Ron Paul website posts racist video, warns of New Black Panther "day of rage"
One of the main websites of the Ron Paul presidential campaign, the "Ron Paul Forums", has posted a racist video which claims that the New Black Panther Party planned to hold a "national day of rage" for April 23. While the demonstration warned of in the video failed to materialize, the website still has the highly offensive video posted. (Read here.)
In addition to warning of the incipient "day of rage", the video shows a white man mocking African-American speech patterns and making a telephone call to a New Black Panther office in which claims to be a member of the original Black Panther Party.
I've just read an article that's brought back into focus an issue that I'd put out of my mind since the last presidential campaign: Ron Paul's troubling history of publishing racist columns. (Read here: Why Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters Matter | News One) The article outlines the content of columns written and/or published by Ron Paul in newsletters called Ron Paul's Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report, all of which listed Paul as editor and publisher. The columns in question are absolutely amazing: unashamedly racist, homophobic and paranoid. For your consideration, here are some excerpts from the writings of Dr. Ron Paul.
"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressmen [sic]. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day."
That column went on to suggest, in response to a proposal that a city be named in King's honor, that the city be called either "Welfaria", "Zooville", "Rapetown", "Dirtburg", or "Lazyopolis".
In another shocking column entitled "Blast 'Em?", Dr. Paul warns in dire terms of the dangers of black on white crime. Dr. Paul suggests that white people arm themselves with illegal, unresgistered guns, and goes on to relay the advice of a police officer that, if a gun were to be used to shoot a "youth", that the shooting be concealed and the weapon thrown away.
"(Carjacking) is the hip-hop thing to do among urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. The youth simply walk up to a car they like, pull a gun, tell the family to get out, steal their jewelry and wallets, and take the car to wreck. Such actions have ballooned in the recent months.
"In the old days, average people could avoid such youth by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob.
"What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).
"I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming."
You may remember that Ron Paul also published columns that stated that
"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action."
and
"Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
and
"(W)e are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers."
and
"We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."
Those statements were first revealed in a Houston Chronicle article published in May, 1996. (Read here.) According to the Chronicle, Paul's congressional campaign responded to questions about these statements by saying that they were consistent with anti-crime statements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The Ron Paul campaign issued another statement, published in the Austin American-Statesman, that compared his newsletters to Tolstoy. (Read here.)
"Dr. Paul is being quoted out of context. It's like picking up War and Peace and reading the fourth paragraph on Page 481 and thinking you can understand what's going on."
Paul's defenses of these and many other outrageous columns have raised more questions than they have answered. His initial reaction to this issue, when it was raised by an adversary in the 1996 congressional election, was to admit to having written the columns and to defend their content as insignificant. As Matt Welch pointed out in a column for Reason (read here), statements made at that time by both Paul and his campaign staff accepted responsibility for publishing the columns and failed in any way to indicate that he hadn't written them or even read them. In fact, according to a contemporaneous report in the Dallas Morning News (emphasis added):
Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation.
However, in 2008, Paul claimed that the columns, which he had said that he had written, which were written in the first person and which included references to his family life and other personal touches, had been ghost-written by someone of whose identity he was somehow uncertain. He claimed that it was completely plausible that he would allow people he did not know to author such columns for him, and that he would go on to publish them without prior review to his supporters in newsletters bearing his name in their titles. Such defenses by Dr. Paul insult those who legitimately want information about this troubling side of his record. Paul's answers to these legitimate question do not treat with appropriate gravity a very serious matter. They are not only inconsistent, they are self-contradictory. They are not only implausible, they are impossible.
Why do these newletters continue to matter? In publishing these newsletters, and in his handling of the resulting controversy, Dr. Paul has shown himself to be either a racist, an amnesiac, a liar, or grossly irresponsible. None of those are attributes one should look for in a prospective president.
Ron Paul's current candidacy for president once again raises the questions that he has failed to adequately address since they first came up in 1996. Who wrote the racist material that was published by him under his name in his newsletters? If the columns were ghosted, did he review them prior to publication? If not, why not? Why has he failed to take responsibility for and fully investigate the facts underlying this troubling publication of extreme racist propaganda into the political mainstream? If Ron Paul fails to answer these questions, fully investigate the matter and issue a complete and frank report of his findings, he will have failed to put the matter behind him. He can't just say that it's "old news" and leave it at that. That will only convince his true believers.
