United States of America
The 1996 general election results were mixed. President Bill Clinton,
a Democrat, was comfortably re-elected, defeating Republican challenger
Bob Dole and third-party challenger Ross Perot. However, Republicans maintained
control over both houses of congress: the senate and the house of representatives.
If anything, the newly elected congress is likely to be more conservative
than its predecessor: a significant number of moderate Republicans were
replaced by more conservative members of their party.
The Religious Right (see RELIGION) continued to be active politically, especially
within the Republican Party. The party's platform was heavily influenced
by the Religious Right, to the point where Republican presidential candidate,
Bob Dole, publicly distanced himself from it in order to cultivate the political
mainstream.
Far-right militia groups (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS) also soldiered
on. Various plots were uncovered and prosecutions begun against militia
cells collecting the material of, and preparing for, acts of domestic terrorism.
A rash of church burnings, largely affecting black churches, caught the
nation's attention in 1996. Jewish groups, such as the American Jewish Committee
(AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), established funds to help rebuild
the churches; a black and Jewish teenage group helped rebuild an Alabama
church over the 4 July holiday, and in August President Clinton, Vice President
Gore and their families joined Rabbi James Rudin of the AJC and the Revd
Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches to help rebuild
a church in Tennessee.
Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam movement (NOI), followed
up his successful "Million Man March" of 1995 with a series of
controversial trips to alleged terrorist-sponsoring states such as Libya,
Iran and Iraq (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS). He also convened
a "National Political Convention" in St Louis, Missouri, which
was poorly attended, and a "World Day of Atonement" at the United
Nations in New York. Farrakhan remained true to his pattern of asking to
meet with Jews while continuing to make outrageous antisemitic expressions,
and while the NOI continued to print and distribute antisemitic books and
periodicals.
In the meantime, a number of Jewish groups continued their efforts to terminate
government-funded contracts with companies affiliated with the NOI, premised
on the belief that such companies were violating the equal employment opportunity
laws applicable to businesses that receive such contracts.
In 1996, the economic picture in the USA showed the unemployment rate to
be 5.3 per cent, with inflation up to 3.3 per cent in 1996 from 2.5 per
cent in 1995. Economic growth for 1996 was 2.5 per cent. Consumer prices
rose at an annual rate of 3.3 per cent.
Although religious-based antisemitism dates back to colonial days, antisemitism
with a racist bent emerged during the 1890s. This was when the large-scale
immigration of Jews began that characterized the next three decades. US
antisemitism followed the European nineteenth-century pattern and instituted
moves to restrict immigration. A result of this trend was the passage by
the US congress in the 1920s of national origin quotas. These quotas largely
closed the doors to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The resultant
effect of the quotas was that, some years later, the USA was unavailable
as a refuge for a significant number of Jews fleeing Hitler's Europe. Another
result of the "nativist" trend was the re-emergence in the early
twentieth century of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Dormant since its first incarnation
following the Civil War, the KKK promoted antisemitism and became a potent
force.
In the early twentieth century, antisemitic stereotypes proliferated within
the popular cultural areas of vaudeville and the stage, and later in motion
pictures. In 1903 the Kishinev pogrom galvanized many leading US Jews to
fight antisemitism, leading to the formation of the AJC on 3 February 1906.
In 1913 Leo Frank, a Jew, was wrongfully convicted of the murder of a young
Christian woman in his factory in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1915 Frank was removed
from his prison cell by a vigilante mob and lynched, a victim of rumours,
slanders and calls to anti-Jewish pre-judice.
In the 1920s the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, believing and then
popularizing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, conducted a seven-year
propaganda campaign through his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent,
against what he termed the "International Jew". The 1930s, the
era of the American depression, was a time of distinct anti-Jewish bias
in many areas of society. Large-scale discrimination against Jews in employment,
higher education and housing combined with virulent political antisemitism
resulting from the rise of Nazism in Germany and fascism in other European
countries. The last major eruption of antisemitism in the USA occurred during
this period, with an upsurge of ideologically motivated and political anti-Jewish
activity. The era gave rise to domestic anti-Jewish bigots, such as Father
Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith and William Dudley Pelley, the leader
of the Silver Shirts. It also witnessed the rise of the German-American
Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn, and the notorious anti-Jewish speech by the aviator
and US hero Charles A. Lindbergh to an America First Committee rally. Especially
influential in the 1930s was Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose weekly
radio broadcasts with an openly antisemitic message reached millions. Coughlin's
campaign paved the way for isolationist organizations, such as the America
First Committee, to attract anti-semites to their banners. Interestingly,
echoes of some of Father Coughlin's speeches can be heard today in the verbiage
of some NOI speakers, such as Khallid Abdul Muhammad.
The 1940s-a period of social cohesiveness as the USA went to war-saw a diminution
of some forms of antisemitism. Nonetheless, there was continuing anti-Jewish
bias in employment and housing, while in social clubs there were other,
"polite" forms of discrimination. Quotas on Jewish students also
continued at many major universities.
The 1950s was an era in which the Jewish communal agenda in the USA was
almost synonymous with the civil rights struggle. In 1954, the supreme court's
decision in Brown vs. Board of Education ruled segregated schools
illegal (the AJC underwrote the sociological studies upon which the supreme
court based its decision). In the years following the Brown case, those
who fought to preserve racial segregation caused serious social turmoil.
There was some scapegoating of Jews, an increase in KKK activity and the
growth of "white citizens' councils". There was also a proliferation
of antisemitic fringe groups. During the post-war years, antisemitism lost
much of its ideological strength. Serious manifestations of antisemitism
ceased to be a factor in the USA.
In the last three-and-a-half decades there has been little political antisemitism:
discriminatory barriers have continued to fall in all areas of US society,
including the corporate world. Notwithstanding these trends, there have
been some noteworthy manifestations of antisemitism during the latter part
of the twentieth century. Together with the McCarthyite witch-hunts, the
late 1950s and 1960s witnessed the rise and growth of radical far-right
groups. These groups advanced a theory that sometimes focused on Jews as
promoters of a conspiracy to spread communism and control the world. In
1960, during a two-month period, a swastika-daubing epidemic took place
resulting in 643 desecrations of synagogues and other Jewish property throughout
the USA. In the 1970s, at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement and
at the beginning of the women's movement, antisemitism was also expressed
by the political left. Using the infamous UN Resolution 3379, which equated
Zionism with racism, as a political wedge, various left groups sought to
portray Jews as racist, and/or as part of a conspiracy to spread capitalism
and control the world.
During the latter part of the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s the number
of incidents of antisemitic vandalism and harassment rose around the country.
However, the general diminution of most forms of antisemitism continued.
Analysts suggest that there is no contradiction between the rise in the
number of acts of antisemitic vandalism and the decline in anti-Jewish attitudes.
It is not always possible to determine to what degree incidents are motivated
by antisemitic sentiment alone. In particular, acts of vandalism may be
the work of juveniles with cans of spray paint rather than outright anti-Jewish
acts. Therefore, it is not always accurate to extrapolate conclusions about
societal beliefs from acts of vandalism. The rise in antisemitic hate crimes
generally reflects the upward trend of hate crimes against other communities.
The one difference is that Jewish property (synagogues, cemeteries) is often
the target of a large proportion of antisemitic hate crimes, while among
other groups of victims, such as the gay community, the targets are more
likely to be human beings.
It is worth noting that in the "moments of conflict" during the
post-war period, at a time when one might expect outbursts of antisemitism
for example, the oil crises of the 1970s, the farm crisis of the 1980s and,
most dramatically, the Pollard affair, which clearly evoked the question
of "dual loyalty" there was no increase in manifestations of antisemitism.
This was not the case in the USA before the Second World War, when conflict
situations led to expressions of antisemitism. Conversely, there have been
indications that the US populace is willing to overlook a politician's antisemitism
if he is appealing for other reasons. David Duke was elected a state representative
in Louisiana in the 1980s. He won the majority of white votes in his campaigns
for senator and governor in the early 1990s despite his racist and antisemitic
history, as well as his Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi views. Patrick Buchanan,
despite his antisemitism, was seen as a welcome member of the Republican
Party in the 1992 presidential campaign and there-after. He even won some
of the early caucuses and primaries in the 1996 presidential campaign, before
losing to former senator Bob Dole.
One major source of anxiety in the 1990s derives from Afrocentrist antisemitism
in the African American community, particularly the activities of the NOI.
This anxiety was fuelled by two events. The first was the speech in July
1991 by Professor Leonard Jeffries, Jr, of City College of New York, who
claimed that Jewish conspiracies controlled the slave trade and negative
depictions of African Americans in Hollywood movies, among other things.
The second was the riot in August 1991 in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn
that was set off when an African American child was killed by an out-of-control
car in a motorcade of the late Lubavitcher rabbi Menachem Schneerson. A
three-day riot broke out, targeting Jews and Jewish property in the neighbourhood.
In the early hours of the riot, a young Australian Hasidic scholar, Yankel
Rosenbaum, was fatally stabbed. Lemrick Nelson, tried for Rosenbaum's murder,
was acquitted on state murder charges in October 1992, but subsequently
convicted on federal civil rights charges in early 1997 (see LEGAL MATTERS).
Classical antisemitism continues to be expressed by NOI leaders and in NOI
publications; yet it is not met with the same level of denunciation by mainstream
blacks and whites as would the same anti-Jewish sentiments if uttered by
a KKK or militia leader.
Virtually all the world's racial, national, ethnic, cultural and religious
groupings are represen-ted in US society. Furthermore, the ethnic complexity
of the population tends increasingly to displace the hegemony of those of
white European descent. According to 1990 census figures, 12.1 per cent
of the population of the US were black, 9 per cent were of Hispanic origin,
2.9 per cent were Asian Americans and 0.8 per cent were native Americans.
The 75 per cent representing people of white European descent in 1990 is
expected to fall to an estimated 52.7 per cent by 2050.
Although the USA has a long democratic tradition, it also has a history
of racism. Racial discrimination continues to show itself in various sectors
of US society. Hotly debated by scholars, community leaders and politicians
is the degree to which racism contributes at present to the significant
disparities that exist between white Americans, African Americans, Hispanic
Americans, native Americans and some groups of Asian Americans. The Arab
American community is also subject to negative stereotyping and some harassment,
particularly during periods of tension in the Middle East and after acts
of terrorism.
Despite the emergence of a sizeable black middle class, including highly
successful black artists and sports figures, a large percentage of African
Americans live in inner-city ghettos plagued by poverty, unemployment, crime,
drugs, illiteracy and violence. In 1995, 41.9 per cent of all black children
lived at or beneath the poverty line. The 1994 African American infant mortality
rate was 14.9 per 1,000 live births, compared with 6.3 per 1,000 live births
for whites. These problems were even more pronounced in the native American
community, where unemployment on some reservations hovered at over 80 per
cent.
In 1996 the US department of justice, under a mandate from the Hate Crimes
Statistics Act, reported 7,947 incidents characterized as hate- or bias-motivated
during 1995 (the third year of reporting, up from 5,932 in 1994-but with
9,584 law enforcement agencies reporting in 1995 as opposed to 7,356 in
1994), with 5,645 racially or ethnically motivated, 1,277 motivated by religion
(1,058 of which were antisemitic) and 1,019 by sexual orientation. Reporting,
although improved in 1995, continued to be characterized by non-compliance
by many state and local jurisdictions. Because in many places additional
paperwork is a disincentive for police to classify an incident as a hate
crime, the statistics are not always accurate. The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), the agency that collects the data, is trying to improve the reporting
for subsequent years.
During 1996 there were thirty-four incidents of church burnings; these apparent
arsons disproportionately affected black churches in the South, but there
were many incidents at white churches and some burnings as far afield as
Connecticut. The American Jewish community expressed its solidarity with
the affected parishioners, with statements issued by virtually every major
organization. Many followed up with more substantial endeavours by pressing
for remedial legislation and by fund-raising to assist the churches in rebuilding.
Following June hearings on the church arsons before the Congressional Black
Caucus, at which the ADL testified, and the Senate Judiciary Committee,
the senate and the house of representatives with the backing of the organized
Jewish community quickly and unanimously passed the Church Arson Prevention
Act of 1996. The omnibus bill, which at mid-year still awaited signature
by the president, amended the 1988 Religious Vandalism Act (legislation
that the AJC had played a significant role in conceptualizing and promoting)
so as to expand the kinds of offences to which it applies, increased resources
for federal prosecution of hate crimes, extended an existing mandate for
collection of hate crimes statistics, and allowed the federal government
to provide loan guarantees for the rebuilding of non-profit institutions
affected by arson or terror.
In addition, several drives were put in place by Jewish groups, often in
collaboration with non-Jewish charities, to raise funds for the devastated
congregations. Thus, the AJC joined with the National Council of Churches
and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in a fund-raising effort,
as did the New York Board of Rabbis and the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding;
the ADL set up its own fund to which contributions could be made.
According to figures from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the
largest groups of immigrants who lawfully entered the USA in 1994 were from
Mexico, the former Soviet Union (FSU), China, Philippines, Dominican Republic,
Vietnam and India. Allegations have been made of violence by the border
police towards undocumented Mexican im-migrants.
A growing concern with immigration was made manifest by the passage (by
59 to 41 per cent) of California's controversial Proposition 187 in the
elections of November 1994. If the provision is ever enforced (there is
a court order pending against its enforcement), it will prevent the state's
estimated 1.8 million illegal immigrants from receiving non-emergency health
care, welfare and education. The measure would also compel teachers and
health professionals to inform the immigration authorities of suspected
illegal immigrants, including their children. The matter is still in litigation.
Throughout 1996 officials of Jewish organizations traditionally supportive
of "fair and generous" immigration policies-together with coalition
partners at various other ethnic, religious and civic groups-sought to prevent
the immigration reform bills introduced in both houses of congress in 1995
from becoming law. For many, one of the most crucial concerns was posed
by the house bill's provision intended to sharply cap the number of refugees
eligible to be granted asylum in the USA. The bill would have capped refugee
admissions at 50,000, around 60 per cent less than the 110,000 refugees
allowed into the United States in 1995, including around 22,000 Jewish refugees
from the FSU. Jewish groups were also concerned about the view expressed
in some quarters that Jews from the FSU were no longer sufficiently in danger
to be treated as refugees.
