The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gladio

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 06, 2017 5:33 pm

The Long List of Murders Committed by White Extremists Since the Oklahoma City Bombing

JUNE 18 2015

Image
Wade Michael Page, who killed six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.


Wednesday's mass murder of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina is the most high-profile example of white extremist terror in the United States since Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. But though not each incident makes national headlines, a tally kept by the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that the murder of law enforcement officials and innocent civilians by racial supremacists, anti-government paranoiacs, and other believers in white fringe movements has been depressingly common in the two decades since Timothy McVeigh's attack. Below (taken from SPLC's records and confirmed by outside news accounts) is a list of 29 deadly attacks since Oklahoma City—comprising a total of 63 victims—carried out or believed to have been carried out by white extremists.

October 9, 1995. An Amtrak employee is killed when a train derails near Hyder, Arizona because the track it's traveling on has been sabotaged. The perpetrators are never found, but anti-law enforcement propaganda messages from the "Sons of Gestapo" are found near the scene.

April 12, 1996. A neo-Nazi named Larry Wayne Shoemake, who is found to have owned at least 22 firearms and an estimated 20,000 rounds of ammunition, kills a black man in a random Jackson, Mississippi attack.

July 27, 1996 A bomb set by Eric Robert Rudolph, who is affiliated with the "Christian Identity" fundamentalist movement, kills one person at the Atlanta Olympics.

January 29, 1998. Another bomb set by Rudolph kills a man at a Birmingham abortion clinic.

May 29, 1998. Three militia sympathizers named Alan Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean fire 29 shots at a Cortez, Colorado police officer who is trying to apprehend them because they've stolen a water truck, killing him. The three evade capture but are believed to ultimately have died in the desert wilderness surrounding the crime scene.

October 23, 1998. With his wife and children nearby, an abortion provider in Amherst, New York is shot and killed through the window of his home by James Charles Kopp.

July 1, 1999. Brothers Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams, who also have connections to the "Christian Identity" movement, kill a gay couple in Redding, California.

July 2-July 5 1999. Neo-Nazi Benjamin Nathaniel Smith kills black basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and and a Korean graduate student and wounds nine other non-white victims in a three-day shooting spree.

August 10, 1999. Neo-Nazi Buford Furrow kills a Filipino immigrant after firing 70 shots inside a Jewish community center near Los Angeles.

April 28, 2000. An unemployed immigration attorney named Richard Baumhammers who believes "non-white immigration" should be banned shoots and kills five people in the Pittsburgh area.

December 8, 2003. Steven Bixby kills two police officers in Abbeville, South Carolina during a dispute over the state's decision to use a 20-foot strip of the Bixbys' land to widen a highway.

May 24, 2004. Wade and Christopher Lay, a father-son pair obsessed with the 1993 government siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, kill a bank security guard in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

January 21, 2009. Neo-Nazi Keith Luke rapes and kills an immigrant from Cape Verde in Brockton, Massachusetts, then kills a 72-year-old homeless immigrant.

April 4, 2009. Richard Andrew Poplawski, a frequent poster on the white supremacist Stormfront website who apparently believes a national "gun ban" is imminent, kills three Pittsburgh police officers.

April 25, 2009. Joshua Cartwright kills two Okaloosa County, Florida sheriff's deputies. Per a police report, Cartwright's wife says he was paranoid about the U.S. government and "extremely disturbed" by Barack Obama's election.

May 30, 2009. Shawna Forde, Albert Gaxiola, and Jason Bush kill a Latino man and his nine-year-old daughter in Arivaca, Arizona during a robbery intended to raise funds for the "Minutemen American Defense" group.


May 31, 2009. Scott Roeder kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the Wichita, Kansas Lutheran church where Tiller serves as an usher.

June 10, 2009. An 89-year-old white supremacist named James von Brunn kills a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. from point-blank range.

Feb. 18, 2010. Joseph Andrew Stack flies a plane into an Austin, Texas IRS office, killing one person.

May 20, 2010. A father-son pair named Jerry and Joseph Kane (who conduct "seminars" about how "sovereign citizens" can evade debt) kill two West Memphis, Arkansas police officers.

September 26-October 3, 2011. Avowed white supremacists David Pedersen and Holly Ann Grigsby kill Grigsby's father and stepmother in Washington, a man they believe is Jewish in Oregon, and a black man in California.

August 5, 2012. A white supremacist named Wade Michael Page kills six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

August 16, 2012. "Sovereign citizen"-movement adherents Brian Smith and Kyle Joekel, who are now awaiting trial, allegedly kill two Louisiana sheriff's deputies in a trailer-park ambush.

September 4, 2012. Christopher Lacy, a software engineer who lives in a rural trailer and apparently sympathizes with the "sovereign citizen" movement, shoots a California Highway Patrol officer who dies the next day.

April 13, 2014. Frazier Glenn Miller, a 73-year-old with a long history of KKK activity, kills three people in the area of a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas.

June 8, 2014. Jerad and Amanda Miller kill two police officers in a random attack at a pizza restaurant in Las Vegas, then kill a customer at a Walmart. The Millers had spent time on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's property during protests related to Bundy's dispute with the federal government.

September 12, 2014: Eric Frein allegedly shoots and kills a Pennslyvania state trooper; he's caught 48 days later after hiding from authorities in "survivalist" fashion in a rural area.

June 17, 2015. Dylann Roof allegedly kills nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

July 24, 2015: John Russell Houser, a 59-year-old man with a history of expressing extremist and anti-feminist beliefs, kills two women at a screening of the Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana.

*This article has been updated to include attacks that were not mentioned in the original post.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 6:22 pm

League of the South Announces Formation of ‘Southern Defense Force’

February 06, 2017 Hatewatch Staff

Edging closer to militancy, the neo-Confederate League of the South says it's forming a force to combat the 'leftist menace to our historic Christian civilization.'

In a military-styled order titled “Directive 02022017,” Michael Hill, president of the neo-Confederate League of the South (LOS), announced Friday the formation of a new vigilante “defense force.”

[T]he League of the South is calling for all able-bodied, traditionalist Southern men to join our organization’s Southern Defense Force for the purpose of helping our State and local magistrates across Dixie combat this growing leftist menace to our historic Christian civilization. As private citizens in a private organization, we will stand ready to protect our own families and friends, our property, and our liberty from leftist chaos. Moreover, we will be ready to assist our local and State authorities in keeping the peace should they find it necessary to “deputize” private citizens for that purpose.


It remains to be seen what actions the new “Southern Defense Force” [SDF] will take to “plan for contingencies – natural or man-made –– that might affect the Southern people.” But announcements of plans to militarize the League are not new.

