Today, we’re releasing the latest issue of the Intelligence Report, the investigative quarterly published by the Southern Poverty Law Center and written by the staff of Hatewatch. Highlights include a cover story about the racist fringe of the black Hebrew Israelite movement, whose preachers are predicting the imminent return of Jesus Christ, who they expect will kill or enslave whites, Jews, homosexuals and others. The story describes how thousands of black men and women have joined this movement, which is spreading rapidly from East Coast inner-city neighborhoods to cities across the country. Other stories include:

• “‘Arming’ for Armageddon” examines the apocalyptic movement Joel’s Army. Numbering in the tens of thousands, members of this movement are breaking away in droves from mainline Pentecostal churches and embracing an ideology of theocratic takeover. The approach is so militant that one Christian ministry worries it may soon produce “real warfare with actual warriors.”
• “Anti-Semitism Goes to School” reports on anti-Semitism on university campuses, including strains that originate on the political left. Two examples — extremist Muslims at a California campus and a once-“progressive” forum in Oregon — serve to illustrate this phenomenon.
• “From Brazil to Auschwitz” describes how twin brothers in Massachusetts who have led a nativist crusade against Brazilian immigrants also may be Holocaust deniers.

Here’s a link to the rest of the issue, which includes an array of other features and short news items. We hope you’ll find it interesting and important.

The racist skinhead logged on with exciting news: He’d just enlisted in the United States Army.

“Sieg Heil, I will do us proud,” he wrote. It was a June 3 post to AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which “Sobibor’s SS,” who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala., had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II).

About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor’s SS bragged in another post to Forum 14 that he’d specifically requested and been assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D. MOS98D soldiers are in high demand right now. That’s because they’re specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) like the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, a part of learning how to disarm an IED is learning how to make one.

“I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing [sic] my clearance I can’t share them here,” Sobibor’s SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose than defending America: “Once all the Jews are gone the world will start fixing itself.”

Sobibor’s SS included enough biographical details in his various posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he’s a single father from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator with access to enlistment records for recent months should have little trouble discerning whether the Army is actually teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind how to be a tactical bomb maker.

But there’s little reason to expect that will happen.

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives. ( continue to full post… )

As news of a possible assassination plot against Sen. Barack Obama broke on Monday and Tuesday, white supremacists reacted overwhelmingly with suspicion that they were being set up by the federal government to take the fall.

Reports from Denver indicate that the three men arrested in the supposed plot on Sunday — Tharin Gartrell, Nathan D. Johnson and Shawn Adolf — may have been linked to a “white supremacy group,” possibly racist skinheads. One of the men was reportedly wearing a swastika ring when arrested, and one was said to be linked to a motorcycle gang called the Sons of Silence. The Southern Poverty Law Center has no evidence linking the gang or any of the three men to white supremacism.

“Seems more like an attempt by ZOG to assassinate us,” wrote “DAglaff Wolfing” on Stormfront.org, the most important white supremacist Web forum, referring to the “Zionist Occupation Government” — white supremacist lingo for the federal government. Added “Ravening Wolf” in the same thread: “It wouldn’t surprise me if these people are jews [sic], or dumb patsies, involved in yet another false-flag Mossad operation … in order to conjure up yet more anti-gun legislation.”

“I completely predicted that they would do this,” “AZDane” wrote on Stormfront. “If Obama IS assassinated, it will be the gov’t doing it and we’ll take the blame. Like always.”

Many of those posting derided those arrested because police also found quantities of methamphetamine. (“Besides,” wrote one, “real white men wouldn’t have been stopped from completing their mission, whatever it may be. These people were fools.”) But they kept coming back to the idea of a government plot.

“It sounds like concocted BS,” wrote “General1812.” “Seriously, plots that are this serious don’t come to the surface so easily. The government law enforcement [agencies] may be expecting Obama to win, and so are getting ready to conduct a preemptive strike against WNist [white nationalist] organizations.”

Or, as “Alida302” put it in the Stormfront thread: “Sound like a bunch of wannabe small timers to me. They need to make sure that [Obama’s] black ass is protected. His death would bring down a s**tstorm of hell upon all of us.”

Earlier, long before the Democratic convention opened in Denver, many white supremacists were arguing that an Obama victory could actually be good for their movement. They predicted that such a victory would shock white Americans, drive millions of them into white supremacist groups and, ultimately, lead to a race war that would finally result in the much hoped-for final Aryan victory.

Although it was called a “national security convention,” the three-day event hosted by a Denver-area American Legion post last week was concerned about one thing: illegal immigration.