In March the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to "split the bill",
dividing the legal immigration and illegal immigration sections into two
distinct initiatives. The bill, which now did not further limit the number
of legal immigrants, was passed by the senate on 2 May. The full house also
voted to "split the bill" and adopted an amendment that removed
the refugee caps. There remained concern as to what would emerge from the
conference committee due to draft the legislation in its final form. A formal
conference was finally announced in late September and the house voted by
305 to 123 to pass the immigration bill that it produced.
The bill was more controversial in the senate, with criticism of provisions
that would have further curtailed public benefits to legal immigrants. The
most controversial provisions were removed, but the law as enacted still
included provisions that undermined US commitment to the protection of refugees.
In June, the house of representatives passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations
Act, and it was passed by the senate in July. The senate version contained
three notable amendments. The "Lautenberg Amendment" continued
the policy of allowing refugee status for Jews from the FSU along with certain
other groups. The other two provisions concerned indicted war criminals
in the former Yugoslavia, and German compensation to Holocaust survivors.
The final bill included the "Lautenberg Amendment", but not the
other two amendments.
In terms of membership and influence the impact of racist and antisemitic
groups on society in 1996 was minimal. Nonetheless, the white supremacist
movement has gradually expanded since the early 1980s, and has been responsible
for occasional manifestations of violence, allegedly including the bombing
of the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995. No single organization
dominates the movement, which is composed of probably hundreds of groups
of varying sizes and overlapping activities whose fortunes wax and wane.
To one degree or another, however, they share the goal of creating a society
dominated by white Christians in which the rights of others (particularly
Jews and African Americans) are denied; many of them espouse theories of
Jewish conspiracy and Holocaust denial and many are adherents of Christian
Identity churches (see below and RELIGION). The number of hard-core activists
in the movement has been estimated at at least 25,000. A much greater number
of floating sympathizers, estimated at between 150,000 and 200,000, attend
meetings or rallies, buy literature and make donations. But the "bright
line" between this fringe and mainstream society has shown signs of
erosion. One example was the statement of Representative Helen Chenoweth
giving credence to the claim that the United Nations had usurped US sovereignty
in US national parks (see MAINSTREAM POLITICS). This claim was believed
beyond the paranoid militia crowd: the official brochure of Tennessee's
Great Smoky National Park included an article this summer entitled "Park
is Not Run by United Nations".
The major antisemitic and white supremacist propaganda organization is the
Liberty Lobby, founded in 1955 by Willis A. Carto, a professed admirer of
Hitler and a leading exponent of the Populist Party (see below). Carto was
one of the key figures in US Holocaust denial as the founder of the Institute
for Historical Review (IHR) and its antisemitic publishing house, Noontide
Press (see PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA and HOLOCAUST DENIAL). In 1991 the Liberty
Lobby launched the Populist Action Committee to support far-right candidates
standing as Republicans, Democrats, Populists or independents. The organization's
weekly tabloid, Spotlight, is widely distrib-uted and produces a
popular talk show, Radio Free America (see PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA).
The Liberty Lobby has also been an ardent promoter of the militia movement.
In fact Timothy McVeigh, one of the accused Oklahoma City bombers, had advertised
a rocket launcher under a pseudonym in Spotlight, and allegedly used
a Spotlight -issued phone card while plotting the bombing.
Formed in 1984 under the leadership of the former KKK leader Robert Weems,
the Populist Party fields candidates in local, state and federal elections.
Its most famous candidate, David Duke, another former KKK leader, stood
as the Populist Party's candidate in the 1988 presidential election before
he won a seat in the Louisiana state legislature as a Republican in 1989.
The Populist Party's presidential candidate in 1992, Bo Gritz, was a former
Green Beret upon whom the character Rambo was supposedly based and who has
emerged as a leading influence on the US militia movement. Once the political
arm of the Liberty Lobby, the Populist Party has received publicity and
support in Spotlight. In the early 1990s the party split into two
factions: one, the Populist Action Committee, led by Carto, and the other
led by Don Wassall. The latter publishes the tabloid Populist Observer.
Mark Downey, the vice-chair of the Populist Party in Washington state, attracted
some attention in 1996. Speaking at a candidate forum, Downey, who was running
for legislative office, said that homosexuals should be killed, and ended
his presentation with a stiff-arm Nazi salute. He also held a fund-raising
dinner at which the major scheduled speaker was Michael Hoffman II, a well-known
Holocaust-denier. And Downey led a group of protesters at KTSW, a Tacoma
CBS affiliate, because the radio station aired a docu-drama entitled Ruby
Ridge: An American Tragedy.
The KKK is the oldest of the contemporary racist organizations in the USA.
It has enjoyed several periods of growth since its founding in the years
following the Civil War, during the 1920s and during the 1950s and 1960s.
While many of today's KKK groups attempt to project a more "respectable"
and less violent image, they have incorporated a Nazi-inspired antisemitism
into traditional white supremacy, and the KKK's original Prot-estantism
has largely given way to adher-ence to Christian Identity beliefs (see below
and RELIGION). According to Klanwatch, an independent group that monitors
KKK activity and produces a publication of the same name, the total membership
of the different factions that are known collectively as the KKK is 6,000.
The ten-year decline in KKK membership came to a halt in 1991, with perhaps
a small upward swing since 1992. The disbanding of the Invisible Empire
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by James W. Farrands and based in Sanford,
North Carolina, occurred in 1993 as part of the settlement of a lawsuit
brought against them by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The principal KKK
organization remaining was the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Thom
Robb and based in Harrison, Arkansas. Robb's group, which has attempted
to appeal to a more "moderate" mainstream, has suffered defections
from those who favour greater militancy. KKK rallies and marches were held
in 1996 in: Altoona, Puxatawny and Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania; Louisville,
Kentucky; Bryan and Wilmington, Ohio; LaGrange and Kokomo, Indiana; Tulsa,
Okla-homa; Thurmont, Maryland; Ann Arbor, Saginaw and Midland, Michigan;
and Chicago, Illinois. The American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held a cross
burning in Salida, California, to protest against Black History Month. KKK
members were also arrested in some of the burnings of black churches, including
that of the Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina, and the
Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville, South Carolina.
Aryan Nations, established in 1974 by Richard Butler, a Christian Identity
"preacher" and former Klansman, acts as an umbrella organization
to unite various KKK and neo-Nazi groups. Although based in Hayden Lake,
Idaho, the group's membership is nationwide. In 1989 a headquarters for
the south was opened in Tennessee. The group, which defines its aims as
the creation of a whites-only preserve in the Pacific Northwest of North
America (the so-called "Northwest Imperative"), holds an annual
"world congress" for white supremacists and neo-Nazis from the
USA, Canada and Europe. At this congress instruction is provided on urban
terrorism and guerrilla warfare. According to Klanwatch, in July
1996 the Aryan Nations congress drew roughly 100 people, about 100 less
than had attended in 1995. Aryan Nations also holds an annual youth festival
to mark the anniversary of Hitler's birth in April. The organization is
also active in Canada.
One outgrowth of Aryan Nations was The Order, an underground network of
white supremacists that formed in 1983 after two Aryan Nations leaders,
Louis Beam and Robert Miles, published a small-circulation newsletter calling
for a movement of "leaderless resistance". Under this concept,
small cells would take independent action, making it more difficult for
the law enforcement authorities to break up the groups. The specific aim
of The Order was to organize cells to carry out acts of violence and terror
to create a Pacific Northwestern whites-only republic. Members of The Order
were responsible for, and often convicted of, numerous murders, robberies
and bomb plots. The Order is defunct at present but attempts have been made
to revive it. Two Order-like groups went on crime sprees in 1996: the Aryan
Republican Army in the Midwest and the Phineas Priesthood in the Northwest.
White Aryan Resistance (WAR) is a white-supremacist organization based in
San Diego, California, and headed by former KKK leader Tom Metzger and his
son John. Metzger is best known for his television programme, Race and
Reason, which has been broadcast on community access stations in at
least ten states, including California, New York, Texas and Virginia. WAR
espouses an ideology known as the Third Position, which rejects both the
capitalist West and the former communist East. The organization claims to
represent the interests of the international white working class in its
"battle" against race mixing and capitalist exploitation. Metzger
also favours a loose organizational structure and "leaderless resistance".
Despite being fined $12.5 million in connection with the 1988 murder of
an Ethiopian immigrant, Metzger and WAR remain active. Affili- ated to WAR
is the Aryan Women's League, founded by Lyn Metzger, daughter of the WAR
leader, which has branches in several cities.
WAR continues to influence young racists: "WAR" monograms were
popular among California skinheads in 1996, and a twenty-five-year old New
York City police officer was suspended after he allegedly pasted a sampling
of WAR's racist and neo-Nazi stickers on a bar's bathroom (see below). WAR
also maintains an Internet site, with depictions of Jews as vermin and blacks
as sub-human.
The Christian Patriot movement is a part of the white-supremacist movement.
Some Christian Patriots are also known as Populists, America Firsters, Freemen,
Identity Believers or Patriots. At the time of their emergence, in the tax
protest movements of the late 1970s, they mostly belonged to the Posse Comitatus
movement (Latin for "power of the country"), active in the 1970s
and 1980s. Today, the Christian Patriots are affiliated to dozens of different
organizations, including the militia movement. Christian Patriots believe
in an international Jewish banking conspiracy. They also believe the USA
should be a Christian republic instead of a democracy in which the "idle
and parasitic majority" have the power to subvert the "productive
minority". They believe that only property-owning Christians should
have a voice and that "internationalists" (usually Jews) and "aliens"
are attempting to establish international socialism. In effect, they believe
that the USA is the biblical promised land-promised to white Aryan Nordic
types and that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments
to the Constitution) are divinely inspired and must be treated like scripture.
Subsequent amendments (income tax, votes for women, equal rights) they see
as man-made and suspect.
In 1996 various militia groups, including the Freemen in Montana, published
material reflecting Christian Patriot views, promoting the idea of different
levels of citizenship based on skin colour and religion. Most Christian
Patriots also are Christian Identity adherents; Christian Identity provides
a neat theological package of racism and antisemitism that helps empower
the white-only political views of Christian Patriotism (see RELIGION).
Neo-Nazi skinheads have menaced numerous US communities over the past decade.
Southern Poverty Law Center estimates the number of racist skinheads to
be about 4,000 nationwide. Skinhead violence has been racist in nature,
targeted at African Americans, Jews and Jewish institutions, Asian Americans,
and homosexuals and other groups. There have been at least thirty-four homicides
committed by skinheads since 1990. These have led to dozens of convictions
for murder, assault, arson and, most frequently, vandalism.
In April, two young men described by police as "neo-Nazi punk rockers",
were arrested in connection with vandalism in Jewish cemeteries in the Los
Angeles area, including the unearthing and theft of at least one skull.
That same month, nine skinheads were arrested after a fight involving blacks
and Hispanics in Wisconsin. This group, known as "The Fond du Lac Boot
Boys", included a nineteen-year-old who possessed business cards from
the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance (see below). In June a scuffle
broke out in Auburn, Washington, between protestors and a group of skinheads
who were about to be inducted into the KKK at a ceremony held at the local
American Legion hall. In July, two sixteen-year-olds from Antelope Valley,
California, were charged with assaulting two black teenagers with a machete.
In October, four skinheads were arrested in southern California and charged
with stabbing a Hispanic fisherman. Members of this group had been overheard
making "white pride" comments, and one had white supremacist and
KKK literature. In November, in the early morning hours, a skinhead gang
charged into a Ralph's Supermarket in Orange County, California, attacking
three employees. Also in November, an Everett, Washington, skinhead, who
sported large tattoos on his arms with the words "white" and "power",
was arrested on charges relating to the 1995 California murder of a black
man and the beating of a Hispanic teenager.
As in years past, there is no national skinhead organization. Rather, there
are loosely linked networks of gangs with names like Northern Hammerskins,
American Front, New Dawn Hammerskins, Confederate Hammerskins, American
Spring, Fourth Reich, Aryan Resistance League, National Front and SS of
America. White Power music is the unifying force of the skinhead movement.
Resistance Records, founded by the Canadian Church of the Creator (COTC)
leader, George Burdi, publishes skinhead rock music tapes and CDs. WAR is
the "adult" organization to which neo-Nazi skinheads are most
often linked, although other groups, such as the Aryan Nations, the National
Alliance and, particularly in the Southeast, the KKK, have attracted skinhead
followers.
The National Alliance is a highly structured hierarchical organization founded
by William Pierce, the author of the pro-violence novels The Turner Diaries
and Hunter, and a follower of American Nazi Party founder, George
Lincoln Rockwell. The organization, based in West Virginia, promotes a violent
form of national socialism and calls for the extermination of non-Aryans.
It has been gaining in influence, primarily among young skinheads, and also
recruits members in Canada and the UK. It operates phone message centres
in the USA and Canada and publishes a monthly, National Vanguard.
Pierce received additional notoriety this year when The Turner Diaries
was reprinted by a publishing house. Despite the efforts of the Southern
Poverty Law Center, the AJC and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, major book
chains stocked the book, ignoring the fact that profits from its sale would
help the National Alliance carry out its activities, among them printing
racist comic books targeted at school children. The Turner Diaries was
also an inspiration to the accused Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh-a
major scene in the book is eerily similar to the actual bombing, down to
the time of day and size and type of explosive used. McVeigh peddled the
book while in the military, and later at gun shows. He also reportedly phoned
the National Alliance two weeks before the bombing.
In May, Pierce suffered a setback in an-other matter. A North Carolina federal
jury, acting on a suit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, ruled
that Pierce had bought land from Ben Klassen, the head of the white supremacist
COTC, as a way to help Klassen's group avoid turning over the property to
the family of Harold Mansfield. Mansfield was a black soldier who had been
shot in 1991 by a COTC "reverend", and whose family had been awarded
the land in question in a law-suit. Pierce was ordered to pay the family
$85,000.