In 2014, the group began developing and training a paramilitary unit called the “Indomitables” to advance a second secession, though such efforts fizzled quickly.

Promising increased LOS militancy has cost the group and led to faltering membership. Since Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine congregants at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church in 2015, Hatewatch has documented a string of high-profile departures.

All of that has not stopped Hill from adopting the posture of a military commander, albeit one who has demonstrated a repeated and remarkable inability to maintain a clear chain of command and restrain more impulsive League members. At last year’s LOS national conference, younger members broke away for an unsanctioned protest of a Montgomery, Alabama, LGBT Pride parade and shouted “God hates fags” at demonstrators.

Image
LOS President Michael Hill.

Hill’s militancy also comes as President Trump signs a litany of executive orders to make good on campaign promises on mass immigration and Islamic extremism. Hill wagered hard on a former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's victory in the 2016 election and has since struggled with the realization that Trump's rhetoric has sapped support in the Deep South for causes historically championed by the League.

Hill’s announcement closes by directing recruits to contact the League using a web form reserved for normal members. “Are you ready to be a man among men?” Hill asks. “Join the League and its Southern Defense Force today!”

The phrase “man among men” is a reference to propaganda posters for the Rhodesian Army during the Rhodesian Bush War, a civil war from 1964-79 in the unrecognized country of Rhodesia that remains a popular reference for white nationalists. The conflict inspired Dylann Roof, who named his blog “The Last Rhodesian” and posed for pictures on social media with the Confederate Battle Flag while wearing a jacket patched with a Rhodesian flag.

It seems to have inspired Hill, too. He has echoed the Rhodesian mythos in a series of social media posts and on the LOS website, typifying the loss of political hegemony by whites in that war as tantamount to racial genocide.

While Hill is just one voice in a growing chorus contributing to an escalation of violent rhetoric across the South and the United States, the formation of the SDF represents something else, too –– a desperate promise of armed resistance from an aging radical on the fringe of a movement he once dominated.


https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/02/06/league-south-announces-formation-‘southern-defense-force’
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 14, 2017 10:36 pm

When Racist Trolling Becomes Real-World Violence

The Internet is an important recruitment tool for ISIS. The same is true for white supremacist organizations


“This has been a very difficult week,” Mejri says in French. She is friends with the wife of Boubaker Thabti, and frequents Azzeddine Soufiane’s butcher shop; both men who died in the attack. She is also friends with some of the victims who remain in hospital.

Mejri knows that there have been individuals who have celebrated the murders online. She knows which kinds of stories published by the news network tva she should steer clear from when it comes to the comment section. She calls these comments “shocking,” but in the same breath mentions that she doesn’t believe that these comments reflect the opinions of a majority of Quebecers.

Since the Sunday attack, Montreal police have received more than forty-three reports of “hateful incidents,” compared to fifty-five calls for all of 2016. The provincial police force has received 175 reports (these numbers are as of February 2; they keep climbing). On February 1, a man from the Montreal suburb Kirkland was charged for Islamophobic comments he made online. On February 2, a mosque in Montreal had its windows smashed and its walls spray-painted.

It’s broadly accepted that the Internet is an important tool to recruit individuals who are lonely, isolated or looking for somewhere that accepts them. isis’s online recruitment tactics have long been considered key to their capacity to recruit people from Europe and North America. It’s no different for white supremacist organizations. And as charismatic leaders such as Richard Spencer, Donald Trump and Marine LePen emerge, hate speech that once would have been isolated in support group-like forums is bleeding into the mainstream and increasingly considered acceptable. A fringe movement that was once hidden away in online corners is now proudly boasting on our social media feeds and marching down our streets.

Police have to take hateful online speech seriously. But, since these are often crimes that need to be reported, individuals need to take online hate speech more seriously, too. They need to screencap, share, and report anything they see that advocates violence against others.

The Ste. Foy shooting also shows that the federal and provincial governments need to dedicate more resources to identifying anti-social, violent behavior in the name of white supremacy. Radical Islam has dominated far too much of the public conversation of extremism. This horrific event needs to mark a departure of the Quebec government’s instant connection of individualized, extremist violence with Muslims, and instead find ways to address white supremacy and treat it as the threat that it is.

For those of us who have paid close attention to the rise in online hatred, watching Sunday night’s attack was like seeing a train approaching from miles away. When it finally arrived, the overwhelming sense of helplessness and inevitability was overbearing.

It shouldn’t take six men murdered in a mosque to wake us out of our complacency; to convince our politicians to tone down the rhetoric; to trigger broad introspection on what a culture of fear and paranoia towards Muslims has done to us all. In the memories of Boubaker Thabti, Azzeddine Soufiane, Khaled Belkacemi, Ibrahima Barry, Abdelkrim Hassane, and Mamadou Barry, we all have a responsibility to resist hatred however we can, and when we see it—whether online or in real life.


https://thewalrus.ca/when-racist-trolli ... -violence/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 20, 2017 9:31 am

Slave revolts from Stono to Nat Turner

Image

In a moment, I’ll look at the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston.

Before I do that, though, I want to note some differences between city slaves and plantation field hands.


The abject conditions of field hands gave them the most reason to rise up against their masters, but they also tended to have the narrowest outlook and lowest horizon of hope. Frederick Douglass, the country’s most famous escaped slave, wrote that making a slave work eighty hours a week was a more effective method for breaking a spirit than even whipping was.

The German Coast revolt came out of the plantations, but its key leaders were a slave-driver and two men who had experienced freedom as warriors in Africa. Gabriel of Virginia was raised in the country, but he trained as a blacksmith and spent time in the city of Richmond. He could read and write, he met a great variety of people, free and slave — including free people of color — and his skilled occupation gave him a sense of his own worth.

Many urban slaves were hired out as wage laborers. Douglass himself worked as a caulker in a shipyard in Baltimore alongside white workers, and that made him think. “I was living among freeman,” he wrote,

and was in all respects equal to them by nature and attainments. Why should I be a slave?… I was now getting… A dollar and fifty cents per day. I … worked for it,… and it was rightfully my own; and yet … every Saturday night, this money… was … taken from me by [my master].… Why should he have it? I owed him nothing. (Douglass, 187)


Some masters did take all of a slave’s wages, but many found it convenient to let their slaves find their own jobs while collecting a flat fee for the time the slave spent out of the house (Wade, 48). That meant that slaves could make cash for themselves if they earned more than the fees they paid their masters.

