Hate Groups in the U.S.

Organized hate groups or neo-Nazi organizations remain unremitting sources of anti-Jewish hostility and significant factors in assessing the intensity of anti-Semitism in America today.

There are instances, though rare relative to the total number of instances, in which hate group members and associates engage in violence or vandalism to fulfill the aims of the groups they represent. These groups also have the potential to produce vicious and incendiary propoganda that inspires individuals to commit acts of terror. The propaganda produced by the myriad of American hate groups can potentially affect the impressionable young, the disaffected and those looking for a scapegoat to explain away their problems. Thus, a culture of hate, shielded by First Amendment protections, exists on the fringes of American society.

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Aryan Nations

Despite the poor health of its leader, Richard Butler, and internal power struggles that have siphoned off support and membership over the past decade, the Hayden Lake, Idaho-based Aryan Nations remains an organization of serious concern and a potential catalyst for acts of violence. The ideology that motivates the group's hatred is "Christian Identity," a pseudo-religious doctrine which argues that Northern European whites and their American descendants are the "Chosen People" of Scriptural prophecy; that Jews are the "Synagogue of Satan"; that Blacks and other people of color are subhuman "mud people," and that the Bible mandates that homosexuals be executed. To promote this agenda, Aryan Nations hosts semiannual gatherings at its headquarters, conducts a "prison outreach ministry" affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, and operates a Home Page on the World Wide Web. Aryan Nations is the most significant "Identity"-oriented organization in America.

Klu Klux Klan (KKK)

Though currently suffering its greatest decline since the 1940s, with its three most prominent national units of the era-the United Clans of America, the Invisible Empire Knights of the KKK and the Knights of the KKK-either defunct or factionalized, America's oldest hate group, the Ku Klux Klan, continues to operate on a local level, in some instances still engaging in illegal acts of violence and intimidation. Local Klan factions active today include:

Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan: Formed in 1985 by Virgil Griffin and based in Mount Holly, North Carolina. The Christian Knights are active in North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. A suspect in two June 1995 arsons of predominately Black South Carolina churches-part of an apparent epidemic of church arsons occurring throughout the country since January 1995-carried a card identifying him as a member of the Christian Knights.

Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan: A breakaway faction from the now-defunct Invisible Empire Knights of the KKK, the Keystone Knights was founded by Barry Black in 1992 and is based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The Keystone Knights publishes an anti-Jewish, anti-Black newsletter called The Keystone American.

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Arkansas Faction): The Harrison, Arkansas-based Knights of the KKK, led by Thom Robb, is the largest and most active Klan faction operating in the nation today. Nonetheless, a rash of schisms and defections in 1994 has contributed to a dramatic decline in the Knights' numbers; from a total of approximately 1,000 members three years ago, the Knights today can claim a hard-core membership of at most 500, spread across seven states. In addition to traditional KKK activities, Thom Robb also maintains a Klan Web site on the computer Internet.

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Michigan Faction): A splinter group in Thom Robb's Knights formed in August 1994 when three Klan officers in Michigan, Indiana and Illinois claimed the Knights' name for themselves and declared Robb "deposed" as national director. Robb responded by expelling the three from the Knights. The Michigan faction of the Knights today maintains an even lower profile than the Arkansas branch.

Federation of Klans, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan: The Federation of Klans was formed in April 1994 by Chicagoan Ed Novak (né Ed Melkonian) following his defection from the Knights of the KKK. Though originally making significant inroads among Klansmen at the start of his defection, Novak has engaged in little organizing since 1994, and today Federation of Klans membership stands at no more than 50 people across five states.

Knights of the White Camellia Ku Klux Klan: The Knights of the White Camellia, a Texas Klan group led by Charles Lee, along with the Texas chapter of Thom Robb's Knights of the KKK, has been linked to a number of incidents of racial intimidation and harassment in Vidor, Texas. These incidents, which occurred in 1992 and 1993, involved efforts to prevent the desegregation of an all-white Federally assisted housing project in Vidor. Among the reported acts of intimidation was the threat to blow up a housing unit to prevent its integration; residents of the project additionally alleged that the White Camellia Knights carried automatic weapons on a bus they drove through the housing complex and that one Klan member offered white children $50 to beat up African-American children. The Texas Commission on Human Rights has brought a civil suit against both Klan groups in response to these incidents.

Militias

Though not anti-Semitic in intent, the militia movement is nonetheless a highly significant development on the far right in the 1990s, and has become a lightning rod for anti-Semitic propaganda and agitation. Coming to public attention in early 1994, militia organizations now operate in at least 40 states, with membership totaling as much as 15,000 nationwide-more than the current number of skinheads, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen combined.

Militia groups came under intense scrutiny in the national media after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, because of accused bomber Timothy McVeigh's possible association with the Arizona Patriots, a militia-style group with a history of weapons stockpiling and anti-Semitism, and a militia group in Michigan, and because it was widely reported that he embraced the same political agenda that animates the movement.