The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/Auslands- und Aufbauorganisation
(NSDAP/AO, German National Socialist Workers' Party/Overseas Section) was
founded in 1972. Headed by Gary Lauck of Lincoln, Nebraska, the NSDAP/AO
has become the world's largest supplier of neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denial
material to Germany, where such propaganda is illegal, as well as to other
European countries. Lauck published material in more than ten languages,
including Russian, and disseminated it in various forms, including on computer
disks and by e-mail. He also sponsored two cable television talk shows in
the USA. In August, Lauck was convicted in a German court for violating
laws against inciting racial hatred and distributing Nazi paraphernalia.
He was sentenced to four years in prison at the Hamburg state court in September
(see Germany ).
The bizarre pseudo-political activities of the followers of seventy-six-year-old
Lyndon LaRouche continued in 1996. LaRouche was released from prison in
January 1994 after serving five years of a fifteen-year prison sentence
for financial irregularities. Antisemitism is a mainstay of the international
LaRouche network. Its rhetoric identifies a "hard kernel of truth"
in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 1996, LaRouchites were
recruiting support in various countries, especially in Eastern Europe, Russia
and Australia (seeAustralia). They also stepped up co-operation with other
US groups, such as the NOI in Washington, DC, and militia organizations
around the country.
The activities of militia groups continued in 1996 in nearly every state.
Estimates of the number of militia members range from 10,000 to 40,000.
Some, though not all, of these militia groups had documented connections
to white-supremacist and antisemitic groups. One of the most notorious is
the Militia of Montana (MOM), organized by John Trochmann, who has links
with the Aryan Nations in Idaho. Militia groups cite the Second Amendment
(incorrectly interpreted as guaranteeing an individual the "right .
. . to keep and bear arms") and the Tenth Amendment (reserving powers
not delegated to the federal government "to the States . . . or to
the people"). They appeal to disaffected Americans by talking about
gun rights, the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 assault rifle ban (the former
mandates a waiting period for the purchase of firearms; the latter outlaws
nineteen types of assault rifles and ammunition clips holding over ten rounds).
Also cited is the government shoot-out with the white supremacist fugitive
Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and the federal government's
siege of the Branch Da-vidian cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993 (both Weaver
and the Branch Davidians were wanted for gun violations). These events,
claim the militias, prove that the federal government is encroaching on,
and even attacking, the rights of Americans. Many militia groups have attracted
large numbers to initial meetings, though subsequent meetings are typically
less well attended. The federal government is the principal target of the
armed militias, although conspiracy theories, including anti-Jewish stereotypes,
drive this movement. The movement is heavily armed and has adopted "leaderless
resistance" (see above). In 1996 it seemed that every few weeks another
militia cell was arrested after illegally preparing for "war".
Convictions for such activity in 1996 included guilty verdicts in Oklahoma
against Willie Ray Lampley and others for plots to bomb various targets,
including the ADL's Houston, Texas, office, abortion clinics and gay bars;
many other trials are pending.
Among the more important militia actions in 1996 were as follows: in April,
three members of the Georgia Militia were charged with conspiracy to build
pipe-bombs for warfare against the federal and state governments. The indictment
alleged that the group planned to "assassinate politicians, starting
at the highest levels". Initial reports, aired by the CBS reporter
Jim Stewart, included allegations that the group had discussed pipe-bombing
the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Department of justice officials immediately
refuted this report, but testimony about discussions of using the pipe-bombs
to terrorize the Olympic Games-in fact, of robbing drug dealers in order
to accumulate enough money to quit work and train full-time for Olympic
terrorism-was heard during the autumn trial of the militia members, all
of whom were convicted of stockpiling pipe-bombs. (At the time of writing,
no one has been charged with an actual pipe-bombing of the Olympic Games,
which caused two deaths and scores of injuries.)
On 23 April 1996, the FBI issued a na-tional alert about a militia plan
called "Project Worst Nightmare". Several FBI offices had received
copies of the text, which threatened to "shut federal operations down"
and "destroy media installations" by various acts of terrorism
if Montana's Freemen (see below) were attacked.
In May, in Wenatchee, Washington, militia leader Bruce Alden Bannister was
convicted of assault against a police officer, and was ordered to pay $50
per month towards the officer's $412 medical expenses. In July he paid $50-in
pennies.
Also in May, a Fort Myers, Florida, teenage militia group, calling itself
Lords of Chaos, was arrested for the murder of a high school band director.
The arrests were well timed: the group had plans for later that week. They
intended to go to Disneyworld, assault and detain employees dressed as Disney
characters, steal their costumes, then walk around the park shooting blacks
with a silencer-equipped gun.
In June, a Long Island militia group was arrested. The group, which included
the president of a UFO club, planned to kill local Republican officials
by contaminating their toothpaste with radioactive material.
In July, authorities arrested members of the Arizona Vipers, a Phoenix-area
militia group that had been training to attack public buildings, and which
had threatened to kill infiltrators. They were arrested with explosives
and other ordnance in a Phoenix suburb. By the year's end, some of the group
had pleaded guilty.
Also in July, nine members of the Washington State Militia were arrested
on explosives and conspiracy charges. According to documents filed in this
case, the group planned to use its weaponry in battle against either the
US government or the UN. On the other side of the Cascade mountains, in
Spokane, Paul James Cavanugh, Jr, a militia supporter, was arrested in connection
with a 29 April 1996 pipe-bombing of the Spokane City Hall. At his arrest
he possessed an Uzi machine gun, extra ammunition clips, a home-made bomb
and an assortment of large knives and martial arts weaponry.
Over the Labor Day weekend militia supporters planned to rally in Washington,
DC. Organized by Citizens Against Legal Loopholes (which reportedly sells
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as militia videos blaming
the US government for the Oklahoma City bombing) and the Committee of 1776
(a Pennsylvania pro-guns group), the scheduled speakers included the veteran
antisemite Eustace Mullins (author of The Biological Jew, The
Federal Reserve Conspiracy and The World Order ) , Jack McLamb,
founder of Police Against the New World Order and Larry Pratt of Gun Owners
of America, among others. When only a small number of people showed up one
organizer explained that the militia supporters must have been stuck in
traffic.
In October, members of the Mountaineer Militia in West Virginia were arrested
and charged with plotting to blow up the FBI fingerprint building in Clarksburg.
The group's training manual, The Principles of Militia Operations, Principles
of Militia Training, and Organizational Structure, stated: "[W]e
are at war . . . our struggle is an 'all or nothing' war, which has been
launched against our heritage." The manual promoted the "Four
F's of counterinsurgency . . . Find 'em, Fix 'em, Fight 'em and Finish 'em".
Among those arrested was a firefighter.
In the same month, three men were ar-rested in Washington state and charged
with crimes stemming from a series of bombings and bank robberies in the
Northwest, including the bombing of the Spokane Spokesman-Review
and a Planned Parenthood centre. The men-Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and
Verne Jay Merrell-left behind material at crime scenes with the symbol of
the Phineas Priesthood, a description used in recent years by some white
supremacists. (In 1990 the Christian Identity leader, Richard Hoskins, wrote
a book entitled Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood.
It distorts biblical passages to glorify violence against Jews and minorities.)
All three men had associations with America's Promise Ministries (APM),
a Christian Identity church in Sandpoint, Idaho, known in the area for distributing
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford's The International
Jew, and other antisemitica, including Holocaust-denying material. In
the 1980s Merrell-who worked for many years with security clearances in
nuclear power plants-had been active with the Arizona Patriots, a Christian
Identity paramilitary group that had threatened to kill the then governor,
Bruce Babitt, and to bomb dams and federal buildings. Barbee had been quoted
in 1995 admitting that he was part of a cell getting "ready to conduct
guerrilla warfare". According to journalist David Neiwert, the Phineas
Priesthood's agenda included: "executing" inter-racial couples
and homosexuals; bombing abortion clinics and "executing" abortion
doctors; bombing civil rights centres and "executing" civil rights
leaders and other "race mixers"; and robbing banks to finance
the priesthood's activities, purchase arms and help finance the activities
of other radical "patriots" and white supremacists. (In April
1996, in a case that may be unrelated, Phineas Priesthood leaflets were
circulated in Idaho Falls, Idaho.)
Also in October the Royal Canadian Mounted Police found a cache of weapons
(including automatic rifles and a .50 calibre machine gun), ammunition and
other gear in a remote area of British Columbia. The site was reportedly
a training camp for a US militia group.
In November, militia leaders held a "Third Continental Congress"
in Kansas City, Missouri. Convened in the basement of a Holiday Inn, and
publicized in part by a notice sandwiched between that for a pest control
company's meeting and a similar announcement for a motor repair group, the
meeting's goal was "to establish the Republican Provisional Government".
Only a handful attended.
In December, two militia members from Michigan were charged with killing
William Gleason, who was in hiding after failing to appear on firearms charges-police
had earlier found assault rifles, military equipment and over 1,000 rounds
of ammunition in his car. Gleason and the two militia members charged had
had a falling out over allegiance to the militia leader Mark Koernke, also
known as "Mark From Michigan".
With concern over the perils posed by the militia movement heightened by
the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995, Jewish organizations joined with
congressmen Charles Schumer (Democrat, New York) and Peter King (Republican,
New York) in an ongoing call for House Judiciary Committee hearings on the
issue. They, and supporting Jewish organizations, expressed frustration
that extensive hearings were being held concerning government actions at
Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, while fanatical anti-government agitators,
whose beliefs had clearly already been the catalyst for many dozens of deaths,
received scant attention. As the summer of 1995 drew on with no house session
on the militia movement scheduled, Congressman Schumer convened an informal
hearing on Capitol Hill in July 1995 at which the AJC, the ADL and the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, among others, presented statements.
Four months later, a formal hearing was at last held before the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime, at which the aforementioned Jewish organizations
were among the groups and individuals testifying about the dangers posed
by paramilitary groups. The Jewish groups took the occasion to express support
for bills directed at the violent activities of paramilitary groups introduced
by Congressmen Schumer and Jerrold Nadler (Democrat, New York). Not all
those present at the hearing were so enthusiastic. Congressman Bob Barr
(Republican, Georgia) termed himself "flabbergasted" to hear Jewish
groups, which he noted had a reputation for concern about civil liberties,
in "such a pell-mell rush to outlaw more activity" when "we
already have very, very extensive criminal laws in this country that do
protect us against acts of violence or conspiracy to commit acts of violence".
Kenneth Stern, the AJC's programme specialist on antisemitism and extremism,
disagreed with the notion that the proposed legislation constituted a threat
to civil liberties, asserting that the formation of paramilitary units by
the militia groups endangers lives and poses a threat to surrounding communities.
Two other major cases involving armed white supremacist groups occurred
in 1996. A group that investigators called the "Midwestern Bank Bandits"
was arrested early in the year. Calling itself the Aryan Republican Army
(ARA), the group held up over twenty banks in 1994 and 1995 in Ohio, Iowa,
Wisconsin, Missouri, Nebraska and Kentucky, getting away with over $250,000.
The group's goal was "to open the door to the overthrow of the US government",
according to one of its members. The ARA had a distinctive style: members
wore shirts bearing the FBI logo, and purchased getaway cars using the names
of retired FBI agents.
An eighty-one-day stand-off between federal law enforcement and a Montana
Christian Patriot group known as the Freemen occurred in 1996. Various Freemen
had had warrants, including federal warrants, outstanding for years, and
had made life difficult for many public servants in Montana, having issued
"common law bounties", "indictments", "liens"
and fraudulent checks. Nick Murnion, the county attorney of Jordan, Montana,
had been told that when the Freemen caught him, they would not bother building
a gallows to hang him from; rather, they would let him swing from a bridge.
The FBI, however, refused to arrest the Freemen despite the pleading of
local residents, in part because of criticism it had received for its handling
of the 1992 Randy Weaver siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (an FBI agent was indicted
in October for obstruction of justice related to the Weaver case), and the
1993 stand-off with the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. While the FBI waited,
the Freemen were conducting classes for up to thirty visitors each week,
teaching them how to set up common law courts and write fraudulent financial
instruments. The AJC, however, tried to prod the FBI, first through insistence
that Murnion be invited to testify before the House Crimes Subcommittee
in the fall of 1995, then through a national press conference, and finally
through a profile of the Freemen in Kenneth Stern's book Force Upon the
Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. The FBI,
however, did not arrest any of the Freemen until 25 March 1996, by which
time residents of Jordan had formed a posse and were poised to arrest the
Freemen themselves. An eighty-one-day stand-off began. Unlike in past situations,
no law enforcement personnel were killed or wounded, and the FBI was willing
to wait for the extremists to give up. Various far-right personalities,
including State Senator Charles Duke and Bo Gritz, were used as intermedi-aries
during the ordeal. Finally, after their electricity was turned off, the
Freemen surrendered, and were charged in federal court, where they refused
counsel, refused to be fingerprinted and refused to recognize the court's
jurisdiction. Related Freemen cases were also prosecuted in other federal
districts. In Colorado, a man trying to pass a cheque from the Freemen group
was indicted after trying to buy eight Hummer all-terrain vehicles. Also
in Colorado, three others, including the husband of a Colorado state representative,
were indicted on state charges related to fraudulent financial transactions.
In Nevada, a retired insurance broker was arrested after using a bogus Freeman
cheque to pay for his mother's funeral. In Michigan, two men were in-dicted
after writing more than $500,000 in bad Freemen cheques. In Utah, a Freeman
was indicted for helping five other Freemen avoid arrest. And in October,
three Freemen followers were convicted in a California federal court of
fraud and money-laundering.
Of significance in 1996 was the proliferation of "common law courts".
Reminiscent of the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s (see above), which proclaimed
the county sheriff as the highest legitimate government official and then
sent out "bounties", "liens" and "indictments"
against public officials, accusing them of "treason", the 1990s
"common law courts" are also an expression of white supremacist,
Christian Patriot belief. Over 100 of these "courts" have been
established around the country, conducting campaigns that the AJC has termed
"paper terrorism" against county, state and federal officials.