In Charleston, hundreds of slave women were engaged in paid needlework and the trading of produce and craft goods. Hundreds of slave men worked for wages — the majority moving goods from place to place because the city was a major port.

Many African Americans could even afford to live outside their masters’ households. Slaves could marry and cohabit independently. Some skilled artisans even began hiring wage workers themselves.

Maybe most important, an unsupervised collective life of Blacks in Charleston and other cities developed in ways that were impossible on a plantation:

— Free people of color built schools for their children;

— Black churches were founded;

— everybody met out on the streets;

… and gathered in the markets on Sundays.

In the words of historian Richard Wade,

The [Southern] city had created its own kind of world, with a pace, sophistication, and environment that separated it from rural modes. In the process it transformed Negro no less than white, slave no less than free man…. [T]he city slave was often quite unlike his country brother. (27)


* * * * *

Denmark Vesey was a slave on board ship with his master in the Caribbean in the 1780s and 90s. He spent a year as a teenager in Haiti before the revolution broke out. He and his master settled and Charleston in the 1790s. Then in 1800, Vesey won the lottery and bought his freedom. He became a successful carpenter.

When a branch of the recently-founded African Methodist Episcopal Church opened up in 1818, Vesey became a Sunday school class teacher. About a third of the city’s Black population — more than 4,300 people — belonged to the church from the start (Powers, 21). The AME church was home to several strands of abolitionism, from the most gradualist to the most militant.

Four years later, in 1822, Vesey was accused of conspiring with several other members of the church to mount the biggest slave insurrection in US history. The other center of the conspiracy was the skilled tradesmen and wage workers — not the personal house slaves, who tended to be much more loyal to their masters.

One of those house slaves, in fact, informed his master that rebels had tried to recruit him. Word of the plot made its way to the mayor, who put the city on military lockdown on the supposed day of revolt.

According to some accounts, the conspiracy included thousands of slaves, including many on the plantations surrounding the city. They were to set fire to the city, acquire weapons, kill any whites who got in their way — and maybe even sail out of the harbor to Haiti.

This last was not really far-fetched, considering the number of free black sailors who came in and out of the port, and the fact that many Charleston-area Blacks knew how to pilot a boat.[2]

Another possibility was that the conspirators, like Gabriel and Charles Deslondes, aimed to take the city, fortify it, and hold it.[3]

The authorities hanged 35 of the supposed leaders and exiled another 27. The mayor approved the arson of the AME church, which became an underground congregation until the end of the Civil War. Just a ten-minute walk away from the ashes of that church, the state soon built an armory known as the Citadel, which served as quarters for a militia that specialized in harassing urban Blacks. The Citadel also became a military academy that still exists today.

From now on, free black sailors who arrived in port would go straight to jail and then be released only when their ship sailed. Other Southern states soon picked up this blatantly unconstitutional law. In general, there was a raft of new measures to repress both free people of color and Black slaves. The state, for example, prohibited free Blacks from entering the state — and even barred the re-entry of free Black residents who left the state for any reason.

There’s a problem with the story of the conspiracy, though.

It might all be a fabrication. It seems clear that Vesey and some others refused to subordinate themselves to anybody and expressed some militant ideas. Vesey was known for chastising other Blacks who bowed and scraped to the whites.

Nevertheless, the story of the conspiracy is based on secret interrogations of a handful of prisoners who were subjected to torture and solitary confinement. The exception is the point where they put two prisoners together so they could get their story straight.

It’s possible, of course, that the whole thing (or much of it) is true, and that the central figures of the conspiracy heroically went to their deaths without admitting anything. Or they might have refused to confess because they didn’t do anything.

Right now, historians are in a major controversy over the Vesey affair. The re-examination of the evidence began fifteen years ago with a 60-page article by Michael Johnson in the William and Mary Quarterly. I’ve read it, and now I’m one of the skeptics; the case does look pretty flimsy, and I’m not sure what to believe.

Like I said, it could’ve happened, but the other a possibility is important, too — the possibility that South Carolina entered into a period of mass murder and heightened repression against Black people on the basis of a white panic… and nothing else. The fact that both stories are plausible tells us a lot about what life was like in the Old South.

* * * * *

More at: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2016 ... at-turner/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Thu May 25, 2017 7:00 am

The Jihadi State of Mind

Kenan Malik MAY 24, 2017

I have written before about the increasingly blurred lines between ideological violence and sociopathic rage. There is now what we might call a “jihadi state of mind,” in which some mixture of social disengagement, moral dissolution, unleavened misanthropy and inchoate rage drives some to see the most abhorrent expressions of violence as a kind of revolt.

It is a state of mind that finds its most vicious, barbaric form in Islamist terror. But it’s not only in Islamist terror that it finds expression.

Earlier this month, a 20-year-old Briton named Damon Smith was found guilty of planting a homemade bomb filled with ball bearings on a London Underground train. Police discovered in his flat shredded pages of an article from the Qaeda-linked magazine Inspire, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” Yet there was nothing to connect Mr. Smith to any extremist network.

Image
Damon Joseph Smith, a 20-year-old Briton, was recently convicted of planting a homemade bomb filled with ball bearings on a London Underground train.


He did not think of himself as Muslim and had been inside a mosque only as a tourist in Turkey. He suffered from behavioral problems and reportedly had been given a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. Bombs were “something to do when he was bored,” a psychiatrist wrote in his evaluation of Mr. Smith.

Damon Smith was not a jihadist in any conventional sense of the word. But he inhabited this jihadi state of mind.

So did the white nationalist, Dylann Roof, who shot dead nine African-American worshipers in a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. According to a recently published psychiatric report ordered by the court, “The best way he has found to explain his thinking is the analogy of his being a jihadist.”

We need not just confront jihadism in the narrow sense of preventing acts of terror, but also tackle in a broader fashion the jihadi state of mind. Its causes are deep and complex. The moral firewalls against inhuman behavior have weakened. The influence of civil society institutions that help create social bonds, from churches to labor unions, has eroded. So has that of the progressive movements that used to give social grievance a political form.

Image
Dylann Roof, who killed nine African-American worshipers in a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, seen in a a photo from a white supremacist website.


Cracks now exist in which are spawned angry individuals, inhabiting a space beyond normal moral boundaries. There, they may find in Islamism or white nationalism the salve for their demons and a warped vindication for their actions.


More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/opin ... ubz=1&_r=0
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue May 30, 2017 8:58 am

Time to look more deeply at Internet psyops of the far-Right in all of this:


Jeremy Christian May Just Be the Latest in a Disturbing Trend of Alt-Right Murderers

Image

On May 27, 2017, 35-year-old Jeremy Christian approached two Muslim women — one of whom wore a hijab — on a light-rail train in Portland, OR, and, according a witness, yelled “Get off the bus and get out of the country because you don’t pay taxes here!”