Among McVeigh's reported inspirations for the Oklahoma City catastrophe was the neo-Nazi fantasy novel, The Turner Diaries; moreover, he and Terry Nichols-the other accused perpetrator-were devoted readers of The Spotlight, a weekly tabloid newspaper published by the Liberty Lobby, the leading anti-Semitic propaganda organization in the United States.

Additional manifestations of anti-Semitism in the militia movement can be found in a number of cases. For example, the leader of the Militia of Montana, John Trochmann, in addition to a current association with Liberty Lobby, was a 1990 speaker at an Aryan Nations event. More explicitly, Linda Thompson, a propagandist and activist in militia circles, stated last year, "it seems pretty obvious to me. . . that we've gotten so much infiltration in Secret Service and F.B.I. by Israeli Mossad that it [the FBI] is predominantly Israeli-controlled." In a subsequent Internet posting, Thompson also praised the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Furthermore, popular speakers on the militia circuit include avowed anti-Semites such as the tax protector "Red" Beckman and the conspiracy theorist Eustace Mullins.

National Alliance

The neo-Nazi National Alliance is the most sophisticated, best organized and best financed overtly Hitlerian organization in the United States. Its leader is William Pierce, a former officer in the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, and the author of The Turner Diaries, the fantasy novel reported to have inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Over the past 20 years, the National Alliance has been home to, or connected with, some of America's most violent right-wing terrorists, including The Order, the most significant right-wing domestic terror group of the 1980s. In addition to promoting books such as The Turner Diaries, the National Alliance produces propaganda, often designed to appeal to neo-Nazi skinheads, denouncing Jews as well as "black, brown and yellow parasites."

Equal opportunity bigots, the National Alliance also creates propaganda that attacks gays and lesbians, women and feminism, and even the disabled. Such materials are distributed across the country and around the world via printed flyers, Internet postings on the World Wide Web and shortwave radio broadcasts.

Skinheads

Neo-Nazi skinheads in the United States have been responsible for at least 41 murders since December 1987. Some of the more notorious of these killings have included the stomping death of a 15-year-old Vietnamese immigrant by two 18-year-old skins in Houston, Texas. The following year in Arlington, Texas, three 16-year-old members of the Confederate Hammerskins killed an African-American man while he sat on the back of a truck with white friends. Skinheads belonging to the Aryan National Front were responsible for two separate killings of homeless African-American men in Birmingham, Alabama, during the winter of 1991-92. In January 1995, two skinhead brothers near Allentown, Pennsylvania, murdered their father, mother and younger brother; the two murderers had reportedly been visitors to the "Christian Identity" compound of Pennsylvania Aryan Nations activist Mark Thomas. So immersed were they in skinhead culture that the two had slogans and Nazi insignias tattooed on their foreheads.

Racist skinheads do not confine their bigotry purely to ethnic prejudice. They have also been responsible for several murders and countless assaults against gays and lesbians. Fatal attacks have occurred in New York City; San Diego; St. Louis; Salem, Oregon; and Reno, Nevada. Furthermore, racist skinheads have also attacked and even killed their anti-racist counterparts in brawls and unprovoked attacks.

Like the most militant members of the "Christian Identity" and militia underworlds, some skinheads have harbored fantasies of fomenting a race war in the United States. In July 1993, four members of the Fourth Reich Skins were among a group of eight charged in Los Angeles with planning a conspiracy to bomb an African-American church, to mail a letter bomb to a rabbi, and to assassinate several Black public figures. Within 10 days of the Los Angeles arrests, three skinheads from Washington State were also arrested in connection to two bombings that were part of another plot to ignite a race war. The three Washington skinheads later pleaded guilty.

White Aryan Resistance (WAR)

Founded by former California Klan leader Tom Metzger in 1983, WAR has been the leading information and propaganda clearinghouse for the neo-Nazi skinhead movement in the United States. In addition to its catalyzing presence among young hatemongers, WAR on at least one occasion has played an instigating role: in 1988, Dave Mazzella, then billed as a WAR "vice-president," met with members of a Portland, Oregon, skinhead gang, East Side White Pride. After receiving a "crash course" with Mazzella on the finer points of street brawling and ethnic intimidation, three members of the gang attacked a group of Ethiopian immigrants with a baseball bat and steel-toed boots. One of the immigrants, Mulugeta Seraw, was murdered.

In response to this hate crime, ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1990 instituted civil litigation against Metzger on behalf of the Seraw family. With the participation of Mazzella-who was not charged in the murder and who meanwhile had left the racist movement and renounced his ties to the Metzgers-the two civil rights groups were able to secure a $12.5 million judgment against WAR and Metzger. Upheld on appeal in April 1993, this judgment is one of the largest civil verdicts of its kind in U.S. history. Nonetheless, WAR continues to publish a monthly tabloid and operates a telephone hate message service, as well as an Internet Home Page, to disseminate the lowest level of hatemongering propaganda against Jews, Blacks and other groups. With a proven record of violence, WAR remains a group whose activities and publications demand the attention of law enforcement and the condemnation of the public.