In conclusion, here's video of Ron Paul on CNN in 2008, renouncing the contents of his newletters and claiming that he can't possibly be racist because he "does not view people in collective groups". He also argues falsely and in offensive terms which immediately belie this absurd defense that the issue of the newsletters was being raised for a particular political purpose concerning a collective group. (At 2:40 of the below-embedded video.)
"(It is) part knock down Ron Paul because he's gaining grounds with the blacks. I'm getting more support right now, and more votes from the blacks because they understand what I'm talking about and they trust me."
In spite of the fact that the issue had come up in 1996, and that his campaign had at time defended them, Paul states in this interview that, prior to 2008, he was unfamiliar with any of the racist material from his newsletter. As I stated above, his defenses have raised more questions than they've answered.
[The full contents of the Ron Paul newsletters was uncovered in 2008 by the very persistent and clever research of Jamie Kirchick, then of the New Republic. (His great article on this is available behind a paywall here.) Julian Sanchez and David Weigel wrote in Reason in 2008 that they were of the opinion that longtime Ron Paul chief advisor Lew Rockwell was likely the author and almost certainly the real editor of the offensive columns. (Read here.) A fairly comprehensive compendium of links to coverage of the newletters controversy is available here.]
A series of bills intended to limit the rights of children of immigrants has been withdrawn by their sponsors, an implicit acknowledgment that they lacked the votes to pass. (Read here: Trouble in Teabagger Land? - Blog For Arizona.)
Senator Ron Gould (R-Lake Havasu City) was the author of SB-1308 and SB-1309. SB-1308 would have established two new forms of birth certificates: one for children with at least one parent a legal resident and another for children of undocumented immigrants. SB-1309 required children to have at least one parent to be a citizen or documented immigrant in order to be considered a citizen of Arizona. If passed, both of these bills would inevitably face constitutional challenges in that they contradict the plain language of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." There's also the matter of 150 years of subsequent case law.
After his bills were withdrawn, Gould gave an angry floor speech in the Senate, saying:
You have to wonder sometimes why are conservatives still members of the Republican Party.
Sen. Ron Gould
In another example of anti-Hispanic racism in Arizona's senate, Senator Lori Klein (R-Anthem) gave a speech which depicted Hispanic public school students as "gang members" who "don't want to be educated". These conclusions were those of a substitute teacher who wrote a letter complaining about a single disobedient class he had to teach. Here is video of that speech, along with a Democratic response:
And now it turns out that the letter she read may have been a hoax. (Read here.) There's no record of a substitute teacher with the name of the person who sent that letter.
Last Saturday evening, Sheriff Spruell gave a live interview to the Political Cesspool, the radio program of the far-right racist organization Council of Conservative Citizens. Spruell's presence on that program, which backs David Duke for president in 2012, is troubling enough. According to the most recent census, 25% of the residents of Spruell's county are American Indian or Hispanic. Those citizens can hardly be reassured that the man they depend on to enforce the law in their county thinks it appropriate to appear on the nation's most popular explicitly racist program -- one that touts "free speech for White Americans", promotes racist organizations like American Renaissance and individuals like David Duke and promotes racist depictions of African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics.
What Spruell had to say on that radio program was more troubling still. Spruell revealed that he believes that federal employees working on roads in the federal forest and park land in his county may be secretly conspiring to give natural resources to China "as collateral for (the national) debt". Although he offered no evidence for this odd belief, he made a very real and very troubling threat to counter this purported conspiracy. He announced that he would arrest any federal employee who attempted to close a road on federal land in his county. He said that he intended to do this out of his deep, abiding love for the constitution.
The interview is available at about 1:00 of the mp3 at this link. The conspiracy theory mongering begins at about 10:30. (Link goes directly to mp3 file. The interview can also be heard at link #2 of the 2/5/2011 program here.