American Legion Post 1111 in Bloomfield, Colo., joined with two nativist groups to sponsor the Aug. 21-23 convention that featured hard-line anti-immigration rabble-rousers Glenn Spencer and Frosty Wooldridge. Although the convention involved an individual legion post, the national legion this spring launched a campaign against illegal immigration that featured a booklet filled with inaccuracies about undocumented immigrants. After Hispanic groups expressed concerns, a message appeared on the legion’s website stating that the booklet was being “updated.”

At last week’s convention, attendees got to watch the premiere of a video called “Border Truth USA,” which took viewers on “a high-definition video tour of the border narrated live by Glenn Spencer,” according to Spencer’s American Patrol website. He also demonstrated the “Virtual Vigilance camera system.”

But Spencer, who leads the vitriolic hate groups American Patrol and American Border Patrol, has done more than show off gadgets designed to catch “illegal aliens.” He’s also spouted anti-Latino comments, proclaiming in a 1996 letter to The Los Angeles Times that “Mexican culture is based on deceit” and “Chicanos and Mexicanos lie as a means of survival.” Local retiree Francis McWilliams, who was introduced as American Border Patrol’s director in September 2002, quickly resigned after concluding that Spencer was “borderline xenophobic.” Spencer also sent every member of Congress a copy of his video, “Bonds of our Nation,” which promotes the myth that the Mexican government and Mexican-Americans are plotting to take over the American Southwest and create the nation of Aztlan. Betina McCann, then the fiancée of neo-Nazi Steven Barry, hand-delivered the videos. In 2003, Spencer was charged with four felonies after repeatedly firing a .357 rifle into the night and hitting, among other things, a neighbor’s garage. He said he had heard “suspicious noises” in his backyard. After pleading to a single misdemeanor count of endangerment, he was fined $2,500 and sentenced to a year’s probation.

Although Spencer toned down the racist rhetoric after moving from California to Cochise County, Ariz., in 2002, he recently posted a Washington Times story about whites losing their hold on the majority amid rising Hispanic immigration, along with a cartoon showing Uncle Sam with the gun of “liberalism” in his mouth as “Mexico” pulls the trigger. Above the article and cartoon is Spencer’s heading: “White America Commits Suicide: The Coming Disunited States of America.” ( continue to full post… )

Intelligence Report Senior Editor David Holthouse and I discuss the recent Jerome Corsi affair in this week’s podcast. Corsi, widely criticized for his recent book attacking Barack Obama and also earlier condemnations of John McCain, turns out to be a regular on a white supremacist radio show.

Question: What do the National Chicken Council, AT&T Corp., the Seattle Police Department, the Petroleum Club of Houston and the Korean Acupuncture Association of Illinois have in common with the infamous Middle Eastern terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi?

Answer: They’re all key players in the Aztlan conspiracy, a secret plot to reconquer the seven Southwestern states and merge them with Mexico.

At least, that is, according to James Joseph Sanchez, creator of Who’s Who in the Aztlan Movement, a two-volume compilation set containing the names of 42,732 “individuals, organizations and incidents.” According to the second volume inside jacket copy, it represents “the largest open source, cross-referenced named-persons index to the Aztlan movement and their allies.” Although Sanchez doesn’t explain it — the volumes contain no introductory or explanatory material at all, just a seemingly endless list — Aztlan is a term sometimes used by Latino nationalists to describe the part of the United States once controlled by Spain and/or Mexico. Nativist conspiracy theorists and white supremacists have seized upon a few statements by Latino radicals to claim that Mexico is really secretly planning to take over much of America.

The conspiracy, apparently, is massive. In tiny, hard-to-read type, Sanchez lists as members of the alleged “Aztlan Movement” more than 1,000 Latino street gangs, 29 members of the “California State Assemby” [sic], a dozen United Auto Workers union locals, Catholic churches, Unitarian churches, a Somalian organic coffee company, McDonald’s Corp., and Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili.

Casting a net that’s perhaps just a smidgen too wide, Sanchez also lists You Don’t Speak For Me!, a Hispanic anti-immigration front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nativist hate group that has itself plugged the Aztlan conspiracy theory.

Nowhere does Sanchez say what part all these alleged individuals and organizations (full disclosure: they include the Southern Poverty Law Center and several of its employees) have in the Aztlan conspiracy. It is enough, apparently, to know they are on the list. ( continue to full post… )

Right-wing propagandist Jerome Corsi backed out of his scheduled appearance on the white supremacist radio show, “The Political Cesspool,” last night only five minutes before he was supposed to go on, according to the show’s host James Edwards.

Just before 5 p.m. CST, Edwards came on the air following a commercial break to announce that Corsi had just E-mailed to cancel his scheduled hour-long interview due to “travel plans that changed.”

