A handbook detailing the activities and backgrounds of major rightwing extremists in America — 23 organizations and 48 individuals — was made public today by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
The 175-page comprehensive guide, listing those who attack democratic freedoms and advocate anti-Semitic or racist policies, includes the violence-prone Posse Comitatus, the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi groups. Entitled “Extremism on the Right,” it was presented at a session of the ADL’s national executive committee meeting here.
Justin Finger, director of the ADL’s civil rights division, told some 200 Jewish community leaders attending the meeting, which began today and concludes Sunday, that the guidebook is based on several decades of ADL’s monitoring, exposing and countering these groups. He said that many of the groups and individuals listed have close ideological or organizational links with each other.
“The threat from extremists, which represent only a fraction of our society, lies not in their numbers but in their inflammatory propaganda and their potential for inciting and perpetrating violence,” Finger said.
SOME OF THE EXTREMIST ORGANIZATIONS
Organizations listed and described in the handbook include:
* Posse Comitatus, which is composed of loosely affiliated bands of armed vigilantes, achieved national prominence when one of its members was indicted for killing two U.S. marshals last February and was later killed himself in a shoot-out with police. Through publications and radio broadcasts. Posse members disseminate virulent anti-Semitic and racist propaganda, and denounce the U.S. government.
* The Ku Klux Klan, embracing three major factions as well as smaller, splinter groups, is the oldest and largest of violent U.S. rightwing extremist groups. Its membership is estimated at 8,000 to 10,000. Members of the Klan have operated paramilitary training camps in various locations across the nation. Klan groups continue to engage in rallies, cross-burnings and in the outpouring of hate literature against Blacks, Jews and immigrant groups.
* Liberty Lobby, which describes itself as a “pressure group for patriotism,” is the best financed anti-Semitic organization in the United States. The organization’s weekly newspaper. The Spotlight, with a claimed circulation of 247,000, is the most widely read rightwing extremist newspaper in the country. Spotlight attempts to project an image of conservative respectability, but the paper’s recurrent themes reveal Spotlight’s true targets of bigotry and hate — “Zionism,” “Israel’s American supporters,” “dual loyalists,” “International Bankers” and other code words for Jews.
* National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) is a quasi political propaganda network founded and run by Lyndon La Rouche Jr., a one-time member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Originally a far-left group with a Marxist ideology, NCLC has since lurched far to the right, although it still reflects a positive attitude toward the Soviet Union and its policies.
In 1980, LaRouche sought the Democratic presidential nomination and entered 15 state primaries, garnering 185,000 votes. This sparked a number of NCLC-member local candidacies around the nation. NCLC publications single out prominent Jews, Jewish families and Jewish organizations for abuse, and attack Israel and Zionism. NCLC front groups include the Fusion Energy Foundation, the National Anti-Drug Coalition, and the Humanist Academy; its publications include New Solidarity and Executive Intelligence Review.
* Institute for Historical Review has been the primary force in the movement to deny the reality of the Holocaust. Operating under the guise of responsible scholarship, the Institute has solicited membership from the ranks of academia and from the public. Its “revisionist” materials are replete with anti-Semitic themes and it claims the Holocaust is “atrocity propaganda.”
* Aryan Nations, one of the most virulent of American hate groups, advocates racism and anti-Semitism and has declared as its ultimate aim the establishment of a “national racist state,” by violent means if necessary. A newsletter published by the group in 1982 declared that “just as our forefathers purchased their freedom in blood so must we …. We will have to kill the bastards.” Aryan Nations has links to the German neo-Nazi leader Manfred Roeder, and to the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups.
* The Christian Patriots Defense League is one of several “survivalist” groups which are involved in paramilitary training. Purveying racism and anti-Semitism, the group’s membership application form states “the very survival of the Caucasian race is at stake.”
* The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, a paramilitary survivalist group, operates a “Christian” communal settlement in rural Missouri, and advocates preparation for the “ultimate Holocaust.” One of its leaders, Kerry Noble, has declared, “We do believe that nonwhites and Jews are a threat to our Christian, white race” and that “Jews are financing the training of blacks to take over most of our major cities.”
* New Order/ National Socialist White People’s Party, the current name of the original neo-Nazi organization in the United States founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, is the largest and oldest (founded 1959) of seven neo-Nazi groups listed in the handbook. Preaching Hitlerian philosophy and often brandishing swastikas and other Nazi regalia, members of the neo-Nazi parties have been involved in acts of violence against Jews, Blacks and other minority groups.
* Identity Churches, a pseudo Christian movement that preaches hatred and violence against Jews, Blacks and other minorities, embraces many separate “church” groups and provides a common ideological thread for several organized hate groups — including the Posse and the Klan. The “churches” assert that Anglo-Saxons, not Jews, are the “true Israel” and God’s chosen people. Vicious hostility to nonwhite races and relentless vilification of Jews are major components of the movement’s theology of hate.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
