Tuesday, November 29, 2011

STROLLING HATE STREET

    Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i, or سید علی حسینی خامنه‌ای, or سید علی حسینی خامنه‌ای - Seyyid Əli Xameneyi, is the Supreme Leader of Iran and the figurative head of the Muslim conservative establishment in Iran and Twelver Shi'a marja. He was President of Iran from 1981 to 1989 and has been Supreme Leader of Iran since June 1989 when the Assembly of Experts appointed him to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This would be a big So What? were it not for one bit of interesting and inter-connected news. 
    Dozens of young Iranian men entered buildings inside the British embassy compound in Tehran today, throwing rocks, gas bombs and burning documents looted from the offices. The Fars news agency said that earlier in the day security forces tried to eject the protesters, a minority from a larger group staging an anti-British demonstration outside the compound. Fars referred to the protesters as students who were chanting "Death to America", "Death to England" and "Death to Israel" among other catchy and cliched slogans. These students said that they would not leave until they get direct orders to do so from the Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hossein Khamenei. That is the answer to the big So What? The demonstration succeeded Britain's imposition of new sanctions on the Islamic state last week over its nuclear program, the consequence being that London banned all UK financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts, including the Iran's central bank, as part of a new wave of sanctions by Western countries.
    Why is any of this really all that important? There  are reasons and some pretty fascinating ones. The problem is that here in the United States, we are taught xenophobia and ethnocentrism at such a young age that seriously contemplating our own symbiotic relationship with people in other countries often feels like trying to swim through wool. 
Sherine Tadros
    So what can we do? One thing is we can discover that foreign news is often a lot more interesting than the "Your Pet and the Holidays" nonsense that domestic affiliates favor these days. If you don't believe me, then you should take a read at a smart reporter named Sherine Tadros, the Al Jazeera English correspondent who covers stories in North Africa and the Middle East. Her Twitter page is #!/SherineT, or you can read more in depth writing by Ms. Tadros at http://blogs.aljazeera.net/profile/sherine-tadros. 
    According to her biography, Ms. Tadros has reported for Al Jazeera from the Middle East and North Africa. Highlights include the the seizure of Beirut by Hezbollah, the 2008/9 War on Gaza, where she was one of the only foreign journalists reporting from inside the territory, as well as the Egyptian and Yemen uprisings in 2011. Sherine holds two degrees in Middle East politics and previously taught undergraduate politics at SOAS, University of London. I know it may shock some readers, but Sean Hannity's resume is somewhat less impressive.
    Another excellent source of global news comes from the UK Guardian, a newspaper with a web site of http://www.guardian.co.uk. As I write this, the Guardian reports that the Iranian demonstrators had taken six embassy workers hostage, but that Iranian police have secured their release. That sounds like good news because in November 1979, Iranian militants were goaded into taking over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, a bit of propagandistic nastiness that resulted in a complete alteration in both U.S. and Iranian domestic and foreign policy, one that traces directly to the events of September 11, the fall of Baghdad, and the Arab Spring. If your memory needs refreshing, you can always read the history in the earlier blog postings at Philropost. 
    The entire concept of terror as a tool of social change stunts the mind and yet is just as prevalent here at home as it is in the Middle East. Let's look at two states, Arizona and Ohio. 
Idiots get their exercise
    According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Arizona has twenty-two active hate groups. Here is an overview of some of the more prominent and disturbing.
  • American Patrol is one of the most virulent anti-immigrant groups. On its website and in self-produced videos, the group rails against Mexican immigrants, accusing them of bringing to the U.S. crime, drugs and squalor and of practicing “immigration via the birth canal.” Mexicans, in the words of group founder Glenn Spencer, are a “cultural cancer” following a secret plan, the Plan de Aztlán, to complete “la reconquista” (the reconquest, or takeover) of the American Southwest, which was once controlled by Spain and/or Mexico.
  • The American Third Position is a political party established by racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and "return" the United States to white rule. The group is currently led by a coterie of prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. David Duke’s former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing. The party plans to run candidates nationwide.
  • The Brotherhood of Klans (BOK) has been one of the largest and most widespread Ku Klux Klan organizations in the United States. It is also the only KKK faction to establish chapters outside the U.S., with a sizable presence in Canada. Where most Klan groups splash pictures and news of their activities on their websites, the Brotherhood of Klans is secretive, in the tradition of Klan groups of the past, offering scant details of its actions online and conducting serious background checks of prospective members. In other ways, the BOK is quite modern. Its members often eschew white robes and hoods for paramilitary garb, and its leadership networks extensively with non-Klan white supremacists, most notably racist skinheads and outlaw bikers, as well as with other Klan outfits, especially those based in the Deep South.
  • Still actively practicing polygamy more than a century after the mainstream Mormon Church abandoned the practice, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a white supremacist, homophobic, antigovernment, totalitarian cult. After concealing itself from the public eye for decades by virtually taking over and occupying small towns on the Utah-Arizona border, the intensely secretive FLDS finally started coming under scrutiny in the mid-2000s due to widespread allegations of organized welfare fraud and sexual abuse of children. Following the 2007 conviction of FLDS "prophet" Warren Jeffs on charges of being an accomplice to rape, many of the cult's members relocated to live behind the walls of FLDS compounds in Colorado and Texas.
  • The Jewish Defense League has chapters in Eastern Europe, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Russia, and the United Kingdom, in addition to those in the U.S. The FBI deemed the league a right-wing terrorist group in their report "Terrorism 2000/2001." The JDL continues to wield steady membership through its website and blog, which distort news stories in order to vilify politicians, academics, and community leaders as "anti-Semitic." One such recent attack was entitled "Carter the Jew Hater," and attacked the former president's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
  • Since its founding in 1930, the Nation of Islam has grown into one of the best-known organizations in black America, offering numerous programs and events designed to uplift African Americans. All the same, its theology of innate black superiority over whites — a belief system vehemently and consistently rejected by mainstream Muslims — and the deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric of its leaders, including top minister Louis Farrakhan, have earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate. "[T]he Jews don't like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn't a great man for me as a black person, but he was a great German. Now, I'm not proud of Hitler's evils against Jewish people, but that's a matter of record. He raised Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there's a similarity in that we are raising our people up from nothing."— Louis Farrakhan, radio interview, March 11, 1984.
  • An organization that specializes in theatrical and provocative protests, the National Socialist Movement is one of the largest and most prominent Nazi groups in the United States. The group is notable for its violent anti-Jewish rhetoric, its racist views and its policy allowing members of other racist groups to join NSM while remaining members of other groups. Until 2007, NSM members protested in full Nazi uniforms, now traded in for black “Battle Dress Uniforms.”
The state of Ohio, where this author was born and raised, has thirty-two active hate groups recognized by the SPLC. Here is an overview of the more aromatic organizations.