CONTINUE READING
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)


Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 07, 2017 6:53 pm

Gavin McInnes: Dylann Roof Was Not A Terrorist

Gavin McInnes, a right-wing commentator on CRTV and leader of the bizarre “Proud Boys” organization, claimed that Dylann Roof—a white nationalist who murdered black churchgoers in 2015—was not a terrorist, despite the fact that Roof wrote a manifesto explaining that he carried out a mass shooting for political purposes.

On today’s episode of McInnes’ new CRTV program “Get Off My Lawn,” he explained that he did not think it was correct to label the mass shooting at a Texas church last week as an act of terrorism because there was no apparent political reasoning for it and “sometimes politicization matters.” But despite this working definition, he claimed that Roof’s massacre of black churchgoers in 2015 was not terrorism.

“Dylann Roof, Batman shooting, Columbine—those are mental midget lunatic drug addict psychos on crazy medication. That’s not terrorism,” McInnes said. “When jihadists do it, it’s terrorism.”

McInnes went on, “There’s reasons why jihadists commit terror. There are not reasons why lunatic white people commit terror.”

In his manifesto, which was loaded with racial slurs, Roof explained that he felt a racial injustice against white people and that he felt the calling to bring the ideology of the “skinheads” and “real KKK” he found online “to the real world.”

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gavi ... terrorist/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 29, 2017 12:10 pm

Will the alt-right produce the next Timothy McVeigh?

Since a “Unite the Rally” in Charlottesville that left one counter-protester dead, Spencer has waged an aggressive PR campaign to prove that his movement is not a loose collection of violent racists and misogynists, but a band of political revolutionaries with a radical new vision for the future. Those efforts have failed, punctuated by his embarrassing speech at the University of Florida, where he was shouted off the stage by students and anti-fascist activists.

As in Charlottesville, the engagement ended in mayhem, with three fascists from Spencer’s inner circle opening fire on a group of demonstrators at a bus stop following an exchange of words. Earlier this month, the Huffington Post reported that the $10,565 check Spencer used to book the speaking engagement at Gainesville had bounced.

The Pepe brigade is unlikely to enjoy the kind of exposure it did during the 2016 election. But if the history of white supremacist movements and recent mass shootings are any indication, the alt right’s rapid decline holds the potential for further acts of violence in the years to come.

Disintegration and Mass Murder

Spencer’s fall from grace, coupled with the alt right’s growing disillusionment with the Trump administration, recently prompted a call on the movement’s website, Altright.com, for a “leaderless resistance.”

The term has a long and complicated history, but it was a favorite slogan of Texas Ku Klux Klan leader, Louis Beam. A high official in the Knights of the Klan during the 1970s, Beam helped guide the rise of David Duke, whose leisure suits and boyish looks put a more polite face on the Klan’s racism. The Knights collapsed in 1979 amid a scandal involving the sale of membership lists and pseudonymously authored texts, but its members would join paramilitary groups affiliated with the Aryan Nations and other white supremacist organizations.

During that time, Beam helped inspire a group of white nationalist militants calling themselves the Bruders Schweigen (Silent Brotherhood), or the “Order,” which would commit a string of armed robberies and murders from September 1983 to December 1984 when its leader, Robert Mathews, was killed. Following the Order’s demise, “leaderless resistance” follower and former Klan leader Tom Metzger linked older white nationalist groups to new knots of fascist skinheads emerging in the U.S. as part of a “Chicago strategy.”

Toward this end, Metzger created the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), turning fascist skinheads into “frontline soldiers” in the coming race war. Working with decentralized neo-Nazi gangs in primarily urban areas, Metzger envisioned the skinhead phenomenon as a way of creating a militant working class that could battle encroaching multiculturalism.

His vision was short-lived. Metzger was soon implicated in the racially motivated murder of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw, and a million-dollar civil rights lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center effectively destroyed his organization. With the Klan, the Order and WAR torn asunder, a vacuum emerged in white nationalist organizing.

A new opportunity presented itself when federal agents botched a raid on the compound of Aryan Nations supporter Randy Weaver. Metzger and Beam converged in Estes Park, Colorado with other white nationalist leaders hoping to use Weaver’s case as an opportunity to reorient the movement toward local militias concerned about gun control and supranational governance. Inspired by the Weavers and the growth of the militia movement, Timothy McVeigh planted a bomb at the Edward R. Murrah federal building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people in the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil.

The Alt Right’s Trail of Blood

The decade between the Oklahoma City bombing and the emergence of the alt right saw a massive growth in United States militias, which the Tea Party movement had made a radical wing of the Republican Party. The alt right shared similar politics of anti-interventionism abroad, but offered a more explicitly racist and misogynistic platform on the one hand, and an “edgier,” more youthful face on the other.

Rather than pushing conservative family values, it used tactics more typically associated with the left in what Pat Buchanan famously dubbed the “culture wars.” The alt right seized social media, internet message boards, podcasts and other web 2.0 opportunities to disseminate its far-right ideas to younger generations, all the while peddling white identity politics to shield itself from accusations of bigotry. The movement also adopted a more academic white nationalism, born of the “European New Right” and “identitarian” street movements, and finally brought stateside by figures like Richard Spencer. While antifascist groups recognized the violence of their rhetoric immediately, the alt right’s platitudes about free speech opened up space for a fair hearing in the press.

In January, clashes at demonstrations hit a fever pitch when a Trump supporter shot an unarmed anti-fascist protester outside of a Milo Yiannopoulos speaking engagement in Seattle. Racially motivated attacks, including the killing of a First Nations woman struck by a trailer hitch, Alexandre Bissonnette’s massacre of six people in a Canadian mosque, Adam Purinton’s murder of two Indian men, the torching of a Toronto mosque and the shooting of a Sikh man in Seattle continued throughout the winter.

On March 20, James Harris Jackson stabbed a man to death in New York City with a sword, claiming he “intended to kill as many black men as he could.” Jackson was seemingly radicalized online by sources controlled by Richard Spencer like the National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal. Dylann Roof followed a similar trajectory, opening fire on a Charleston Church after being “red-pilled” on false race and crime statistics by the Council of Conservative Citizens. The innocuous-sounding CofCC belies a white nationalist political project that uses alt right leader Jared Taylor as its spokesperson and has hosted leading figures on the far right.