The Jordan, Montana, confrontation between federal officials and Freemen
was an example of this phenomenon, and of the increasing connection between
these "courts" and militia groups as para-legal and paramilitary
arms of the white supremacist movement. The AJC, the Southern Poverty Law
Center and the ADL have been working with law enforcement officials to encourage
prosecution of groups that use fraudulent financial or judicial documents,
and/or threaten public officials and others with such bogus claims. And
in December, fifteen people were convicted in Troy, Missouri, for judicial
tampering. The group, members of a "common law court", had filed
a $10.8 million judgment against a real judge who was going to preside over
a traffic charge.
In another manifestation of Christian Patriot/common law/militia behaviour,
a Texas group called the Republic of Texas issued liens, set up a common
law jury, and ordered the US government, the International Monetary Fund
and the Holy See of the Catholic Church to pay $93 trillion for "150
years of plundering". The group claims that Texas is an independent
nation, challenging the US's annexation of that state in 1846. At the year's
end, huge civil contempt fines were accumulating against this group. Other
white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity of note in 1996 included the following
incidents.
In January, a man was killed outside a gay bar in a town twenty-five miles
from Houston, Texas. In August, Daniel Christopher Bean was convicted of
the murder. Bean belonged to a neo-Nazi group called the German Peace Corps,
and stabbed Frederick Mangione to death because he was gay. Mangione's body
bore 35 stab wounds.
In March, John Howard opened the Redneck Shop in Laurens, South Carolina,
featuring the World's Only Ku Klux Klan Museum. "It's our heritage
that should not be forgotten", Howard explained. Local clergy protested
against the museum, dismissing Howard's claim that the museum was only educational.
Howard also rented out the back of his building for local KKK meetings.
Also in March, the US Army announced disciplinary proceedings against nine
82nd Airborne Division soldiers from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for racist
activities. All nine were alleged to be skinheads.
In April, a man from Hood River, Oregon, who feared that the USA was turning
into a police state, was arrested for stockpiling weapons and explosives.
Two burglars had set off a booby trap on his property, igniting 200 pounds
of explosives and 90,000 rounds of ammunition. Agents found another 1,200
pounds of explosives in the man's truck and 60 pounds buried alongside his
driveway.
Also in April, in Jackson, Mississippi, a white supremacist killed one person
and wounded ten others, going on a shooting spree in a shopping centre in
a largely black neighbourhood with two AK-47s, an MAC-11 assault rifle,
a twelve-bore shotgun, an AR-15 and two handguns. He fired over 100 rounds.
The man, Larry Shoemake, hid in and eventually set fire to a restaurant,
dying in the flames. Neo-Nazi notes were later found spread around his house,
which also sported Nazi flags and white supremacist literature.
That same month, a black inmate at an Ohio prison was stabbed to death by
a white supremacist gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood. Also in April,
more than thirty people were arrested as part of a Phoenix-based Aryan Brotherhood
enterprise, smuggling weapons and drugs into ten Arizona prisons.
In June the Army discharged a soldier after he put KKK literature in mailboxes
in Watertown, New York.
In late July or early August someone arranged the chopped stalks of a Mansfield
Township, New Jersey, cornfield into a sixty-foot swastika, clearly visible
from the air. Also in July, red painted swastikas were found on the doors
of at least six black soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After an investigation
the Army issued a statement saying that a black soldier was responsible,
and the commander of the Army's Special Forces recommended that the soldier
be discharged.
And in July further evidence of the "common law" tax and money
scams became clear when 600 New York City employees were investigated for
tax evasion. Fifteen police officers were indicted after sending letters
to the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) claiming that they were beyond US sovereignty.
In September, two black aircraft mechanics at Kelly Air Force Base claimed
that men wearing pillowcases that resembled KKK hoods drove by and taunted
them. Also in September, the white supremacist Faron Lovelace was captured
in the Priest Lake area of northern Idaho. Lovelace was an escaped bank
robber who allegedly killed a fellow racist in 1995 after a disagreement.
Lovelace was also connected to the 1995 kidnapping and robbery of Jill and
Malcolm Friedman of Colville, Washington. The Friedmans were eventually
released, and reported that their kidnapper said he had picked them because
he thought they were Jewish. (They are actually Episcopalian.)
In October, two South Carolina men were charged with shooting into a predominantly
black crowd with an assault rifle, wounding three teenagers. The men had
just attended a KKK sponsored rally, and were found with KKK literature
in their vehicle. One of the two also had a statue of a Klansman and a Confederate
battle flag in his front yard.
In November, a New York City policeman was arrested, and suspended from
his job, after pasting neo-Nazi stickers in an Orange County, New York,
bar. One of the stickers sported the Internet address for the WAR web site,
others contained derogatory references to blacks, including a depiction
of a man dressed with neo-Nazi paraphernalia choking a black man, and the
phrase "Kill Niggers".
In December, a New York state prison guard was suspended after he was discovered
flying a Nazi flag on his porch. The guard was also reportedly a member
of the National Association for the Advancement of White People. When asked
about the flag he said, "I am not a racist and not a Nazi. I like the
colour of the flag. I put the American flag out, too."
Also in December, the Bethel Temple in Eugene, Oregon, a predominately black
church, was defaced with the letters "KKK" and a swastika.
A neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist White Workers Party, was given
permission to erect a six-foot-tall concrete cross in a local park for the
December holiday season. The town manager explained that the group's free
speech rights required him to accede, based on a federal court's ruling
involving the town's earlier refusal to allow the Lubavitch Center to erect
a menorah.
Islamist groups also continue to function and fundraise within the USA.
Pro-Hamas videos were made and distributed in the USA, encouraging Arabs
to engage in and bankroll an Islamic holy war. "He who supports a warrior's
family with goodness, it is as if he fought himself," one videotaped
Hamas member explained. "The warrior has his reward, and the facilitator-that
is, the one who pays money to support the jihad -gets his own reward,
plus the reward of the warrior." In July the New York Post reported
that Mideast terror groups made about $100 million per year from an illegal
scam involving grocery stores. The terror groups would buy supermarket coupons
by the pound, cut them, handle them so that they looked worn, then redeem
them. In September, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and two others were convicted of
a conspiracy to blow up US commercial airliners. The group planned to smuggle
explosives on board planes departing from East Asia, then get off at the
next stop, priming the bombs to explode on the next leg. They wanted to
destroy as many as a dozen US jets in a period of a few days in January,
1995, killing thousands (see LEGAL MATTERS). FBI agent Oliver B. Revell
summed up the new type of Islamist terrorism Yousef represents. "In
the past", Revell said, "we were fighting terrorists with an organizational
structure and some attainable goal like land or the release of political
prisoners. But Ramzi Yousef is the new breed, who are more difficult and
hazardous. They want nothing less than the overthrow of the West, and since
that's not going to happen, they just want to punish-the more casualties
the better."
The Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) movement was founded in 1930 by
Elijah Muhammad, formerly Elijah Poole. Its espousal of black separatism
made life problematic for mainstream civil rights and black organizations
throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The NOI has long been riven by factional
disputes, the most celebrated split being the departure in 1964 of Malcolm
X, who turned to orthodox Islam and was subsequently assassinated. Under
the leadership of Louis Farrakhan, the movement recently has become influential
in the African American community. Estimates of the organization's size
range from 10,000 to 30,000 members, with many times that number of young
ad-mirers. NOI mosques or temples exist in 120 cities.
Antisemitic rhetoric figures prominently in the movement's Afrocentrist
ideology (see EDUCATION), as does anti-white, anti-Catholic, anti-Korean
and homophobic rhetoric. Farrakhan's most memorable antisemitic tirade of
1996 occurred during his annual Savior's Day speech: "Allah will punish
you," he said, referring to Jews. "You are wicked deceivers of
the American people. You have sucked their blood. You are not real Jews
. . . You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles
around the US government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation
to hell. But I warn you . . . you would be wise to leave me alone. But if
you choose to crucify me, know that Allah will crucify you." In the
same speech Farrakhan also returned to the time-worn image of himself as
Jesus-like and Jews as the tormentors of Jesus: "The Jews don't like
me, they didn't like Jesus . . . The Jews put the Romans on Jesus, and the
Zionists are stimulating and pulling strings in Washington." Another
major ideological theme of the NOI is the insistence that the persecution
suffered throughout history by blacks is far worse than that suffered by
the Jews under the Third Reich. As a corollary to this view, Farrakhan in
February compared an Iraqi hospital to one of the Nazi death camps (see
below). And in March, an NOI leader, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, publicly questioned
the Holocaust, saying that even "among their own people, their scholars
question the number". He also dismissed the Nazi atrocities as "white
on white crime".
In early 1996, Farrakhan embarked on a five-week "World Friendship
Tour" to twenty-three countries. In Nigeria, he defended the military
dictatorship. Asked about the junta's execution of the Nigerian environmentalist
and author Ken Saro-Wiwa (whose supposed crime was seeking oil profits for
the Ogoni tribe), Farrakhan said, "You hanged one man. So what?"
In Sudan, Farrakhan not only defended the ruling party against western criticism
for its promotion of terrorism, he also dismissed vast evidence of the country's
ongoing enslavement of blacks as a "Jewish conspiracy". In fact,
Farrakhan met with the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who, according
to the Wall Street Journal, not only condones slavery, but also himself
"owns African slaves from southern Sudan". Among Farrakhan's other
visits were those to three allegedly high-profile, terrorist-sponsoring
nations: Iran, Iraq and Libya. In Iran he was reported to have said: "You
can quote me: God will destroy America by the hands of Muslims . . . God
will not give Japan or Europe the honour of bringing down the United States;
this is an honour God will bestow upon Muslims." Borrowing the late
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's term, Farrakhan also referred to the United
States as "the Great Satan". In Iraq he met with the dictator
Saddam Hussein. He said that UN sanctions against Iraq were "a crime
against humanity" and that "[V]isiting the hospital we visited
today would be, or could be, compared to visiting one of the [Nazi] death
camps".
When Farrakhan returned to the United States, he was criticized for his
cavorting with dictators. He used his 25 February Savior's Day speech to
defend himself and those with whom he had met. "Qadaffi is hated because
. . . he's financing liberation struggles against imperialists and Zionists
and oppressors", Farrakhan said. He continued his foreign travels later
in the year, including Cuba and Canada, and made return trips to Iraq and
Iran. In August he went again to Libya, this time to receive a $250,000
"humanitarian" award bestowed by Colonel Qadaffi (see Libya).
Because Libya is regarded as a sponsor of terrorism by the USA (it is also
harbouring two people wanted for trial over the downing of Pan Am flight
103 in Scotland), US law prohibits the transfer of money to or from that
country. Farrakhan petitioned the treasury department not only to receive
the prize money but also to get a $1 billion "gift" from Qadaffi
that would enable the NOI, in the words of a Libyan press statement, "to
mobilize the oppressed minorities" so that they could "play a
significant role in American political life". Farrakhan also praised
Qaddafi for his work in liberating oppressed peoples around the world.
Although Farrakhan said the money would be used to help blacks, Qadaffi
said the money would offer "a loophole to enter the fortress [the USA]
and to confront it from within". The treasury department denied Farrakhan's
request; Farrakhan said he would contest the decision in "the mother
of all court battles".
A justice department spokesman announced after Farrakhan's return to the
USA that, if the NOI received the promised money from Libya, an investigation
would be launched into the possible violation of the requirement that foreign
agents register with federal authorities, and the treasury department indicated
that it was, in any event, looking into whether Farrakhan had violated US
law by spending American currency while in Libya, Iraq or Iran. Congressman
Peter King (Republican, New York), an outspoken critic of Farrakhan, called
for investigation not only of Farrakhan but also of the administration's
"inaction", inasmuch as US citizens are prohibited from even visiting
these nations without the state department's permission.
A hearing was held before the House International Relations Subcommittee
on International Operations and Human Rights in March, ostensibly for the
purpose of investigating outlaw regimes and their attempts to influence
US policy, but the inquiries of the panel's members, including those of
Congressmen King, Christopher Smith (Republican, New Jersey), chairman of
the subcommittee, and Tom Lantos (Democrat, California) were clearly focused
on the issues raised by what Congressman Lantos labelled as Farrakhan's
"terror tour", which demonstrated, for him, that Farrakhan was
not only "a vicious racist and hate-monger" but also "a potential
national security threat". Congressman Donald Payne (Democrat, New
Jersey), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Congresswoman Cynthia
McKinney (Democrat, Georgia) criticized the hearing, the latter commenting
that it was "a thinly veiled attempt to do a little Farrakhan-bashing".
Neither Farrakhan nor any of his supporters were asked to testify, although
scores of his supporters filled the hearing room and an additional room
into which the proceedings were piped. Although no action was reported taken
by the administration with respect to travel to interdicted countries, it
was subsequently announced that the administration would not waive applicable
law barring receipt of funds from Libya, thereby seemingly mooting the NOI-Libya
partnership.
Following all of these events, it seemed to some observers that Farrakhan's
trafficking with regimes viewed by most Americans as dictatorships and supporters
of terrorism had, by his own hand, stalled his aspirations to mainstream
leadership within the African American community. But it was difficult to
reconcile that perspective with his receiving an award as "Newsmaker
of the Year" after the "terror tour" from the National Newspaper
Publishers Association, an organization of black newspaper publishers-a
move that drew sharp expressions of dismay from Jewish leaders.
In April, Farrakhan was quoted in a New Yorker profile written by Henry
Louis Gates as saying that he believes his father, whose parents were Portuguese,
may have been Jewish. "If in my lineage there are Jews," Farrakhan
said, he hoped that before he died he "not only will have rendered
a service to my own beloved community of black people but will also have
rendered a service to the Jewish community". In the same interview
Farrakhan also spoke about "wise Jews who plan evil", including
a conspiracy of Jewish bankers. Also in April, Edgar Bronfman, head of the
World Jewish Congress, met with Farrakhan at the behest of the journalist
Mike Wallace, despite the long-standing policy of groups such as the AJC
and the ADL not to meet with overt antisemites such as Farrakhan. Two days
after the meeting, at which Bronfman "was convinced that Farrakhan
was sincere in trying to build bridges to the Jewish community", Farrakhan
spoke in Brooklyn and, according to Bronfman, "compared Iraqi children
to the children of the Holocaust". Six months later, Bronfman's meeting
came to light. Bronfman called Farrakhan "evil personified" and
stated that "no self-respecting person, let alone a Jew, should have
anything to do with him".