Sheriff Spruell may think that his constituents want him to protect national forests from the Chinese by arresting Forestry Service employees, but he'd be wrong. About 1/3 of Montezuma County is federal forest which is administered by three federal agencies, and many local residents object to a recently announced plan to end public access to some Forest Service land (read here). Spruell is now using that controversy as a springboard for his broader agenda of opposition to federal authority and promotion of conspiracy theories. When asked by a reporter for the local paper what issues they wanted him to deal with, they universally said crime related to local production of crystal meth, which is endemic in the area. (Read here.) Interestingly, not one of them cited countering the threat of Chinese encroachment on U.S. forests as a concern.
Spruell was brought to the attention of the Cesspool radio show by a supporter, Montezuma County resident Mike Gaddy, who actually conducted the interview. Gaddy is a former leader of the anti-immigrant Minutemen vigilante group and a blogger at the Lew Rockwell website. There, you can read his many columns advocating gun ownership, predicting a civil war in which federal agents will soon confiscate guns and place gun owners in concentration camps (read here) , claiming that U.S. gun control laws are taken word for word from those of Nazi Germany (read here), supporting the Confederacy as opposing a "one world government" (read here), and implying that Pearl Harbor, the TWA 800 crash, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 were done by the federal government (read here). He also claims that the Tucson massacre was a "false flag" undertaken by the federal government to justify further restrictions on gun ownership (read here).
Think about the following quote from Gaddy as you picture Sheriff Spruell and his deputies attempting to arrest U.S. Forest Service employees in Montezuma County:
What will be the reaction of the soldier from Colorado who is confiscating guns and placing so-called domestic terrorists in detention camps in Ohio when he gets word other soldiers are doing the same to his family and friends back home? Who will soldiers and law enforcement officers side with ... If military and law enforcement personnel begin to side with the citizens, will the fedgov [sic] call in United Nations forces to subdue those who cherish personal freedom and will fight to retain it? Regardless of which series of events occur, Americans will be the losers. Brace yourselves and prepare, this is going to get real ugly.
Gaddy and Spruell deliberately characterize a run of the mill conflict between local and federal interests in extremely heightened, militaristic and conspiratorial terms, creating a hostile environment which may endanger federal employees. They should be deeply ashamed.
Sheriff Spruell should renounce his bizarre conspiracy theory and apologize to the innocent federal employees he has threatened to arrest. Moreover, he should make clear to the public that they should take no vigilante action against federal employees. Spruell needs to make clear to Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management workers that they should not fear to do their jobs. For him to do otherwise would compound his already grossly irresponsible behavior. What Spruell advocated in his radio interview is merely vigilantism masquerading as law enforcement. Like many on the Tea Party right, he is all too anxious for local authorities to use force against the federal government in order to prevent illusory conspiracies. In that respect, for them, the means justifies the ends.
2) The chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, Dick Wadhams, has announced that he will step down, ending his bid for another term. (Read here and here.) He's quoted as saying:
I have tired of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is.
While that comment on the Colorado GOP in the Tea Party era was targeted more at Tom Tancredo and other statewide politicians than at Sheriff Spruill, it certainly applies.
In a column published on the conservative websites Townhall, Human Events, and WorldNetDaily, Pat Buchanan has cited the white supremacist organization VDARE and two of its primary contributors, Steve Sailer and Robert Weissberg, to promote a theory concerning racial disparities in academic achievement. The column, entitled "Who Owns the Future?", purports to break down the test scores of American public school students by race and compare the differences with the difference between test scores of students in the countries associated with their ethnic groups. Buchanan and his VDARE sources argue that, on average, whites and Asians perform better on standardized tests than Hispanics and blacks do because they are, on average, more intelligent. They also argue that the racial intelligence gap they discern in the U.S. is mirrored in identical gaps between student performance in nations of the same races. So, Buchanan asserts,
America's public schools, then, are not abject failures.
They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America's schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.
What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.
We do not know how to close the gap in reading, science and math between Anglo and Asian students and black and Hispanic students.
And from the PISA tests, neither does any other country on earth.
The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.
Even Buchanan knows are some flagrant gaps in their data. Midway through the column appears a throwaway comment by Buchanan to the effect that
African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did)...