Edwards sounded skeptical of Corsi’s explanation, and with good reason. Last week Corsi was at the center of a media firestorm concerning the multitude of inaccuracies, distortions and outright lies in his new book The Obama Nation, as well his scheduled appearance on last night’s “Cesspool,” which was first reported by Hatewatch on Aug. 13.

That night, during his appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Corsi reiterated his past apologies for a series of bigoted and hateful blog posts he wrote in the years spanning 2001-2004.

But if Corsi was trying to salvage his reputation by not appearing on the “Cesspool” last night, he was probably too late. As Hatewatch also first reported last week, Corsi had previously appeared on the racist, anti-Semitic radio show on July 20. His interview was streamed live on the Internet by the white nationalist website Stormfront, which is run by a former Klan leader. ( continue to full post… )

Myth monger Jerome Corsi is at it again.

The author notorious for his book falsely vilifying 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry has penned an equally spurious attack on this year’s presumed Democratic nominee. The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, released on Aug. 1, has taken less than two weeks to clinch the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list. (It’s not that Corsi is any fan of presumptive Republican nominee John McCain; Corsi has accused McCain of being supported by a group with ties to Al Qaeda and vowed that he would not support the Republican candidate.)

While the book’s popularity is beyond dispute, its content is not. The website Media Matters recently documented Corsi’s numerous untrue or misleading allegations.

That his book is rife with inaccuracies hasn’t stopped Corsi from promoting it on dozens of talk shows, where he has peddled additional falsehoods about Obama. On Fox News’ Hannity’s America, for instance, he made the ludicrous claim that Obama supports abortion “after a child’s born.”

Perhaps Corsi’s most telling appearance, however, has been on The Political Cesspool, an overtly racist, anti-Semitic radio show hosted by self-avowed white nationalist James Edwards. Corsi was interviewed on the Cesspool on July 20 and is scheduled to appear again this Sunday, August 17, joining a recent guest roster that has included Christian Identity pastor Pete Peters, Holocaust denier Mark Weber and former Klan boss David Duke.

Along with promoting Corsi’s appearances, Edwards is boasting on his website that the three-hour weekly show will join the Republic Broadcasting Network in September. This conspiracy-minded network, heard via satellite and the web, features talk about a sinister “New World Order” and wild theories about the causes of 9/11. Shows that air on the network include The Piper Report, named after host Michael Collins Piper, who has contributed to the holocaust denial magazine The Barnes Review, and Mark Dankof’s America, which has interviewed Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial group.

On this week’s podcast, Heidi Beirich and I discuss her eyebrow-raising story about Chloe Black, the former wife of Klan leader David Duke who is currently married to Don Black, founder of the white supremacist website Stormfront. Chloe Black, who has a long movement history of her own, has been fronting for a school meant to lift black and Latino kids out of poverty. What’s more, when she insisted to reporters that she was no racist, there was a remarkable unintended consequence — a major, angry backlash from her husband’s racist supporters.

On Aug. 4, FOX News aired a segment about the Canadian prosecution of conservative author Mark Steyn for alleged anti-Muslim human rights violations. Steyn, the author of the No. 1 Canadian bestseller, America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, has had three complaints lodged against him for human rights violations by the Canadian Islamic Congress. Two cases have been dismissed, but the Human Rights Tribunal of British Columbia is still investigating a charge that Steyn’s work amounts to hate speech against Muslims.

Steyn’s book, which was serialized in the well-known Canadian newsmagazine Macleans, contends that Western democracies, particularly in Europe, may become fertile ground for Islamic extremists because of rapidly growing Muslim populations.

While there are many individuals and groups that think the prosecution of Steyn harms free speech in Canada — including PEN Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists — Fox News correspondent Steve Brown chose to interview a decidedly odd source: Paul Fromm, who was very sparingly identified on the broadcast as a “Free Speech Activist.” That’s a pretty weak, not to say completely misleading, description of Paul Fromm. As anyone who lives in Canada or who has access to Google should know, Fromm is Canada’s most notorious extremist, whose views form a trifecta of hate: he’s a white supremacist, a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite. And he’s got a history of extremism a mile long.

“What we are seeing is an effort by minority groups, including in this case radical Muslims, to shut down criticism and that’s what it is,” Fromm, who habitually mocks Muslims, once calling a Muslim woman “a hag in a bag” while participating in a conference put on by former Klansman David Duke, told FOX about the Steyn investigations. At a 2007 meeting of racists and Holocaust deniers in Atlanta, Fromm pulled the Muslim hate card again, labeling Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama “a crypto-Moslem of mixed parentage.”

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