Holocaust never happened or was greatly exaggerated (Jews made it up to manipulate non-Jews), and, most recently, that Julian Assange, the man behind Wikileaks, is a pawn (of Israel).

Notice a theme? ( continue to full post… )