Considering that African-American academic performance is really at the heart of the matter (just as black-white relations are at the heart of U.S. race relations), the fact that Buchanan and his friends at VDARE have virtually no data to support their theory of intrinsic white superiority is of key importance. Buchanan acknowledges that glaring flaw in his evidence even as he invents out of whole cloth facts that would be true under other circumstances. Moreover, Buchanan, like Sailer and Weissberg, fails to factor that economic and other environmental disparities experienced by Latin American students are experienced by Hispanic students in the U.S., thus making it impossible to reach conclusions concerning genetic causation The methodology behind their conclusions is fatally flawed. That Buchanan's column is both designed to malign entire races and is unsupported by facts indicates a malicious and racist mind at work. With that in mind, the fact that he should rely on even more overt racists as his sources is not at all surprising. What is surprising is that mainstream news media such as MSNBC would still consider his views within the pale.
Just how bad is VDARE? The blog Right Wing Watch writes that
The Southern Poverty Law Center labels VDARE as a “White Nationalist” organization and says that VDARE “regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites.”
"America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely."
That nation based on racism is not the United States with which most of us are familiar or comfortable, nor should we be. That Pat Buchanan apparently shares VDARE's beliefs is deeply troubling.
Eli Roth (aka "Bear Jew" of Inglorious Basterds) has tweeted a link to my post concerning Hutton Gibson's interview with the racist radio program Political Cesspool. (Read that post here.)
The Political Cesspool program is broadcast on a number of local radio stations and via webstreams, links to which can be found on countless racist websites. Its host has been associated with Pat Buchanan's Reform Party (for which he was a delegate and candidate) and is currently associated with two racist political organizations: the Council of Conservative Citizens -- formerly known as the White Citizens Council -- (read here) and the newly formed American Third Position Party (read here and here). The program has provided a media forum for David Duke and others of his ilk, as well as allegedly mainstream right-wing political figures such as Pat Buchanan and his sister Bay Buchanan, and Ron Paul aides Lew Rockwell and Walter Block. According to one blog post (read here), Ron Paul himself appeared on Political Cesspool as well, although that program has been scrubbed from the archive. (A list of the show's guests is available here. My posts concerning the Political Cesspool program can be read here.)
Hutton Gibson used his Political Cesspool interview to expound at length on his belief that "the Antichrist" controls a world-dominating conspiracy (read "Jews and Freemasons") which has taken over every national government in the world and the leadership of the Catholic Church. Gibson also used to interview to advocate the formation of militias in reaction to the election of Barack Obama as president, and expressed his endorsement of Ron Paul as the "only candidate worth supporting".
It seems that Hutton Gibson's son Mel is on Bear Jew's fighting side as the result of his repeated racist, anti-Semitic and misogynist statements.
I noticed that, while the Inglorious Basterds did attend the last Academy Awards ceremony, Mel Gibson did not. Coincidence?
About a year ago, I wrote a number of pieces on Cynthia McKinney's increasing connections to far-right bigots such as former Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Mahathir; his chief aide, conspiracy theory author Matthias Chang (read here and here); and Islamic Party of Britain leader David Pidcock (read here). I also wrote about her anti-Semitic interviews with hate bloggers Daryl Bradford Smith and Noel "Ognir" Ryan (read here). McKinney's supporters and representatives of the U.S. Green Party have defended her work with this motley crew, sometimes stating that condemning McKinney's work with them amounts to "guilt by association", acknowledging by implication that this group has some troubling beliefs or worse. At other times, McKinney supporters have actually defended the extreme views of this group.
Now I've found two additional far right figures for whom McKinney has expressed her support and with whom she's made common cause. I've also discovered that she's done another interview with the two hate bloggers about whom I wrote last year.
Non-denial denials
The information about McKinney's ties to Chang and Pidcock which I published here last spring appears to have been the basis at least in part for an article written by Rob Waters which was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in their December, 2009 Intelligence Report. (Read here.) For that article, Waters got Scott McLarty, a Green Party official, to go on the record to deny that McKinney shared the views espoused by her far-right associates, calling such a conclusion "guilt by association". However, McLarty failed to find any problem with a lengthy quote from Chang's book The Shadow Money Lenders which McKinney posted on a Green Party website, in which a long list of Jewish bankers were accused of plotting to destabilize the world in order to take control of it.