Despite its claims of “free speech,” the alt right has developed a fighting culture increasingly focused on tactical street operations. On April 15, riots broke out in Berkeley when demonstrations against alt right publicist Milo Yiannopoulos led to the cancellation of a planned speaking event and ensuing “free speech” rally by white supremacists. Groups that attended, including members of the violent Rise Above Movement and far-right evangelical Patriot Prayer returned to their bases in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest respectively to apply pressure to local communities through coordinated acts violence.

In Berkeley and at subsequent rallies from Boston to Portland, Oregon, the alt right secured the support of Patriot groups like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, while maintaining a semi-protective membrane of “alt light” groups and media figures who lent legitimacy to the movement by distancing themselves from the open racism at its core.

Meanwhile, the killing continued. As Richard Spencer’s face was being splashed across the front pages of major newspapers across the U.S., appalling acts of violence cemented the alt right’s reputation among activists. On April 28, less than two weeks after the Berkeley clashes, a Trump supporter attacked college liberals with a machete on Transylvania University’s campus in Kentucky. Two days later, a racially motivated mass shooting at a pool party in San Diego left one dead and six injured, followed by the brutal May 5 beating of a man in South Beach and a May 20 arson attack on a black family in upstate New York. The next week, Patriot Prayer supporter and “free speech” advocate Jeremy Christian murdered two and critically injured one on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon. That same month, a Timothy McVeigh supporter and member of the alt right group “Atomwaffen” in Florida murdered his two roommates; police found bomb-making materials in his garage.

Through June and July, activists like the Proud Boys staged violent demonstrations, harassed minority communities and attacked left-wing marches, rallies and meetings. While the collective maintained its distance from the more militant fascists in the alt right, it adopted their informal dress code (Fred Perry polo shirts) and white nationalist rhetoric, forging a “military division” called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, led by Kyle Chapman and Augustus Sol Invictus. Guns became increasingly prevalent at white nationalist rallies, as evidenced by the multiple high-power firearms Christopher Cantwell displayed during Vice Media’s recent documentary about the Charlottesville rally. Despite the threats these groups posed, mainstream media continued to provide them a platform in the name of “both sides” journalism.

It wasn’t until the murder of Heather Heyer following the Charlottesville rally in August that the press began to change its tone. The violence of the alt right had been laid bare for all to see, but the disgrace of Charlottesville did not immediately impede the movement’s ability to unite “respectable racists” at the American Renaissance, old-school white supremacists from the Council of Conservative Citizens, reactionaries and online trolls.

Not long after Charlottesville, 30 members of the alt right led by William Fears, formerly of Vanguard America, attacked an Anarchist Book Fair in Houston, Texas with smoke bombs. Members of organizations like the Black Rose Anarchist Federation held the doors, protecting conference attendants from what many feared could escalate into an act of mass violence. Just a few weeks later, Fears and two of his cohorts took aim and shot at counter-demonstrators at a nearby bus stop following Richard Spencer’s failed event at the University of Florida. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

What Happens Next

Even in deeply conservative areas of the country, white nationalist organizations struggle to find adherents, so they enlist more mainstream figures to aid in their recruitment. For years, those were paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan. More recently, they’re online pseudo-celebrities like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. When these personae self-destruct or repudiate the movements they’ve championed, refusing to go down with their more radical associates, the true believers begin to lash out in desperation. Lane Davis, a former Yiannopoulos intern dismissed by the former Breitbart editor, recently murdered his own father during a domestic dispute.

The timeline of alt right attacks over the last year reveals its hate crimes are growing in intensity, and some of the more recent incidents suggest it’s moving towards “leaderless resistance.” On November 1, Scott Ostrem was arrested for what appears to have been the racist murder of three Latinos outside of a Walmart on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado. Just over a week later, on November 10, former Air Force member and Dylann Roof admirer Devin Kelley murdered 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Richard Spencer’s movement presently finds itself in a state of disintegration. As it continues to fracture, many of its members will be reabsorbed into American society, but not all of the virulent racists and misogynists it has cultivated will go quietly. The alt right has already penetrated the U.S. military and local police departments. If a splinter faction were to go underground, adopting a “leaderless resistance” aimed at “national revolution,” the alt right or whatever formation it ultimately assumes could become more deadly than ever.

So-called Anticom groups and other openly identitarian groups are already forming “defense squads” in preparation for armed conflict with the left or anyone they rightly or wrongly associate with Antifa. Many believe that “total revolution and anarchy from the likes of Bob Mathews and Tim McVeigh are the only solutions remaining,” as Order member David Lane wrote from prison in 2005. They have the training to carry out massive acts of violence, and while their movement may have stalled, autonomous acts of terror remain extraordinarily dangerous.



https://www.rawstory.com/2017/11/will-t ... veigh/amp/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 28, 2017 1:27 pm

Six far-right conspiracy theories that reached Congress and the White House in 2017

Image

Far-right rally in Charlottesville was a liberal set-up

In August, white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, VA, for a so-called “Unite The Right” rally to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Far-right protesters participated in the rally yielding torches and weapons and chanting bigoted and anti-Semitic slogans; a man also drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring at least 19 other people. In an attempt to deflect blame, far-right and fake news outlets pointed to a Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLC) profile of Jason Kessler, who helped organize the rally, and noted that his previous reported support for Obama when he was still president suggested that Kessler was a “liberal double agent” and the rally was a “#falseflag” and a “#SorosOp.” A user on the far-right, conspiracy theory-obsessed subreddit “r/The_Donald” claimed he was the one who found Kessler’s SPLC profile and that far-right and fake news outlets had picked up his original post that implied Kessler was a liberal operative.

In September, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) told the San Francisco Chronicle that a “former ‘Hillary and Bernie supporter’” duped “dumb Civil War re-enactors” into attending the rally, adding, “It was left-wingers who were manipulating them in order to have this confrontation” and to “put our president on the spot.” The following month, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) told Vice News that Kessler “was an Obama sympathizer” and that the rally “was created by the Left.”


https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/ ... 017/218870
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 24, 2018 1:29 pm

Far-Right Propaganda ‘Brainwashed’ Alleged Mosque Attacker, UK Murder Trial Hears

Prosecutors specifically pointed to subscriber emails from a prominent Rebel host sent to the man who drove a van into a crowd of Muslim worshippers.

Image

In court, Osborne has been described by the Crown as a “loner” who was quickly radicalized by media in just a few weeks. The Guardian reports that the incident that incited Osborne’s radicalization was when he first watched a BBC drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal. From there he was, as his former partner of 20 years described it in court, “obsessed” with Islam.

