Skinheads, considered the most violence-prone of extreme right-wing racist groups in the United States, seem to have finally burst into public awareness.
A fictionalized portrayal of actual events involving the shaven-headed, neo-Nazi youths will be broadcast by CBS on Jan. 23 as a television docudrama, “So Proudly We Hail.”
At the same time, the American Jewish Committee will release a booklet which details the history of racist Skinheads, and advises tactics to rout them. (Some youth affect Skinhead dress but not Nazi ideology.)
“Skinheads: Who They Are £ What to Do When They Come to Town,” will be distributed nationwide in tandem with the television special.
The booklet, edited by Kenneth Stern, AJCommittee program specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism, tells of the Skinheads’ origins in Britain in 1967 and provides a profile of the Skinheads, whose numbers have increased 17-fold in this country since 1986.
The television-booklet package was conceived by Stern, who spoke of the increasing danger the Skinheads pose.
“There have been six deaths in the last two years,” he said in a telephone interview. “Between Jan. 1, 1988, and the end of October 1989, there were 187 bias-related arrests associated with Skinheads.”
In a preface to the booklet, Lionel Chetwynd, producer of the CBS program, asks a daunting question: “How can it be that American soil can, in our time, prove so fertile a ground for something as loathsome as Nazism?”
DOMESTIC TERRORISTS
The increasing attention given Skinheads seems to justify the description of them offered just a month ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., as the “domestic terrorists of the 1990s,” whose violent acts have surpassed those of all other right-wing, racist groups.
It confirms a forecast in 1987 by Leonard Zeskind, research director of the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitors right-wing activity.
Zeskind, addressing a conference on malicious harassment following racist bombings in Idaho, said at the time that “nothing frightens me more than the Skinheads.”
In the booklet, Zeskind explains that “they’re the first generation of white kids who don’t expect to live better than their parents.”
The Skinheads, as a group, provide alienated youth “with a sense of community, excited by a shared perception of living under siege,” the booklet says.
AJCommittee slams talk-show hosts like Morton Downey Jr. and Geraldo Rivera for giving Skinheads “free publicity,” which “undoubtedly helped the Skinheads grow.”
Under “What Can We Do?” AJCommittee advises people to report bias-related crimes and to propose to legislators a uniform, nationwide system for reporting hate crimes.
AJCommittee also urges people to contact its local offices to find out if their police departments have bias units and, if not, what can be done to help create them.
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