In September, Farrakhan turned his attention to domestic politics. With
the help of the ousted former leader of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Ben Chavis (who had also assisted
in organizing the "Million Man March"), Farrakhan convened a "National
Political Convention" at the TWA Dome in St Louis, Missouri. Held on
27-29 September, and subtitled "The Convention of the Oppressed",
the goal was to create another political force since it was believed, with
good reason, that the Democratic party took black votes for granted and
that the Republican party ignored them. The event was a dismal failure.
The presidential candidates were invited. Only the antisemitic conspiracy
theorist Lyndon LaRouche (see above) came. Organizers expected between 20,000
and 30,000. According to Reuters, "fewer than 500 people attended".
Also in September, Farrakhan received an unexpected boost from Republican
vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp. Eleven months earlier the Republican
leadership had been almost self-righteous in its statements about the "Million
Man March", blasting Farrakhan as antisemitic and President Clinton
as not being harsh enough in his condemnation of the NOI leader. Now, instead,
Jack Kemp belittled the central role of bigotry in the NOI. While calling
on the group to "renounce antisemitism", Kemp said he believed
Farrakhan's ideas about black self-help were "wonderful". And
Kemp said that if he had been asked to speak at the "Million Man March",
he would have done so. The one-year anniversary of the "Million Man
March" was on 16 October 1996. Farrakhan organized a rally called the
"World Day of Atonement" at the United Nations Plaza in New York.
Farrakhan again offered to meet with the Jewish community; the rhetoric
of antisemitism was downplayed at the rally; police estimated the crowd
at 38,000, but organizers said that as many as 200,000 showed, despite the
fact that the rally permit was for less than 50,000. (Commenting on the
controversy Farrakhan later said, "White men can't jump and white men
can't count.") Following the event, Farrakhan held a press conference
sponsored by Libya at the United Nations.
Affiliated to the NOI are private security companies. NOI Security, formed
in 1990 and based in Washington, DC, and New Life Inc., run by Farrakhan's
son-in-law, Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, and based in Chicago, in the past
few years have been awarded contracts worth millions of dollars to police
and protect public housing estates in several major cities, including some
under the auspices of the US department of housing and urban development.
But in September 1996 in New York, Governor George Pataki ruled that a state-financed
housing project must break its contract with an NOI-linked security group
called the "X-men", after the group had been discovered distributing
antisemitic literature. In response, New York-based NOI minister Conrad
Muhammad referred to Assemblyman Jules Polonetsky, a critic of the "X-men",
as a "snotty-nosed Jewish politician". Such pronouncements from
NOI ministers continued to be nothing unusual. A few weeks before Conrad
Muhammad's statement about the housing project, he called Kenneth Stern
of the AJC a "racist dog", a "brownshirt", a "fascist"
and a "Nazi", all because neither Stern nor any other AJC official
would appear on camera with Muhammad at a television talk show to "debate"
whether Farrakhan should have been able to take Qadaffi's $1 billion gift.
Farrakhan's desire to inculcate younger NOI members with antisemitism was
also reflected in statements of Quannel X, NOI's national youth minister.
He said: "I say to Jewish America: get ready . . . knuckle up, put
your boots on, because we're ready and the war is going down . . . The real
deal is this: black youth do not want a relationship with the Jewish community
or the mainstream white community or the foot-shuffling, head-bowing, knee-bobbing
black community . . . All you Jews can go straight to hell."
Smaller black extremist groups were also active in 1996. In Georgia an offshoot
of the NOI called the Five Percent Nation was allegedly preparing for guerrilla
warfare and buying weapons for that purpose, financing its operation through
a spree of robberies of fast-food stores. Members went on trial in October
1996. There were also reports of a black militia-like group operating in
the Detroit, Michigan, area. And in Indianapolis, Idaho, a small group burned
a US flag on 4 July in protest over the arrest of a Black Panther leader,
and over the treatment of blacks in the USA. A group known as the New Black
Panther Party was active in Texas. Members of this group, accompanied by
an NOI member, Khallid Muhammad, travelled to the site of a burned black
church in June, where some brandished shotguns, threatening violence. The
New Black Panther Party also targeted the Dallas school board. Because of
the group's threats, gun-toting and scuffling with police, a number of school
board meetings had to be cancelled.
During the primary season, arch conservative and antisemite Patrick Buchanan
did well in some of the earlier caucuses and primaries, before being defeated
by Bob Dole. That some antisemites and extremists gravitated to Buchanan
was no surprise. He was promoted in far-right publications and, in February,
Larry Pratt, one of his top aides, took a leave of absence after it was
disclosed that Pratt had attended a meeting of white supremacists and Christian
Identity adherents in 1992, during which he advocated the formation of armed
militia units. Another co-chair, Michael Farris, was criticized for having
attended a January anti-abortion banquet honouring Paul Hill. Hill, believing
that killing abortion providers was an acceptable means of opposing abortion,
had been convicted of a 1994 murder of a physician and a companion in Pensacola,
Florida.
During the campaign, Ross Perot's Reform Party worked in alliance with leaders
and members of the former New Alliance Party (NAP). The NAP, headed by Dr
Fred Newman and Dr Lenora Fulani, was part cult, part political party, and
overtly antisemitic, promoting Louis Farrakhan as well as anti-Jewish terrorists,
and calling Jews "stormtroopers of capitalism". The NAP was dissolved
in 1994 and the group was reinvented as the Patriot Party, which worked
with Perot.
Neo-Nazi Arthur Jones ran for congress as a Republican in Chicago. And the
neo-Nazi and former KKK leader David Duke ran for the US senate in Louisiana.
Both lost. However, the white supremacist activities of Don Rogers, an incumbent
California state senator, were exposed during the year. Using a Christian
Patriot white supremacist fiction, Rogers had declared himself a "sovereign
citizen" exempt from paying income taxes in a 1992 affidavit filed
in a California court. The affidavit included Rogers's explanation: "I
was born . . . white. [The] main purpose [of the 14th Amendment was to establish]
the citizenship of the Negro. And because such a white man's citizenship
was not restricted by the 14th Amendment and because he receives no protection
from it, he has no reciprocal obligation to a 14th Amendment allegiance
or sovereignty and owes no obedience to anyone under the 14th Amendment."
Legislative leaders noted that, while Rogers's claim was "idiotic",
they "do not punish idiotic ideas".
In a Georgia congressional race Billy McKinney, the father of Representative
Cynthia McKinney, called his daughter's Republican opponent a "racist
Jew". Representative McKinney said she was "embarrassed"
by her father, and issued a statement abhorring "any form of racism
or antisemitism [including that of] Billy McKinney".
The newly elected congress no longer contains Steve Stockman, a militia-supporting
representative from Texas, who was defeated. But it still boasts Idaho Congressman
(the title she prefers) Helen Chenoweth. Shortly before her election she
was quoted complaining about the "United Nations takeover of America's
national parks [and] the coming one world order".
In January 1995, Christina Jeffrey-dismissed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich
from her new position as historian for the house of representatives because
of earlier remarks about a high school Holocaust course that were described
as antisemitic-immediately began to seek to clear her name. By the year's
end Jeffrey's tenacity had been rewarded, at least in part. The first step
in her exoneration was ADL president Abraham Foxman's action in writing
to her in August that "ADL is satisfied that any characterization of
you as antisemitic or sympathetic to Nazism is entirely unfounded and unfair";
this amounted to a retraction of statements made by the ADL in January,
when it praised Gingrich for firing Jeffrey. There followed a private meeting
in November between Jeffrey, Foxman and Gingrich following which Gingrich
told reporters, "I think she deserves some vindication". There
was talk of hiring Jeffrey as a consultant to the house of representatives,
although not for the house historian position, because that position had
been eliminated after her dismissal.
The ADL's annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents reported a decline
in the number of antisemitic incidents in 1996. The total of 1,722 incidents
represents a decline of 7 per cent, or 121 incidents, from the 1995 total
of 1,843. There were 941 incidents of harassment, threats and assaults directed
against Jewish individuals and institutions. This figure represents a decline
of 16 per cent from the 1995 total of 1,116. Incidents on college campuses
also declined. There were 90 such incidents in 1996, representing a decrease
of 28 from the total of 118 in 1995. However, incidents of vandalism rose:
there were 781 acts of antisemitic vandalism in 1996, an increase of 54
incidents, or 7 per cent, over the year before. The five states reporting
the highest total of antisemitic incidents of all kinds in 1996 were New
York (328), New Jersey (238), California (186), Florida (123) and Massachusetts
(106).
In the justice department's hate crime figures for 1995 (see RACISM AND
XENOPHOBIA), 16 per cent of the incidents were motivated by religious bias.
Of these 1,277 incidents, 1,058 were classified as anti-Jewish; the remainder
included incidents classified as anti-Catholic (31), anti-Protestant (36),
anti-Islamic (29), anti-other religious group (102), anti-multi-religious
group (20) and anti-atheism/ agnoticism, etc. (1).
In January, an October 1995 memo from a low-level department of defence
official came to light. Addressed to defence contractors, it urged them
to look out for Israeli espionage, noting alleged "strong ethnic ties
to Israel present in the US". In response, Representative Nita Lowey
(Democrat, New York) wrote to Secretary of Defense William Perry, saying,
"I deeply resent the implication that American Jews would commit treason
against their nation because of their Jewish heritage".
In May, the FBI sent out an alert in the aftermath of threats by Hamas and
Hizbullah to target Jews worldwide. The FBI said it had received threats
that 1,200 Jewish executives and doctors within the USA would be killed
unless Israel withdrew from Lebanon and paid $12 billion by 5 May. Jewish
groups uniformly said they would not be intimidated by such threats. The
threat was communicated in a two-page letter sent to the San Jose, California,
Mercury News by the previously unknown "Inter-national Freedom Fighters".
Shortly after these reported threats, the FBI began an investigation into
letters threatening attacks on US mosques and Muslim groups. According to
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), the letters were "reportedly mailed
from Birmingham, England, [and] purport to come from a branch of the Jewish
Defense League-Kahane Chai in Britain . . . A Kahane spokesman [said] he
had no knowledge of the letter." The reverse side of the mailing sported
a picture of a Lebanese man carrying his dead children.
In early May, a Jewish high school in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area
was evacuated after a telephoned threat by someone who identified herself
as a member of Hizbullah.
Also in May, the AJC terminated its joint sponsorship of the National Polish
American and Jewish American Council, ending a seventeen-year relationship
with the Polish Amer-ican Congress (PAC) after the PAC's leader, Edward
Moskal, sent a letter to Aleksander Kwaniewski, the Polish president, lamenting
"the submissiveness of the Polish authorities to demands raised by
Jews" (see Poland). The letter complained about "preferential
treatment given to Jews who are seeking the return of their property in
Poland", the banning of a development near Auschwitz in response to
Jewish concerns, and the "unfortunate and unnecessary" apology
offered by the Polish minister of foreign affairs for the 1946 Kielce pogrom.
President Kwaniewski wrote back to Moskal, rejecting his concerns and stating
that there "should be no place for harmful stereotypes, xenophobia,
racial or ethnic pre-judices".
In autumn 1996, Sam Sachs, a Jewish cadet, was subjected to antisemitic
slurs by instructors at the Oregon Public Safety Academy in Monmouth, Oregon.
One instructor used the term "Jew them down", about buying something
for a low price. In another incident an instructor asked Sachs if he was
going to roast a pig for his bar mitzvah, and if he was going to be circumcized.
Westchester County, New York, suffered a series of antisemitic incidents
during the year. In February, September and November, houses and other property
were defaced with swastikas and other antisemitic graffiti.
In Philadelphia the office of Representative Robert Borski (Democrat, Pennsylvania)
was defaced with swastikas twice-in April and again in August.
In the early morning hours on the third night of Chanukah, someone threw
a rock through the front window of a Newtown, Pennsylvania, home, snatched
an electric menorah and smashed it, breaking all nine bulbs. Neighbours
responded by putting menorahs up in their windows, much as some residents
had done in Billings, Montana, three years earlier after a similar hate
crime. Three high school students were arrested.
In 1996 some Jews faked antisemitic incidents. Steve and Al Rubin, a father
and son from Miami, Florida, were convicted on charges of theft, conspiracy
and criminal mischief. They had sent teenagers to paint swastikas and other
antisemitic graffiti on fifteen Hillel Community Day School buses. The younger
Rubin, who worked at the school, steered the repair order to his father's
garage. And in Oregon, three former Reedsport residents were sentenced to
more than nine years in prison for conspiring to defraud their insurance
company by setting fire to their residences. They had claimed the fires
were the result of arson by antisemites.
In another incident, it was announced in February 1996 that the house of
representatives' Page Board had dismissed a page who was believed to have
painted a swastika on the dormitory door of another page. The swastika was
found the previous November by a seventeen-year-old Jewish page on the morning
after he and several other pages had had an argument. A spokesman for Congressman
Gary Ackerman (Democrat, New York), sponsor for the latter page, commented
that "in the end, justice has been served". No criminal charges
were brought, reportedly for lack of sufficient evidence.
In January, a concert at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, drew
criticism. A group called the Folger Consort performed selections intended
to show harmonious relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims during
the time of King Alfonso II Sabio of Spain (1221-84). One song, "A
Que do Bon Rey Davi", contained antisemitic lyrics; it told of a Jew
who murdered a boy who was singing a song in praise of the Virgin Mary,
and conclu-ded with the mass murder of the town's Jews.
Also in January, Warner Music reversed its plans to include Steve Cokely
and NOI minister Conrad Muhammad in its "Our Roots Run Deep" lecture
series as part of Black History Month. Cokely, a former aid to Chicago mayor
Harold Washington, is a proponent of the modern-day blood libel that "AIDS
. . . is a result of doctors, especially Jewish ones, who inject the AIDS
virus in blacks". Muhammad, who calls Jews "bloodsuckers",
and says that "Christians practice a dirty religion", also claims
that AIDS in the African American community is a result of "white plots
against black people". Jewish groups were pleased at Warner Music's
removal of Cokely and Muhammad from its programme.