This obsession brought Osborne to far-right outlets like Rebel Media and Infowars, according to the prosecution. Osborne searched for material posted by former English Defence League leader turned Rebel Media host Tommy Robinson several times in the days leading up to the attack. The court heard that Osborne received a direct message from Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First—the account US President Donald Trump controversially retweeted—but prosecutors do not know what message the DM contained.

In the days leading up to the attack, the court heard, Osborne had screengrabbed two mass emails written by Robinson, according to information gathered by investigators from the defendant’s iphones and ipad. The emails were mass sent to Rebel subscribers in the UK and signed by Robinson. The first came on June 11 ahead of the Rebel Media-supported UK Against Hate rally, a reaction to the Manchester suicide bombing terrorist attack perpetrated by Salman Abedi in May of last year. The email invitation stated that “there is a nation within a nation forming just beneath the surface of the UK. It is a nation built on hatred, on violence and on Islam.”

“It has now been left to us, the ordinary people of the United Kingdom to stand up to hate, to unite and in one voice say 'no more,'”the Rebel Media email said.

The second mail out related to another Rebel Media campaign, regarding a rape allegation against Syrian refugees sent out on June 14.

Rebel Media founder Ezra Levant refused to offer comment to VICE Canada for this story.


More at: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ne4g ... sque-trial
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 27, 2018 12:39 pm

Noah Gunn and the Problem of Neo-Nazi Indoctrination of Youth at Patriot Prayer Events

Image
Noah Gunn, while attempting to rally hammerskin neo-nazis to attend the Patriot Prayer protest against Hillary Clinton, is shown in communication with Salem, OR neo-nazi and NSM member Kynan Dutton

Gunn makes it very clear that he is looking to earn the right to wear “red laces,” a dubious neo-nazi merit badge which generally signifies that the wearer has spilled the blood of a non-white person for the neo-nazi movement. All of Noah Gunn’s posts in this forum have occurred within the past two months, and he began posting there shortly after having attended a Patriot Prayer rally in Salem on October 15th, 2017. There were multiple known fascists in attendance at that event.

Image
Neo-nazi pedophile Jarl Rockhill (2nd from right) stands with other known neo-nazis in attendance at Patriot Prayer’s October 15, 2017 rally in Salem, OR.


https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/noah-gunn/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 28, 2018 12:10 pm

The fatal pressure of competition - Robert Kurz

Image
2002 analysis of the phenomenon of school shootings, which the author claims reflect the totalitarian mass psychology of capitalism in crisis, whose perpetrators are described as "robots of capitalist competition gone haywire" in a "culture of self-destruction and self-forgetting".

The Fatal Pressure of Competition – Robert Kurz

Mad Gunmen and Suicides as Subjects of Crisis


For some years now an expression has become common in the western world: “school massacre”. The schools, which were in days gone by places for a more or less authoritarian education, pubescent eroticism and harmless juvenile mischief, are getting more public attention as the scenes of bloody tragedies. Of course, accounts of crazed murderers are also known from the past. But the current bloody excesses have a new quality all their own. They cannot be allowed to be hidden in a cloud of anthropological generalities. To the contrary, they are specific products of contemporary society.

The new quality of these insane acts of murder can be confirmed by several of their aspects. For example, they are not events separated from one another by long intervals, as in prior epochs; the new massacres have been taking place, since the 1990s, in an increasingly more rapid sequence. Two other aspects are also new. A large and disproportionate percentage of the perpetrators are youths, and some are even children. Also, only a very small number of these homicidal maniacs suffer from a mental disorder in the clinical sense; on the contrary, most were considered, prior to their outbursts, “normal” and well-adjusted. When the media confirm this fact, always with apparent surprise, they indirectly and involuntarily admit that the “normality” of present-day society bears within itself the potential for these acts of murderous rage.

The global and universal character of such phenomena also demands attention. It began in the U.S. In 1997, in the city of Paducah (Kentucky), a 14-year-old adolescent shot three of his classmates to death after the morning announcements and wounded five others. In 1998, in Jonesboro (Arkansas), an 11-year-old child along with a 13-year-old opened fire in their school, killing four girls and a teacher. That same year, in Springfield (Oregon), a 17-year-old youth shot two classmates to death in his high school and wounded twenty others. One year later, two youths aged 17 and 18 carried out the famous Littleton (Colorado) bloodbath [at Columbine High School—translator’s note]: with firearms and explosives they killed twelve of their schoolmates and one teacher, and then immediately took their leave of this life.

In Europe, these school massacres were from the beginning interpreted, still in the context of the traditional anti-Americanism, as a consequence of the gun cult, of social Darwinism and of the insufficient social education of the U.S. But the U.S., in all those respects, is exactly the model for the whole capitalist world of globalization, as would soon be demonstrated. In the small Canadian city of Taber, barely one week after the events at Littleton, a 14-year-old adolescent opened fire randomly, killing a classmate. Other school massacres took place during the 1990s in Scotland, Japan and various African countries. In Germany, in November of 1999, a 15-year-old high school student, brandishing two daggers, killed his teacher; in March of 2000 a 16-year-old young man shot his school principal to death and then tried to commit suicide; in February of 2001, a 22-year-old young man killed his boss with a revolver and then killed the principal of his former high school before finally jumping off a roof and detonating a pipe bomb in mid-air. The most recent act of homicidal rage involving 19-year-old youth in Erfurt who, at the end of April 2002, during the high school final exams, killed 16 people with a bomb (among them almost the entire teaching staff of his school) and then immediately shot himself in the head, was only the culmination of a whole series of such events.

Media Event

Naturally, the phenomenon of the school massacres cannot be considered isolated from its context. The barbarous “culture of the act of homicidal rage” has for some time been a regular media event in many countries; the maddened young school shooters form only one part of this social micro-explosion. Official accounts of acts of homicidal rage on all continents are still scarcely reported; due to their relative frequency, they only gain the attention of the media when they have a suitably spectacular effect. Thus, the well-appointed Swede who, at the end of 2001 riddled a session of parliament with bullets and then killed himself, attained the same global celebrity as that French university student, graduated and unemployed, who opened fire a few months later with two pistols on the Municipal Council of the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, killing eight local police officers.

If the acts of psycho killers are more common than school massacres, both phenomena are in turn integrated in the broader context of a culture of violence within society, which is plaguing the whole world in the course of globalization. The virtual and open civil wars, the economy of pillage on all continents, the criminality of armed masses, joined into gangs in the poor neighborhoods, in the ghettoes and the shanty-towns; generally, it is the universal “continuation of competition by other means”. On the one hand, it is a culture of robbery and murder, whose violence is directed at others; in the meantime, the perpetrators themselves run the “risk” of dying. At the same time, however, direct self-aggression is also increasing, as the rising rates of juvenile suicides in many countries demonstrate. For modern history at least, it is a new development that suicide is not only practiced out of individual desperation, but also in an organized form and on a mass scale. In countries and cultures as distant from one another as the U.S., Switzerland, Germany and Uganda, the so-called “suicide cults” attracted attention at various times in the 1990s, in a gruesome manner, by their collective and ritualized acts of suicide.