  • Based in the United Kingdom, Blood & Honour is a shadowy international coalition of racist skinhead gangs. In the United States, two rival groups claim to be affiliated with Blood & Honour. One faction, known as Blood & Honour America Division, was "reestablished" in North America by the skinhead group Volksfront in 2005 and includes skinhead, Nazi and Christian Identity adherents in its ranks. The other group, which became known as Blood & Honour Council USA, was affiliated until recently with the skinhead group, the Vinlanders Social Club, but now is mainly represented by two skinheads who run a racist music label in Ohio and a racist video company in Texas. In 1998, four members of the Tampa, Fla., chapter of Blood & Honour USA — Charles Marovskis, Kenneth Hoover, James Robertson and Corey Hulse — allegedly killed two homeless men in Florida. Both Marovskis and Hoover pleaded guilty to two federal charges of second-degree murder. Robertson pleaded innocent and remains in prison on a separate murder conviction. As of late 2009, Hulse had not been captured. Police say the skinheads beat the homeless men to death because they were considered inferior and because the skinheads wanted to boost their status within the movement.  
  • The Council of Conservative Citizens is the modern reincarnation of the White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC, which initially tried to project a "mainstream" image, has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to blacks as "a retrograde species of humanity." The group's newspaper, Citizens Informer, regularly publishes articles condemning "race mixing," decrying the evils of illegal immigration, and lamenting the decline of white, European civilization.
  • A self-styled religious organization, the Creativity Movement promotes what it sees as the inherent superiority and "creativity" of the white race — about the only tenets there are to its supposed "theology." After the 1993 suicide of Ben Klassen, who initially formed the group in 1973 as the Church of the Creator and wrote a number of foundational texts, new leader Matt Hale renamed it the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) in 1996. The group, largely composed of racist skinheads, developed a reputation for the rampant criminal violence of its members and the verbal violence of Hale. After Hale was convicted of soliciting the murder of a federal judge in 2004 — and the group was ordered to change its name because of a ruling in a copyright infringement trial — the once-formidable outfit now known as the Creativity Movement all but collapsed, leaving only weak remnants.
  • The National Alliance was for decades the most dangerous and best organized Nazi formation in America. Explicitly genocidal in its ideology, NA materials call for the eradication of the Jews and other races — what a principal foundation document describes as "a temporary unpleasantness" — and the creation of an all-white homeland. Founded by William Pierce in 1970, the group produced assassins, bombers and bank robbers, among other things. Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries, was the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and many other acts of terror. After Pierce died unexpectedly in 2002, the group suffered several splits and ultimately lost most of its members. 
More idiots exercising

    I do not intend any of the above information to unduly alarm anyone. I do intend it to duly inform people as to what goes on right under their noses. So as to not sound too high and mighty myself, for more than one year I lived directly across the street from a Nazi printing company, one based in Utah but with a Phoenix storefront. I thought it odd that every Thursday night I would hear loud heavy metal music company from inside the shop. Then I did a little checking. What a sap I was! So, rest assured, there is nothing condescending in this report. However, it does behoove us, I think, to recognize that anger and hate and violence is not a Middle Eastern issue or a Jewish/Arab/Muslim issue, or even a European issue. The feeling that things suck and that a certain group of people identifiable by biological features are somehow responsible (rather than, say, the people who not so coincidentally benefit economically from the practice of collective hate) is today what it was nearly one hundred years ago: fascism. And, in the words of the wise and wonderful comedian Mort Sahl, "Fascism is always the enemy."


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