In February, the pop star Michael Jackson released a video including his
song "They Don't Care About Us". In June 1995, at the time of
the song's release, Jewish groups had protested because it contained the
lyrics "Jew me, sue me", and "kick me, kike me". Jackson
had apologized and promised to rerecord the track with different lyrics.
But the video nonetheless contained the original antisemitic phrases.
In March the ADL tried to withdraw its Janusz Korczak Literary Award, after
it was announced that Richard Lukas would receive the prize for his book
Did the Children Cry?: Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children.
When ADL officials reviewed the book they discovered that it presented "a
sanitized picture of Polish involvement with Jews during the war".
Calling the award a "mistake", the ADL nevertheless presented
the prize to avoid litigation.
Also in March, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a group of
200 black-oriented papers, presented its "Newsmaker of the Year"
award to NOI leader Louis Farrakhan, citing his "higher level of moral
authority" and his "vision beyond the ordinary".
In April, the actor Marlon Brando, appearing on CNN's Larry King Live,
said that Jews "run" Hollywood, "own" the entertainment
industry, and "should have greater sensitivity about the issue of people
who are suffering because they've been exploited. We have seen the nigger,
we have seen the greaseball, we have seen the chink, the slit-eyed Jap,
but we never saw the kike", Brando said, "because they knew perfectly
well that's where you draw the wagons around." Brando apologized, but
the next month O. J. Simpson, speaking at Oxford University, defended Brando's
antisemitic statement, saying that "[n]obody ever intellectualized
what he [Brando] said because the Jewish community mobilized . . . they
had this man on his knees in three days, crying, apologizing".
In May the Cincinnati Reds owner, Marge Schott, known and disciplined in
1993 by Major League Baseball for her past bigoted statements, said that
Hitler "was good" at the beginning, but then "just went too
far". In reaction to the ensuing uproar, Schott voluntarily stepped
down as managing general partner of the team.
In June, the French synchronized swimming team agreed to change its performance
slated for the Atlanta Olympic Games after protests from French Jews (see
France).
In September, Ted Turner, the chairman of CNN, said that News Corporation
chairman Rupert Murdoch was acting "like the late Fuhrer". Turner
apologized for the remarks. The incident followed a similar 1995 misstatement
by Turner, when he said that his difficulties in purchasing a network left
him feeling like "those Jewish people in Germany in 1942". It
preceded another gaff in October 1996, when Turner again likened business
competitors to Nazis.
In April 1996, veteran WABC radio talk-show host Bob Grant was fired for
a racist comment. Grant had long been criticized by black groups and by
the AJC for his racist banter.
In November a 1994 tape of Texaco executives came to light, reflecting bigoted
remarks against blacks, Jews and others.
In December, New York City council-member Sheldon S. Leffler (Democrat,
Queens) called Mayor Rudolph Giuliani an "Ubermensch ",
during a debate on a plan to develop superstores in the New York area. "[I]f
you're a zealot, a former prosecutor, an Ubermensch," Leffler
reportedly said, "you may not feel you need to listen to what ordinary
citizens in this city want to have to say." Also in December, newly
released tapes of the late President Richard Nixon revealed his deep-seated
antisemitism. Repeatedly using the term "rich Jews," he spoke
of a "Jewish cabal" and claimed that Jews "are stealing in
every direction." He made these remarks while advocating IRS audits
of "the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats."
Racist and antisemitic black extremist speakers continued to speak at
campuses around the country. Speakers on the circuit included Professor
Tony Martin of Wellesley College and various NOI representatives. Also of
note in 1996 were verbal and written attacks from many Afrocentrists on
the Wellesley professor Mary Lefkowitz, dismissing her work as "racist".
A professor of classics, Lefkowitz published Not Out of Africa, a
book challenging the basis of Afrocentrism as built on myths-for example,
she debunked the assertion that Aristotle "stole" knowledge from
the library at Alexandria because the library was built only after Aristotle's
death, and proved that many current Afrocentric claims have their basis
in European works of fiction as well as the rituals that Freemasons developed,
based on their fascination with ancient Egypt.
In January, Seth Greenberg, basketball coach for California State University
at Long Beach, opened a grease board, intent on diagramming plays for his
team, which was visiting New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Someone
had written in red ink, "Seth, get ready for an ass-kicking, you Jew
bastard". During the game spectators also used racial slurs against
the Long Beach team, calling whites "white boys" and blacks "niggers".
In March, Howard University's student newspaper sported an editorial in
which it vilified the ADL as bent on attacking black leadership, ADL regional
director David Friedman as a "pariah", and Howard professor Russell
Adams as someone who should be "held accountable" for working
co-operatively with the ADL. The editorial was paired with a cartoon that
depicted the ADL as a devil in a university building.
In June, four students at the Tri-County Regional Vocational Technical High
School in Franklin, Massachusetts adorned their gradu-ation gowns with KKK
slogans and swastikas. Their messages of hate were not noticed until after
graduation, but their principal notified military authorities when four
of the students signed up as recruits. After a prompt investigation the
military discharged all four.
In July, Thomas Bird resigned as the newly named director of the Jewish
studies programme at Queen College. Bird had been criticized by some Jewish
faculty members, citing among other things Bird's Catholicism as something
that should disqualify him. The AJC and other mainstream Jewish groups supported
Bird-in fact the AJC gave him its coveted Interreligious Award-noting that
Jewish studies is a serious academic field, and that it demeans the seriousness
of the subject to suggest that only a Jew is qualified to direct such a
programme.
In November, antisemitic literature was placed in drop boxes around the
University of Oregon campus. Entitled The Definitive Poetic Prophecy
Against Jewish Racist Superiority, it began: "A secret group obsessed
by power/ Gathered themselves in a 'darkened' hour/ To plot and scheme for
world control/ With 'financial' power their central goal . . . "
Antisemitic propaganda was disseminated by all forms of media and was
for the most part well protected by freedom of speech guarantees. In terms
of the printed word, many pub-lications including books, magazines, journals,
newspapers, newsletters and pamphlets by far-right, militia and neo-Nazi
organizations (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS) purveyed antisemitism.
However, unlike a generation ago, there were no national mainstream antisemitic
serial publications. Some mainstream black-oriented tabloids, such as the
Amsterdam News in New York, continued to promote Afrocentric claims
and the activities of the NOI, while ignoring or sanitizing their antisemitism.
Radio, short-wave, public access and cable television channels provided
opportunities, protected under licensing ordinances, for white-supremacist,
black-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups to broadcast to communities around
the country, as well as internationally. A continuing issue in 1996 was
the proliferation of "talk radio" programmes, including many that
provided a forum for often unchallenged racist and antisemitic remarks.
The California-based publishing house Noontide Press (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS,
MOVEMENTS) continued its activities in 1996. However, Willis A. Carto's
empire is in the midst of litigation between Carto and a group of IHR staffers
who have wrested control of IHR from him. In 1996, Carto lost his lawsuit,
and a multi-million dollar judgment was entered against him for illegally
converting money left to the IHR. Noontide Press published Holocaust-denial
texts such as Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentieth Century and the
works of Paul Rassinier, as well as traditional antisemitic material like
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's The International
Jew.
Among the more important newspapers and journals that espoused antisemitism
were the following. Spotlight (Washington, DC) is a 32-page weekly
Liberty Lobby tabloid, founded in 1974, to which the average number of subscribers
is approaching 100,000. This figure is significantly lower than its readership
a decade ago (200,000-300,000). The racist, antisemitic and Holocaust-denying
articles that fill Spotlight 's pages are not written in the baldly
crude language of KKK and neo-Nazi literature. They are coded in populist,
anti-federal government or conspiratorial rhetoric. Spotlight is
an important promoter of the militia movement and the conspiracy theories
that help fuel it.
White Patriot is a publication of Thom Robb's Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan. The Truth at Last (Georgia) is a racist, antisemitic and homophobic
monthly published by long-time neo-Nazi Ed Fields, a national council member
of the America First Party. Liberty Bell (West Virginia) is a neo-Nazi
monthly published by an independent publisher. The War Eagle is a
neo-Nazi skinhead newsletter that first appeared in 1994. It was produced
by veteran neo-Nazis and America First Committee members Art Jones, John
McLaughlin and Roger Fountain.
The Jubilee is a bi-monthly tabloid of the Christian Identity movement
(see RELIGION) published by Paul Hall in Midpines, California. It has also
been promoting the militia movement, and in April held a "Jubilation
Celeb-ration" in Nevada, drawing about 350 antisemites and white supremacists
including Randy Weaver, Pete Peters and Republican state senator Don Rogers
(California).
Scriptures for America is the publishing arm of Pete Peters's Christian
Identity Church. Among its offerings is a $32 version of the New Testament,
called the "Anointed Standard Translation". It is marketed as
a "Jew-free" bible.
Aid and Abet is a newsletter of the militia movement, published by
the former Arizona policeman Jack McLamb. The newsletter is aimed at recruiting
law enforcement officers into the movement. Taking Aim is a newsletter
of the militia movement that bills itself as "the Militiaman's newsletter".
Endsieg and the New Order (Lincoln, Nebraska) are publications
of Gary Lauck's NSDAP/AO. The New Order is published in English,
French, German, Spanish and Hungarian, and is disseminated internationally.
Final Call is the NOI newspaper, often sold on street corners by
members of the organization, whose sales records directly affect their status
in the organization. There are also NOI bookshops selling books and tapes
of NOI speeches, as well as the infamous The Secret Relationship Between
Blacks and Jews , a rewrite of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
targeted at a black audience. (There have also been reports of The
Secret Relationship being sold at various major market bookstores in
some cities.)
The publications of Lyndon LaRouche and his followers, the New Federalist
(for-merly New Solidarity ) and Executive Intelligence Review,
single out prominent Jews, Jewish families and Jewish organizations for
special abuse.
Antisemitic and white-supremacist groups produce radio programmes that are
regularly broadcast. The talk-radio programme produced by the Liberty Lobby,
Radio Free America, is carried on more than 300 US radio stations
and on short-wave to Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Pete Peters
(see above) hosts a weekly television show, Truth for the Times .
He also hosts a radio programme that is broadcast in several US cities.
And Mark Koernke, a Michigan-based militia leader whose name surfaced shortly
after the Oklahoma City bombing, when he sent an immediate fax to a member
of congress, continues to broadcast on the short-wave station WWCR. In an
October broadcast he advised listeners to buy short lengths of pipe and
bury them on their property in order to confuse "New World Order"
forces when they come looking for caches. A caller, approving of the idea,
suggested that road kill be buried with the metal, to give government officials
a smelly surprise.
The dissemination of racism and antisemitism via the global telecommunications
network has increased in recent years. The Internet has emerged as an uncontrollable,
unpoliceable and decentralized zone where independent voices, however unpopular
or objectionable, can "speak" and be heard; the number of Internet
users had reached into the millions in the USA and Canada as the year ended.
The number of web sites was also growing quickly. Furthermore, information
in cyberspace is protected by the same freedom of speech guarantees as other
forms of expression. However, the parameters of what is allowed are not
yet clearly defined.
As noted, the Internet increasingly is becoming a communication tool of
the antisemitic far right. The Liberty Lobby, for example (see PARTIES,
ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS), sponsors a bulletin board called Logoplex BBS.
Mike Vanderboegh, of the Alabama Militia, began an Internet service called
"Deeswatch", a part of the militia counter-intelligence effort
to track groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center. This counter-intelligence
effort also reportedly targets the AJC and the ADL. The most active US bulletin
board, Cyberspace Minuteman, acts as a linchpin for far-right groups throughout
the USA and Europe. And the Resister , known as "The Political
Warfare Journal of the Special Forces Underground", is available in
an Internet edition. (Its volume 2, issue no. 4 was largely devoted to attacks
on the ADL's Abe Foxman, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Morris Dees and
AJC's Kenneth Stern.) Bomb-making manuals have also been transmitted by
computer links, as have recipes for chemical warfare. For example, on 17
June someone posted what purported to be the formula for a "home chemical
warfare agent . . . so that the 'common man' has an effective weapon against
'big brother'". Appearing in a newsgroup, the instruction noted that
the "mixture is perfect for Molotov cocktails with devastating effects".
Increasingly, antisemitic groups and individuals are opening home pages
on the World Wide Web and developing strategies to advertise their web sites,
such as posting information about them in various USENET newsgroups. It
is clear that in the years to come the Internet will become the most important
communication tool for active antisemites worldwide.
Meanwhile, the use of other older, lower-tech means of dissemination of
antisemitism continues. Various hate groups use telephone answering machines
to spew hatred and recruit members. Cable television stations also allow
hateful programmes over their community access channels. For example, WAR
leader Tom Metzger (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS) has produced
more than forty-five half-hour segments of a television programme, Race
and Reason. These were broadcast on community access stations. In fact,
cable access laws allow community members to produce their own programmes,
or sponsor previously recorded videos. Community access laws do not let
the station censor such programmes for hateful content, although regulations
that restrict the number of times a person can air a programme and/or strictly
enforce rules that require sponsors to live within the cable region have
made the use of this medium more difficult for those with a hateful political
agenda. Community responses with counter-programming can be effective too.
For example, in June, the public access station in Pocatello, Idaho, aired
The Other Israel, a notorious video that distorts the Talmud to promote
antisemitism, and which also includes Holocaust-denial material.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the USA's second largest Christian
body, numbering over 14 million members. In June, 1996 the SBC's national
convention, meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, adopted a resolution calling
upon the denomination to intensify its "evangelizing among the Jewish
people".
The SBC immediately drew sharp reactions from the Jewish community as well
as from many Christian leaders. Rabbi A. James Rudin, the AJC's interreligious
affairs director, called the SBC resolution an "act of spiritual arrogance",
which, if carried out, would represent the "spiritual annihilation"
of the Jewish people. SBC leaders denied that the resolution was anti-Jewish.
Rather, it was just the opposite. They declared that for Christians not
to seek the conversion of the Jews would, in itself, constitute an act of
antisemitism because it would withhold the Christian Gospel from the Jews.
To carry out this new campaign, the SBC appointed a former missionary to
Israel as its director of "Jewish evangelism". The SBC action
was also the source of a well-publicized debate between Jewish leaders and
SBC officials at the 15th National Workshop on Jewish Relations that took
place in Stamford, Connecticut in late October 1996.