Anita Stewart, a Green Party official and staffer to McKinney (during the 2008 presidential campaign and, since then, with McKinney's Dignity Action Network), posted a gnomic comment to one of my articles about McKinney's ties to Chang. She defended McKinney's endorsement of Chang's conspiracy theories as intrinsically valid. Stewart's response, which, like McLarty's, failed to contend with the bigotry or far-right ideology of McKinney's allies, stated that, if McKinney agrees with them, they're probably right. (See comments here.)
As you read McKinney's praise of Chang, and McLarty's and Stewart's defense of that praise, keep in mind that Chang has written that he was inspired by "the American Free Press, The Barnes Review, The Spotlight, and the truth seekers that I have long admired, Harry Elmer Barnes, Willis Carto, Michael Collins Piper, Christopher Petherick, Eustace Mullins (whose life-long persecution by the Police State is a disgrace to the Constitution), (and) Col. Donn de Grand Pre..." That's a long list, and some of the names are obscure ones. Suffice it to say that there is a common thread of bigotry running through that list.
Also keep in mind that McKinney's connection to Chang is more than lip service. Chang, as chief aide to former PM Mahathir of Malaysia, runs a foundation purportedly devoted to the absolute pacifist position of making all war illegal. (Read here.) That foundation, far from actually campaigning to ban all war, focuses exclusively on falsely accusing Israel of crimes such as genocide. Cynthia McKinney has participated as a keynote speaker, presumably for pay, in at lest three of this foundations' international conferences (two in Kuala Lumpur and one in London) where she participated in this ritualistic hate in the name of peace.
Compared by her friends to Father Coughlin
While McKinney's supporters defend her by (falsely) claiming that she does not make anti-Semitic statements herself, the same defense cannot conceivably be made for those who interview her. In one of last year's "Ognir" interviews with McKinney, Ognir/Ryan introduced her with a lengthy discussion of "banking Jewry" having controlled the world for the past four centuries. In another, Ryan asked McKinney about Rahm Emanuel, saying "(h)e's got Jew nationality and Jew loyalties." Far from condemning this obviously bigoted remark, McKinney replied by saying "I think that what you're talking about is who controls the U.S. government". She went on to explain that she left the Democratic Party precisely because she believes it to be controlled by this conspiracy.
In last year's interviews, Ryan's questions to McKinney expounded elaborate, bizarre conspiracy theories concerning Jewish culpability for 9/11, the world financial crisis, capitalism, communism, and, absurdly, medical marijuana and gay marriage. McKinney failed to disagree with the interviewers' assertions once, sometimes going so far as to say that she knew what the interviewer meant by this drivel, thus giving her tacit support. On several occasions, she stated her explicit support. She also showed her own ties to reality to be a bit shaky, comparing herself to civil rights hero Rosa Parks. (Read my original posts on this for more details including transcripts.)
Since I last wrote about her interviews with Ryan and fellow hate blogger Daryl Bradford Smith, McKinney has returned to give them additional interviews. In one conducted by Smith and Ryan on January 14, 2010, Smith introduced McKinney as the best thing to happen in U.S. politics since the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic radio preacher Father Coughlin. (Listen below at about 6:20.)
This comparison, which most people would consider insulting, is a high complement for Smith, who features portraits of both McKinney and Coughlin and recordings of Coughlin's infamous post-Kristallnacht broadcasts on his website. (Read here. Smith also features on his website the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and conspiracy theories about Jews causing the swine flu epidemic.) If one of McKinney's critics were to denounce her by comparing her to Coughlin, that person would be swamped with passionate denials and vicious denunciations impugning the comparison as somehow motivated by a conservative, "Zionist" or even Jewish bias. When the person actually interviewing McKinney makes that comparison, we hear the sound of silence.
from Daryl Bradford Smith's iamthewitness.com website:
McKinney says she's a fan of anti-Semitic author Michael Collins Piper, he dedicates a book to her
Cynthia McKinney has played the double-game of working with increasing brazenness with racists of the far-right, even as she says through her spokesmen that we shouldn't judge her by her friends. I wonder how they explain the fact that McKinney has declared herself, via Facebook, to be a fan of the anti-Semitic author Michael Collins Piper. Piper has worked for decades in the employ of Willis Carto, one of the United States' most infamous far-right racists.