The act of homicidal rage accordingly appears to constitute, in the recent global culture of violence, the logical connection between aggression against others and self-aggression, a sort of synthesis of staged murder and suicide. Most homicidal maniacs not only kill indiscriminately, but also kill themselves immediately thereafter. And the distinct forms of postmodern violence begin to merge. The potential perpetrator of a robbery is also a potential psycho killer. Unlike the acts of the psycho killer in pre-modern societies (the word “amok”* is derived from the Malayan language), it is not a matter of spontaneous outbursts of insane rage, but of actions carefully planned long in advance. The bourgeois subject is still distinguished by strategic “self-control” and by functional discipline even when he sinks into homicidal madness. The psycho killers are robots of capitalist competition gone haywire: subjects of the crisis, dedicated to the concept of the modern subject, and fully educated in all of its characteristics.

Suicidal Terrorism

Even someone who is completely blind in terms of social theory must see the parallels with the terrorists of September 11 and with the suicidal terrorists of the Palestinian intifada. Many western ideologues tried to unconditionally attribute these acts, with obvious apologetic intent, to the “alien cultural domain” of Islam. In the media it is openly said concerning the terrorists of New York, whose plot took shape during uninterrupted years of residence in Germany and the United States, that, despite having conformed externally, they “never came to the west” from the psychic and spiritual point of view. The phenomenon of Islamic terrorism, with its suicide attacks, was due to the historical circumstance that Islam had never had an epoch of Enlightenment. The obvious internal affinity between the young western psycho killers and the young Islamic suicidal terrorists demonstrates exactly the contrary.

Both phenomena belong within the context of capitalist globalization; they are the most recent “postmodern” result of the bourgeois Enlightenment itself. Precisely because they “came” to the west in all of its aspects, the young Arab students were transformed into terrorists. In reality, at the beginning of the 21st century the West (read: the immediate character of the world market and of its totalitarian subjectivity centered in competition) found itself in the midst of a great transformation under specific conditions. But the difference of these conditions has more to do with the distinct force of capital than with cultural diversity. Today, capitalist socialization is not secondary on any continent, but primary; and what was hypostatized by postmodern ideologues as “cultural difference”, is instead part of a thin skin.

The diary of one of the psycho killers of Littleton was quite understandably secured under seven seals by the North American authorities. Due to a leak from an official, it is known that the young criminal had written the following, among other violent fantasies: “Why not hijack a plane sometime and make it crash into New York?” How embarrassing! What was presented as a particularly perfidious atrocity of an alien culture, had already taken form in the mind of a product coming entirely from the “factory of freedom and democracy”. Some time ago, officials also emphasized the information that, a few weeks after September 11 in the U.S., a 15-year-old adolescent had crashed a small plane into a building. The North American media stated, in all seriousness, that the boy had taken an overdose of acne medication and had therefore suffered from a temporary mental disturbance. This explanation is a worthy product of enlightenment philosophy in its last, positivist stage.


https://libcom.org/library/fatal-pressu ... obert-kurz
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 29, 2018 10:54 am

https://www.propublica.org/article/cali ... hate-group

California Murder Suspect Said to Have Trained With Extremist Hate Group

The 20-year-old man charged in Orange County with killing a gay Jewish college student earlier this month is said to have belonged to Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group.

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, Ali Winston, special to ProPublica, and Jake Hanrahan, special to ProPublica

Image
Samuel Woodward, a suspect in the murder of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein, appears in court at the Orange County Central Justice Center on Jan. 17, 2018, in Santa Ana, California.

The California man accused of killing a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student earlier this month is an avowed neo-Nazi and a member of one of the most notorious extremist groups in the country, according to three people with knowledge of the man’s recent activities.

The man, Samuel Woodward, has been charged in Orange County, California, with murdering Blaze Bernstein, who went missing in early January while visiting his family over winter break. Prosecutors allege that Woodward stabbed Bernstein more than 20 times before burying his body in an Orange County park where it was eventually discovered. The two men had attended high school together.

Woodward, 20, is set to be arraigned on Feb. 2 and has not yet entered a plea. Orange County prosecutors say they are examining the possibility that the killing was a hate crime — Bernstein was Jewish and openly gay — and some recent news reports have suggested that the alleged killer might hold far-right or even white supremacist political beliefs.

Now, three people with detailed knowledge of Woodward’s recent past have been able to shed more light on the young man’s extremist activities. They said Woodward was a member of the Atomwaffen Division, an armed Fascist group with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the U.S. government through the use of terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

The organization, which celebrates Hitler and Charles Manson, has been tied to four other murders and an elaborate bomb plot over the past eight months. Experts who study right-wing extremist movements believe Atomwaffen’s commitment to violence has made it one of the more dangerous groups to emerge from the new wave of white supremacists.

Two of the three people who described Woodward’s affiliations are friends of his; the other is a former member of Atomwaffen Division.

ProPublica’s revelations about Woodward’s background add a new element to a murder case that has attracted considerable local and national news coverage. But they also raise fresh concerns about groups like Atomwaffen Division, shadowy outfits of uncertain size that appear capable of genuine harm.

Woodward joined the organization in early 2016 and later traveled to Texas to attend Atomwaffen meetings and a three-day training camp, which involved instruction in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, camping and survival skills, the former member said. ProPublica has obtained photographs of Woodward at an outdoor Atomwaffen meeting in the scrubby Texas countryside. One of the photos depicts Woodward and other members making straight-armed Nazi salutes while wearing skull masks. In other pictures, Woodward is unmasked and easily identifiable.

The young man is proficient with both handguns and assault rifles, according to one person who participated in the Texas training and watched him shoot. That person also said that Woodward helped organize a number of Atomwaffen members in California.

Social media posts and chat logs shared by Woodward’s friends show that he openly described himself as a “National Socialist” or Nazi. He “was as anti-Semitic as you can get,” according to one acquaintance.

ProPublica contacted Orange County prosecutors regarding Woodward’s alleged neo-Nazi activities. Michelle Van Der Linden, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, said she couldn’t comment directly on the case, but said the investigation is ongoing, with detectives exploring all possible leads.