Because 1996 was an election year in the USA, extensive attention was paid
to the continuing phenomenon known as the Religious Right. The Christian
Coalition, the best-known Religious Right organization, played an active
role in both the presidential and congressional elections. In addition,
the Coalition, led by the Revd Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, also focused
on local electoral races throughout the country.
Reed denied charges of antisemitic bias in the Religious Right. However,
some of Robertson's published writings attacked "liberal Jews"
and he made constant negative references to "international bankers".
Although President Clinton was re-elected, the Religious Right did claim
that its active efforts on behalf of Republican congressional candidates
prevented Democratic control of the house of representatives and the senate.
At the year's end, two things seemed clear: the Religious Right had lost
some of its influence in the political realm, and the charges of antisemitism
would continue. The white supremacist wing of the Regligious Right includes
followers of the Christian Identity Church. Christian Identity adherents
believe in two creations. In short, they believe that God first tried a
creation that failed-thus explaining ethnic minorities. When God tried again,
He created Adam and Eve. Eve impregnated with the seed of Adam produced
Abel and the white race. Eve impregnated with the seed of Satan produced
Cain, whose descendants are the Jews. Minorities are thus pre-Adamic beasts,
sometimes called "mud people", and Jews are the literal offspring
of Satan.
In late November 1996, two Lutheran-Jewish conferences took place in Sarasota
and Palm Beach, Florida, that represented a growing rapprochement between
these two faith communities. In 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC),
the USA's largest Lutheran body, adopted a resolution renouncing the antisemitism
that is found in the later writings of Martin Luther. As a direct result
of this action, an increasing number of ELC congregations are engaged in
educational programmes intended to eradicate all vestiges of antisemitism
from church life including teaching, preachings and liturgy. The ELC action
and its implementation is a direct attempt to address the problem of religious
antisemitism that is found in many parts of the Christian com-munity.
Finally, there were repeated calls, especially from the AJC, for a papal
encyclical dealing with antisemitism and the church's role in the Holocaust.
As the year ended, no encyclical or statement was yet issued.
Holocaust denial plays a role in most white-supremacist organizations
in the USA. The vanguard of Holocaust denial, however, has been the California-based
IHR (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS). The IHR was producing a bi-monthly
journal, the pseudo-academic Journal for Historical Review, and eight
newsletters each year worldwide, as well as publishing and distributing
numerous books. However, the regularity of its publica-tions has been sporadic
since the group's ed-itors took over from Willis A. Carto, the IHR's founder
(see PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA). Before that turmoil an annual international
conference hosted by the IHR attracted over 100 Holocaust-deniers from around
the world. In 1994 the editors of the journal wrested control of the institute
from Carto as part of an effort to sanitize its image, and purportedly to
exercise control of a multi-million-dollar bequest left to the IHR by an
heir of Thomas Edison. The issue remains an internal conflict that is the
subject of pending litigation. The winner of the power-play seemingly is
the institute's director, Tom Marcellus, who is supported by Ernst Zundel,
Robert Faurisson and the British Holocaust-denier David Irving (see Canada,
France, United Kingdom). Carto founded a new Liberty Lobby-linked Holocaust-denial
journal called the Barnes Review, named after Harry Elmer Barnes,
one of the "founding fathers" of Holocaust denial, which he continues
to publish.
Holocaust-denial material also appears regularly on newsgroups on the Internet.
The IHR increasingly uses the newsgroups and bulletin boards to disseminate
its publications. It has stated its intention of making available on the
Internet everything it has published in the last fourteen years. Meanwhile,
in 1996, Canadian resident Zundel (see above) found students at ten American
universities to post his Holocaust-denying propaganda in an effort to circumvent
the German government's effort to block access to web sites, such as his,
that encourage racial hatred (see Germany ). The students Zundel enlisted
claimed they were not helping him because they agreed with his message,
but because they wanted to fight censorship. One of the schools the University
of Massachusetts ordered the graduate student involved to remove Zündel's
messages.
An important medium since 1991 for the dissemination of Holocaust denial
among students has been the placing of advertisements in campus newspapers
around the country by Bradley R. Smith, head of the so-called Committee
for Open Debate on the Holocaust and media director for the IHR. However,
in 1996, fewer than five campuses ran one of his advertisements. Smith also
advertised his web site where that information could be found. Holocaust-denying
literature was also found in 1996 placed inside Holocaust-related library
books.
Also of note, in Pocatello, Idaho, a professor who gave a public talk about
the Holocaust began receiving Holocaust-denying and antisemitic literature
at his home, daily.
David Irving (see above) made speeches around the country during 1996. His
fund-raising organization, the David Irving Fighting Fund, has an office
in the USA (as well as in the UK, Germany and Australia). He also gained
notoriety from his latest work, a biography called Goebbels: Mastermind
of the Third Reich. St Martin's Press, a major publisher, originally
defended its decision to publish the book, then decided not to print it
after public criticism prompted the company chairman to read the page proofs
(see COUNTERING ANTISEMITISM).
Lillian Baker died in October. She was well known in Holocaust-denying circles
for her claims that Japanese Americans were not held against their will
in US concentration camps during the Second World War.
A major study released by the AJC in 1996 examined the Religious Right
(see RELIGION) and other US citizens with regard to a host of issues, and
provided a context for the study of antisemitism. The AJC study, A Survey
of the Religious Right: Views on Politics, Society, Jews and Other Minorities
, was conducted during May and June by the Gallup International Institute
and analysed by Dr Tom W. Smith of the University of Chicago's National
Opinion Research Center. The survey examined 507 US citizens aligned with
the Religious Right and 503 other Americans. Respondents were considered
aligned with the Religious Right if they affirmed all three items on Gallup's
evangelicalism scale and also self-identified as political and/or social
conservatives.
With regard to the survey findings as they relate to feelings about Jews,
Smith interpreted the results as indicating that "the Religious Right
exhibit a mixed and complex attitude toward Jews". Thus, on a positive
side, those aligned with the Religious Right are more supportive of Israel
and of the special biblical status of Jews than are other Americans. For
example, 61 per cent (compared to 52 per cent of other Americans) are sympathetic
towards Israel. And 72 per cent (as against 43 per cent of other Americans)
agree that "Jews have a right to the land of Israel, since it was promised
to them by God". Or again, 53 per cent (as against 28 per cent of other
Americans) agree that "now, as in the past, Jews remain God's chosen
people".
However, on the negative side, those aligned with the Religious Right are
more likely than other Americans to raise objections to Jews on religious
grounds. Thus, 58 per cent (compared to 22 per cent of other Americans)
disagree with the statement "Jews do not need to be converted to Christianity".
And 22 per cent (as against 8 per cent of other Americans) think that Jews
must still answer for killing Christ. Those aligned with the Religious Right
are also somewhat more likely than other Americans to believe that Jews
and Christians do not share similar values and cannot get along together.
Finally, in terms of the social and political acceptance of Jews, those
aligned with the Religious Right differ little from other Americans. Thus
79 per cent are willing to vote for a Jew as president, 88 per cent do not
believe that Jews have too much influence in US society, and 96 per cent
are willing to live with Jews as neighbours.
On the issue of the controversial NOI leader Louis Farrakhan (see PARTIES,
MOVEMENTS, ORGANIZATIONS) a March CBS News Poll of 1,029 respondents found
that 48 per cent believe he is prejudiced against whites and Jews. Only
16 per cent viewed these charges against Farrakhan as unfair, and over one-third
of respondents said they don't know or had no response.
An item looking at the question of Jewish influence was contained in a poll
of 1,975 respondents conducted in May-June by Princeton Survey Research
Associates for the Pew Research Center. The item examined the level of influence
various groups have in government and political matters, and nearly half
(49 per cent) said that they would like to see "the Jews" have
less influence than they have now, while 27 per cent would like to see them
have more influence than they have now. Eight per cent volunteered that
they have about the right amount of influence, and 16 per cent did not know.
A federal appeals court ruled in March that Lemrick Nelson will be tried
as an adult in the federal case in which he is charged with violating Yankel
Rosenbaum's civil rights. Rosenbaum, a twenty-nine-year old Hasidic student
from Australia, was murdered when a mob attacked him after a car driven
by a Hasidic Jew went out of control and killed a seven-year-old African
American boy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991 (see HISTORICAL LEGACY).
Nelson, who was a teenager at the time of the murder, was acquitted in state
court in 1992. Jury selection in the federal case began at the end of the
year.
In May, the US supreme court refused to hear an appeal from a federal court's
decision that a cross-bearing seal for the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, was
unconstitutional.
There were legal developments in several terrorism cases during 1996. In
January, Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman was sentenced to life in prison for plotting
a series of bombings and assassinations that prosecutors said was intended
to force the United States to end its support for the governments of Israel
and Egypt. Nine of the sheikh's co-defendants were also sentenced to prison
terms ranging from twenty-five years to life. Among them was El Sayyid Nosair,
the man widely believed to have assassinated the militant Rabbi Meir Kahane
but who was acquitted of murder charges in 1991. Nosair received a life
sentence. In May, three suspected US terrorists were convicted by a federal
jury in Oklahoma of plotting to blow up various targets, including the Houston
office of the ADL. Willie Ray Lampley, his wife and an-other defendant were
planning the bombing of civil rights centres, welfare offices, gay bars
and abortion clinics. Lampley had told a Phoenix newspaper that he and his
followers discussed blowing up the ADL office because Jews have "robbed
this country until money has no value whatsoever".
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man accused of leading terrorist cells that plotted
attacks on US targets at home and abroad, was convicted in September, along
with two other defendants, of trying to blow up twelve US commercial aircraft.
Yousef was a former chauffeur for Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman (see above).
Terrorism remained a preoccupation throughout 1996. Debate continued, among
American Jews and Americans in general, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks
at home and in Israel, as to whether, and what kinds of, new legislative
and executive responses were required. One key concern for some was how
such measures were to be balanced against civil liberties and due process
protections.
Anti-terrorism legislation had been debated in both houses of congress during
1995, but had not become law. After the bombings carried out by Hamas terrorists
in Israel in February and March 1996, the anti-terrorism bill, a version
of which had already passed in the senate, was brought back before the house
of representatives for action. Having been further amended, the bill passed
in the house on 14 March by a vote of 229 to 191. The adopted amendments
were criticized by Jewish groups. However, in April the house-senate conference
committee reported back a bill that restored some of the provisions that
Jewish groups regarded as essential in the fight against terrorism. For
example, the bill provided authority to the secretary of state to designate
certain foreign groups as terrorist organizations and prohibited fund-raising
on behalf of such groups, and expanded federal jurisdiction over terrorism-related
offences. The bill gave greater regard to civil liberties and due process
than the earlier drafts. Certain Jewish groups were still opposed to the
final version of the bill because of provisions relating to habeas corpus
and summary exclusion procedures for handling asylum claims; other Jewish
organizations endorsed the final bill, notwithstanding those provisions.
In the end, the bill was passed by overwhelming margins by both houses of
congress, and was signed into law by the president on 24 April 1996.
In the wake of the Olympic Games bombing (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS, MOVEMENTS)
and the mid-air explosion of TWA flight 800 during the summer of 1996, President
Clinton and members of congress met to discuss the expedited enactment of
supplemental anti-terrorism legislation. Discussions by a bipartisan, bicameral
task force failed to reach consensus over the items that ought to be in
the new package. On the eve of the July recess a bill was introduced in
the house of representatives. It did not include the measures designated
by the president and others as most crucial, but it passed by an overwhelming
bipartisan margin. However, the senate did not bring the bill up for a floor
vote before the congress recess began in early October, with congress not
due to return again until January 1997.
At the state level, in May both houses of the Illinois legislature passed
an anti-terrorism bill, an initiative pressed by the Metropolitan Chicago
Jewish Community Relations Council after reports circulated that Hamas was
raising money in the Chicago area. The bill was signed into law by Governor
Jim Edgar.
Developments in several cases involving suspected war criminals or collaborators
occurred during the year. In May, the justice department began deportation
proceedings against a New Jersey man who promoted the persecution of Jews
in Hungary during the Second World War. The proceedings against Ferenc Koreh,
aged eighty-six, were begun after a federal appeals court upheld an earlier
decision to strip Koreh of his US citizenship. Koreh has admitted to being
the founder and editor of a virulently antisemitic newspaper. The justice
department alleges that Koreh was also a high-ranking propagandist in the
Hungarian government.
The accused Nazi collaborator Aleksandras Lileikis was stripped of his US
citizenship in May when a federal judge in Boston, Massachusetts, issued
a summary judgment. Lileikis, aged eighty-eight, was a former chief of the
Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian security police who facilitated the deportation
of thousands of Lithuanian Jews to Nazi death camps. The prosecutors claimed
that Lileikis's role in the killings was more substantial than he led US
officials to believe when he was granted a visa in 1955. Lileikis left the
USA without waiting to hear the result of his appeal in the US courts, and
arrived in Lithuania in June 1996 using his Lithuanian passport (see Lithuania).
Another Lithuanian, who was second in command to Lileikis, was also stripped
of his citizenship in June. Kazys Gimzauskas, also aged eighty-eight, had
already voluntarily returned to Lithuania more than two years earl-ier while
he was under investigation by the justice department's Office of Special
Investigations (OSI).
A Florida resident who admitted that he concealed his service in the Nazi-sponsored
Lithuanian Battalion, which murdered thousands of unarmed Jews, agreed in
May to move back to Lithuania. In a settlement reached with the OSI, Juozas
Budreikis, aged seventy-nine, admitted that he willfully misrepresented
and concealed his service in the battalion when he immigrated to the USA
in 1958, and again when he applied for citizenship in 1967.
Also in May, a US federal judge stripped a Detroit area resident of his
citizenship for concealing his Nazi past when he applied for naturalization.
Ferdinand Hammer, aged seventy-four, served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz
and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Deportation proceedings were initiated
in November.
And on 31 December, the justice department filed charges against Michael
Kolnhofer, alleging him to have been an SS guard at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.
Within hours, he began shooting at police officers outside his Kansas City
home, and was himself shot. According to reports, he called the officers
antisemitic names, and asked, "Why for you shoot me? I not a Jew."
