In the continued spirit of tying up loose ends in our coverage of the aftermath of the Giffords case, I’m linking to this thorough Politico debunking of allegations that Jared Lee Loughner, the accused shooter in the Gabby Giffords shooting, had ties to racist groups.
We picked up the original Fox News reporting of a law enforcement memo suggesting that Loughner might have ties to an extremist group. We also followed up with the ADL’s own debunking of the notion that Loughner is attached to a recognizable political movement.
Key points from the ADL and Politico debunkings:
A) The memo originated with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, and its officials are now saying it has errors. It’s not clear what, if any, role any federal agency had in disseminating the memo. (Fox originally suggested it was being circulated within Homeland Security, and later walked that back.)
B) Nothing at all seems to link Loughner to the named group, American Renaissance, or any other group.
C) While American Renaissance has views on race that could be characterized as outside of the mainstream, it is not attached to the fervid "Zionist Occupied Government" imaginings of the extreme right.
Here’s founder Jared Taylor to Politico:
Taylor told POLITCO “people for years have been calling us racist, but nobody has been calling us anti-government, anti-Semitic or this ZOG business. I mean, anybody who spent three minutes looking at our webpage would know we’re not talking about any of that stuff.”
In an effort to set the record straight on his group and its philosophy – which he calls “race realism” (“It is the view that most people quite naturally and normally prefer the company of people of the same race”) – he said he had reached out to Fox News asking for the source of the memo and also had talked with representative from DHS and the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, imploring them to put out a statement absolving his group from involvement with Loughner – so far, to no avail.
“We’re the victim,” he said. “Fox told me they have to protect their sources. And here you’ve got some government agency allegedly saying we’re a bunch of anti-government anti-Semites who pall around with deranged killers,” he said. “Do you like that on your official biography?”
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