Woodward told police Bernstein had tried to kiss him while they were in the park, according to a sealed affidavit obtained by the Orange County Register.

Woodward’s defense lawyer, Edward Munoz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, Bernstein’s parents spoke to reporters about the loss of their son, but said they were not interested in talking about any information they had on the investigation of his death.

The Los Angeles Times quoted his mother, Jeanne Pepper Bernstein, as saying she had worried during her son’s life that he might be a target -- because he was small, and Jewish, and gay.

“I was concerned sending him out into the big world,” she said. “But at some point you have to let go and they leave the nest and fly. I couldn’t protect him from everything.”

Atomwaffen started in 2015 and is estimated to have about 80 members scattered around the country in small cells; the former member said the group’s ranks have grown since the lethal and chaotic “Unite the Right” rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

While many of the new white extremist groups have consciously avoided using Nazi imagery, Atomwaffen has done the opposite. The name can mean “Atomic Weapons” in German, and the organization embraces Third Reich iconography, including swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS lightning bolts. The group frequently produces YouTube videos featuring masked Atomwaffen members hiking through the backcountry and firing weapons. They’ve also filmed themselves burning the U.S. Constitution and setting fire to the American flag at an Atomwaffen “Doomsday Hatecamp.”

Atomwaffen’s biggest inspiration seems to be James Mason, a long-time fascist who belonged to the American Nazi Party and later, during the 1970s, joined a more militant offshoot. During the 1980s, Mason published a newsletter called SIEGE, in which he eschewed political activism in favor of creating a new fascist regime through murder, small “lone wolf” terror attacks, and all-out war against the government. Mason also struck up a friendship with the late Charles Manson, who has become another hero for Atomwaffen.

The organization first gained a measure of national attention in May of last year, when 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, one of Atomwaffen’s founding members, was charged in state court in Tampa, Florida, with murdering two of his roommates, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22. Both victims were Atomwaffen loyalists.

The murders allegedly occurred after Arthurs traded Nazism for radical Islam. When police took Arthurs into custody, according to news accounts based on police reports, he claimed he had shot his former comrades because they had taunted him about his Muslim faith and plotted violent attacks to further their fascist agenda. Arthurs told investigators he killed Onsechuk and Himmelman “because they want to build a Fourth Reich.”

While Arthurs initially confessed to the killings, he has pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing. In early January, a judge ordered a psychiatrist to determine whether Arthurs is mentally competent to stand trial.

When law enforcement searched the apartment in Tampa, Florida, where Arthurs and the others lived, they found firearms, a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, rifles, ammunition, and a cooler full of a highly volatile explosive called HMTD. Investigators also discovered radioactive material in the home.

The bomb-making material belonged to a fourth roommate, Atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell, a Florida National Guardsman. Arthurs told authorities that Russell had been planning to blow up a nuclear power plant near Miami. Earlier this month Russell pleaded guilty in federal district court in Tampa to illegal possession of explosives and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Atomwaffen surfaced again in connection with a double homicide in Reston, Virginia, in December 2017. A 17-year-old neo-Nazi allegedly shot to death his girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker and Scott Fricker, who had urged their daughter to break up with him. The accused, who shot himself as well but survived and remains hospitalized, was charged as a juvenile in state court in Virginia with two counts of homicide.

The 17-year-old was a big fan of Atomwaffen and James Mason, according to reporting by the Huffington Post, which examined his social media trail.

The former Atomwaffen member in contact with ProPublica said that the teen was more than a fan: He was in direct communication with the group.

“Their rhetoric is some of the most extreme we have seen,” said Joanna Mendelson, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The group, she said, views itself as the radical vanguard of the white supremacist movement, the frontline soldiers of an imminent race war.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gla

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 30, 2018 9:27 pm

A historical perspective on the contemporary racial divide


During his election campaign, he condemned Obama for failing to label terrorism as “radical Islamic terrorism,” claiming that if you don’t call it what it is, you can’t address it. What happened during that rally was unambiguously an act of terrorism perpetrated by a white neo-Nazi; however, Trump, who is quick to call out people and groups by name, failed to denounce the white nationalist groups behind that act of terror but rather blamed it on “all the sides involved.”

That absurd assertion was also criticized during what was planned to have been a press conference on infrastructure on the 15th of August. He went off script and doubled down on his contention that it was both sides involved who were responsible and remained adamant in his refusal to label it an act of terrorism. Had that driver been a Muslim, it would have been called terrorism in mere seconds. He went on to throw salt on the wound by labelling those white nationalists, KKK and neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

This wasn’t surprising considering that during his election campaign he encouraged the use of violence against those who opposed him, even offering to pay legal fees for whoever punches a man in the face who disagreed and voiced his discontentment. Despite his supporters instigating and initiating violence, he still blamed those who opposed him.

The optics of his rallies resembled lynch mobs. His divisive and hateful rhetoric during his campaign made these white nationalist groups feel as though he spoke for them and that their message was no longer taboo.


Image
Let It Burn” – Art: Kamau Mukuria (Comrade Pitt), 1197165, Red Onion Prison, P.O. Box 1900, Pound VA 24279

Upon being elected into office, he encircled himself with people in his cabinet who are xenophobic, nationalist, bigots and misogynists. His failure to call out those white nationalists and label that cowardly act terrorism is solely due to the fact that he views KKK and neo-Nazis as his base.

After Trump’s initial response to Charlottesville, David Duke sent a tweet reminding Trump that he should remember it’s the white Amerikkkans who put him in office. Following the second press conference, when Trump doubled down, David Duke, who apparently is very active on Twitter, thanked Trump for standing up for white Amerikkkans.

His presidency has only exacerbated racial tensions and further divided the already divided nation. He has set the tone for white nationalist groups to come out of the shadows, and there is no ambiguity whatsoever as to where he stands. His “leadership” or lack thereof further helps explain the rise of hate groups and hate crimes, which have dramatically proliferated, particularly in the South.

What we witnessed in Charlottesville was cumulative and reminiscent of the 1960s and as far back as memory or history serves. It’s 2017, yet the evils of white supremacy that our great leaders – Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, George Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and more – gave their lives confronting is still a perennial ideology that we continue to confront. Despite slavery being “abolished,” its residue still pervades.

“America first,” “Make America great again,” “Deport immigrants taking your jobs,” “Build the (border) wall,” “Ban Muslims” – Trump’s rhetoric and policies have only fueled the hate white nationalist groups have towards non-whites. Bluntly speaking, he is the wind beneath their wings.


http://sfbayview.com/2018/01/a-historic ... al-divide/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 48 guests