During the year there were also legal developments involving the issue of
church-state separation. In January, a federal appeals court declared constitutional
the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. The measure, which requires the
government to prove a compelling interest in limiting religious observances,
had been declared unconstitutional by a district court in Texas.
In August, a Jewish high school student took her case to the US court of
appeals for the Tenth Circuit, arguing that a public school cannot compel
students to participate in the practice of religion or permit a teacher
to engage in religious proselytizing. Rachel Bauchman, a sixteen-year-old
student enrolled in a public high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, challenged
her teacher's proselytizing during class, her school's use of the choral
class at religious services in area churches, and her school's attempt to
compel her to perform religious devotional music at choir class, at school
concerts, in churches and at the school's graduation ceremony. Despite the
proof of her claims of religious discrimination, a federal district court
dismissed Bauchman's complaint in May, ruling that the facts she alleged
failed to establish a constitutional violation. Several leading religious
organizations, both Jewish and Christian, filed a friend-of-the-court brief
in support of Bauchman.
At the same time, a federal district court in Mississippi ruled that the
North Pontotoc School District violated the constitutional separation of
church and state by permitting students to recite prayers over the school
public address system and by allowing the teaching of Bible classes as part
of the school curriculum. The lawsuit was initiated by Lisa Herdahl, a Lutheran,
who said that she and her five children were harassed and threatened when
she objected to the school's religious practices. While advocates of church-state
separation hailed the ruling as a victory, they objected to that aspect
of the decision which allowed children to continue meeting in the school's
gymnasium for a religious service before school.
As 1996 began, not one, but two, pitched battles were underway turning on
proposals for a "religious freedom" constitutional amendment.
The first battle was between those who wanted to see some sort of constitutional
amendment addressed to church-state issues-conceptually reformulated early
in 1995 from the earlier notion of a school-prayer amendment into a broader
"religious equality" amendment-and those opposed to any such initiative.
The Christian Coalition (see RELIGION) and a number of allied groups on
the Religious Right had made passage of a "religious equality"
amendment a prominent part of their agenda, albeit that the contours of
what they wanted that amendment to include were left vague. Opponents of
the amendment were organized in a broad coalition of religious and civic
groups that included a Jewish community almost unanimous in the view that
the initiative was unnecessary and a substantial threat to religious liberty.
Thus, even though it opposed much of the rest of the Jewish community in
support for vouchers, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations joined
with its co-religionists as part of the coalition. And the Agudath Israel
of America, which did not join in the coalition, took a "wait-and-see"
attitude. The second battle-and this was the front that explained why the
year began without the imprimatur of the Republican congressional leadership-was
of a more internecine nature. Advocates of the amendment were at loggerheads
over what the final language of the amendment should be and even, to a large
extent, over just which aspects of existing church-state law should be revisited.
Thus a "religious liberties" amendment introduced by Ernest Istook
(Republican, Oklahoma) in November 1995 was to allow "student-sponsored"
prayer in the public schools and explicitly permit public acknowledgements
of "the religious heritage, beliefs, or traditions of the [American]
people". In contrast, the amendment introduced by House Judiciary Committee
Chairman Henry Hyde (Republican, Illinois), the "religious equality"
amendment introduced in the senate, as well, by Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican,
Utah) was more directly intended to allow funding of religious institutions
by authorizing, if not requiring, the government to subsidize churches,
synagogues and parochial schools to the same extent it subsidizes secular
entities that provide equivalent services. From the perspective of many
Jewish groups and other opponents, however, they amounted to the same thing,
since each contained additional, vague language that left the door open
for the primary aim of the other to be achieved. Those groups quickly weighed
in, asserting that either amendment would undo the delicate constitutional
balance that both protects religious expression and guards against religious
coercion in favour of (or against) religion.
Following reports that the respective proponents of the two measures had
been unable to reconcile their differences, House Majority Leader Richard
Armey (Republican, Texas) introduced a proposed "religious freedom"
amendment as the leadership alternative to the earlier Hyde and Istook initiatives.
Even as the bill was introduced, hearings were announced for Tuesday, 23
July with talk of a mark-up before the August recess. Reportedly, the intent
was to move this bill to a house floor vote in September in time for that
vote to be recorded in the Christian Coalition's voter guide. However, it
became evident at the hearing (at which the AJC interreligious affairs director,
Rabbi Rudin, testified) that the new initiative had not alleviated the determination
of Representative Istook and others to push for their own version. No mark-up
took place before the 104th congress concluded.
On other church-state fronts, unlike the virtually united front presented
by the Jewish community in opposing proposals for a constitutional amendment,
the community was split with respect to the issues of vouchers and "charitable
choice". Orthodox Jewish organizations remain committed, in particular,
to voucher legislation as an important source of additional support for
parochial schools. Free-standing bills to create pilot school-voucher programmes
that would use public funds, introduced in the senate by Senators Joseph
Lieberman (Democrat, Connecticut) and Dan Coats (Republican, Indiana) and
in the house of representatives by Dave Weldon (Republican, Florida) and
Frank Riggs (Republican, California) did not move out of committee. And
an attempt to include a voucher provision in the appropriations bill failed,
but only after the dispute over this issue stalled passage of that bill
for many months.
The "charitable choice" issue was posed most prominently in the
welfare reform bill vetoed twice by President Clinton but then signed by
him in August 1996. That law allows religious organizations to become state
contractors for provision of block-granted, public-assistance programmes
without, in the view of most Jewish groups, providing for the kind of safeguards
necessary to ensure that direct-service providers are hired on a non-discriminatory
basis, and that government funds are not used for sectarian purposes. Speaking
of these and other initiatives that, although short of a constitutional
amendment, nevertheless significantly alter the church-state landscape,
the B'nai B'rith official Reva Price asserted: "It's very smart politics.
Instead of going for big, broad change like the religious equality amendment,
[they are attempting to enact] little pieces that chip away" at the
constitutional prohibition on government establishment of religion.
The US congress was far from the only church-state battleground. The vouchers
issue continued to play out on a number of state and local battlegrounds.
And the Florida state legislature passed a school prayer bill by strong
margins-only to see the bill vetoed in May 1996 by Governor Lawton Chiles.
The Florida governor's action followed his office's receipt of some 20,000
letters and phone calls urging a veto, the result of a grassroots campaign
in which the Florida Jewish community played a significant part. No attempt
to override the decision had been made by mid-year. The vetoed bill would
have afforded local school boards the authority to allow student-led prayers
at secondary school graduation ceremonies and other school events. The battle
over the Florida bill, suggested an official of the National Jewish Democratic
Council, was "a precursor of battle lines to come".
In recent decades honest, sometimes painful, disagreements over public
issues have divided African Americans and Jews. Attesting to the sense of
urgency felt by sectors of both the African American community and the Jewish
community regarding the troubled state of this relationship, the AJC and
Howard University formed a partnership to develop a forum for the two communities
to talk to each other. Common Quest, a national magazine on African American/Jewish
relations, has been designed to fulfil that purpose. The first two issues
appeared in the spring and autumn of 1996. The magazine received critical
acclaim in wide sections of the national media and reaches a list of 18,000
prominent African Americans, Jews and others representing a wide variety
of professions and institutions.
In 1996 the AJC, the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Southern Poverty
Law Center all drew attention to the issue of the Internet as a vehicle
for hateful messages (see PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA).
In February, 2,500 people marched in Westchester County, New York, to protest
against a series of swastika daubings on houses in the area. A community-wide
meeting was also held, and a task force established. Other incidents of
antisemitic graffiti would again plague the area in November, including
the words "Kill Jews" and "Jew Pigs" scribbled on houses.
The AJC, the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other human rights
groups consulted with the Pentagon during the year about extremists within
the military and the National Guard.
In April, St Martin's Press, responding to letters from the AJC and the
ADL, reversed its decision and decided not to publish a biography of the
prominent Nazi Joseph Goebbels written by the Holocaust-denier David Irving
(see HOLOCAUST DENIAL). The publisher had originally defended its decision
to print the book, but after the chairman of the Press read the manuscript,
St Martin's changed its position.
Also in April, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the AJC and the Simon Wiesenthal
Center contacted national booksellers, encouraging then not to stock neo-Nazi
William Pierce's The Turner Diaries (see PARTIES, ORGANIZATIONS,
MOVEMENTS). The groups noted that they were not questioning the right of
the booksellers to stock the book, but, rather, were raising the moral questions
involved. Booksellers only stock a fraction of the volumes that are printed
each year, the AJC noted. "The distribution of this book will help
finance one of the main organizations promoting hatred and violence against
innocent Americans", the group said.
The Lieberman amendment declared it "the Sense of the Senate"
that the UN's Implementation Force should take a more active role in detaining
suspected war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal
of the former Yugoslavia. The D'Amato/Inouye amendment calls upon the German
government to significantly expand eligibility for Holocaust survivor compensation.
Among other inequities built into the current system, compensation is often
available only to those survivors living in the United States, Israel and
certain other western countries. The Jewish victims of Nazi persecution
in Eastern Europe and the FSU have waited more than fifty years to be compensated
for their suffering, but can now only receive restitution if they leave
their home countries. The vast majority of these survivors are already more
than seventy years of age, and are unable to confront the physical and emotional
ordeal of emigration at this time in their lives. (In some cases, the affected
survivors have received compensation, but then only in amounts far less
than have been made available to survivors in the West.)
On 17 September, the conference committee on the FY1997 Foreign Operations
Appropriations bill completed work on the measure. The final bill-which
became part of the Continuing Resolution (CR)-included $50 million in anti-terrorism
aid to Israel and the Lautenberg Amendment. But it dropped the D'Amato/Inouye
resolution on compensation for Holocaust survivors. However, the legislative
history of the CR did include several items pertinent to this issue, including
an expression of congressional support for less rigid conditions on eligibility
for compensation for Holocaust survivors residing in the USA. Finally, the
CR omitted the senate-passed Lieberman resolution concerning indicted war
criminals in the former Yugoslavia.
In November, the Oxnard, California, public library decided not to acquire
a self-published book entitled There's a Fish in the Courthouse.
Written by Gary L. Wean, and praised as an exposé of municipal corruption
by a city council candidate, the 800-page book claimed a Jewish conspiracy
in the judicial system, and called the Holocaust a "scam".
As in 1995, an assessment of antisemitism in the USA in 1996 reveals
a mixed picture. On the positive side, it is clear that hostility towards
Jews continues at a far lower level than hostility towards other minority
groups, including African Americans, gays and native Americans. In addition,
there are few signs of institutional antisemitism in the USA today, that
is, the attempt to limit the entry of Jews into key power sectors, whether
economic, political, educational or cultural. Indeed, by nearly all measures,
Jews constitute a remarkably successful group within US society, being fully
integrated into the nation's fabric.
On the negative side, one can point to the growing presence of extremist
militias, which have a strong potential for terrorist violence-a potential
that should be greater in 1997 than 1996, since the trial of Timothy McVeigh
for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing began at the end of March 1997 and will
be followed by that of his co-defendent, Terry Nichols. McVeigh and Nichols
both had attended some militia meetings and shared their virulent anti-government
ideology. Militia groups claimed that the bombing was the handiwork of the
government, creating its own "Reichstag fire". The AJC has expressed
concern about the possibility of increased militia activity once the trials
begin as paranoid militia members are likely to see the proceedings as a
"Stalinist show trial" designed to set the stage for their arrest.
By using join-the-dots conspiracy theories, militia members have already
speculated on alleged connections between McVeigh, Elohim City (a Christian
Identity compound), the National Alliance, the Midwestern Bandits, the Phineas
Priesthood, the as-yet unidentified John Doe no. 2 and German neo-Nazis.
Militia members' paranoia is likely to be exacerbated by defence strategies
that will inevitably try to "blow smoke" by suggesting other conspiracies
as having a part in the bombing. For example, the McVeigh defence team has
already subpoenaed three British antisemites (David Irving, John Tyndall
and Charlie Sergeant, see page UK), to testify about supposed links between
US and UK neo-Nazis. Of deep concern, too, is the possible use of biological
or chemical weapons by militia cells: there have been three incidents in
the last two years in which militia or white supremacist members were found
possessing such material.
Beyond the far right, what is also troubling is the growing acceptance of
the NOI leader, Louis Farrakhan, as a prominent African American figure
and the number of prominent people, black and white, who are willing to
overlook his clear and continuing record of antisemitism. For while Farrakhan
did damage to his image by cavorting with alleged terrorist regimes during
the year, he still remains a charismatic figure who uses the media to his
advantage. Adding to the nervousness of US Jews is the increased success
of the Religious Right movement in advancing its political agenda.
Antisemitic behaviour on an individual level in the USA has fluctuated in
recent years. This is especially true of antisemitic vandalism, which, according
to ADL figures, increased for five years up to 1991, decreased in 1992,
increased again in 1993, increased yet again to a record high in 1994, decreased
by 11 per cent in 1995, and then decreased again in 1996. What accounts
for these fluctuations is not at all clear.
As in recent years, what is most disturbing about the current situation
in the USA with regard to antisemitism is the breakdown of the taboo on
expressions of antisemitism. For decades this taboo was in place, mainly
in shocked response to the Holocaust, and it served to protect Jews. In
recent years, however, the taboo has begun to wear thin, evidenced this
year, for example, by the words of Ted Turner, comparing his business predicaments
to the Holocaust.
Ignorance of the Nazi genocide, partly due to the passing of generations,
and propelled by those-black and white-with political designs to diminish
or deny the Holocaust, continues to erode its symbolic power and meaning.
In part, this explains why Jews, on college campuses, for example, are exposed
to expressions of hostility that were unlikely to come to the surface in
an earlier period. In part this also reflects a general coarsening of public
discourse in the USA. In addition, it is no longer considered "fashionable"
to champion the cause of the Jewish minority in the USA. One consequence
of this is that Jewish leaders find it much more difficult at present to
find allies in the general community for the struggle against antisemitism.
It is a telling sign of where things now stand in inter-group relations
in the USA that Jews are routinely challenged by other US citizens to "prove"
that Louis Farrakhan is an antisemite. This reflects an insensitivity to
antisemitism that was not present before.
© JPR 1997