Author Leonard Zeskind describes Carto as one of the two foremost leaders of the U.S. "white nationalist" movement in the latter half of the 20th Century, and Piper as Carto's "loyal assistant". (Read here and here. A Piper interview with Carto is available here. [Link goes directly to RAM file.]) Carto is the founder of a number of extreme right wing groups such as the Liberty Lobby (which "appealed to both anti-communists and arch-segregationists", read here) and the Holocaust-denial group Institute for Historical Review, among his countless other similarly oriented projects. Piper has worked for the newspaper founded and published by Carto, American Free Press, since that paper's founding, and has participated in a number of Carto's Holocaust-denial conferences. (Read here and here.) Piper has also been described as a "far-right emissary to the Islamic world", attempting to unite Islamists and the U.S. far-right around the common causes of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism . (Read here and here. My earlier article on Piper can be read here.)
Piper, along with David Duke and a rogue's gallery of others, participated in Holocaust denial conferences hosted by far-right Russian Nationalists (read here), and, infamously, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who invited Piper to the Tehran Holocaust denial conference as his personal guest (read here). It would be fair to say of him that Piper has made the production of books, columns and radio programs fabulizing Jewish conspiracies to control the world his life's work. He has, among other things, accused Jews of assassinating U.S. presidents, secretly controlling the government, financial system and media, and, literally, practicing human sacrifice and cannibalism.
McKinney supporters might be interested to learn that Piper's employer Willis Carto worked in George Wallace's segregationist presidential campaign as a leader of Youth for Wallace and subsequently set up an organization which morphed into the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Both Carto and Piper have for many years worked with former-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and continue to do so. (For a recent example, read here.) Carto was a key backer both of Duke's 1988 run for U.S. president (read here) and Duke's 2004 "New Orleans Protocol" outlining a political strategy for U.S. "European Nationalists" (i.e. white supremicists). (Read here.) The ADL says that Carto is "one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists of the past 50 years... he has been associated with nearly every significant far-right movement in the country, from neo-Nazism to militias, segregationism to Holocaust denial." (Read here. For Searchlight Magazine's take on Carto, read here. Examples of Carto's racist letters to Verne Kaub, a Liberty Lobby board member and author, are available here and here.)
Not only has McKinney now declared her support for Carto's assistant, Michael Collins Piper, Piper has reportedly declared his support for Cynthia McKinney by dedicating his bookThe Judas Goats: The Enemy Withinto her as follows. (Read here.)
To the Honorable Cynthia McKinney
Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia
. . .For daring to speak out and raise questions about what really happened on 9-11 and about the dangerous U.S. policy toward Israel and the Arab world — a policy that has made America many enemies around the globe — Cynthia McKinney was driven from the U.S. Congress in 2002. Judas Goat — a former Republican, no less — was recruited to run against Miss McKinney in the Democratic Party primary.GOP organizers moved into the Democratic Party to assist the Judas Goat. Tons of Zionist money poured into Georgia to help Miss McKinney’s challenger. In the end, Miss McKinney was defeated.But two years later Cynthia McKinney made a comeback and she sits in the U.S. Congress today — a voice for sane policies and one who still does not hesitate to speak the truth. And as this is written, they are moving against her once again. Her voice is one for all good people. Dear God: Let there be more like Cynthia McKinney!
Piper's Judas Goats book alleges that the Jews control the world via dual Zionist and Trostkyite conspiracies, both under the control of the Rothschild family. Piper describes it as supplement to a book called Synagogue of Satan by Andrew Carrington Hitchcock, which Piper calls "an overwhelming detailed history of how Jewish power and influence -- particularly through the venue [sic] of the Rothschild banking dynasty -- how that influence came to rule supreme". (He's nothing if not consistent.) He talks about the book at length in an interview with far-right radio hate preacher Texe Marrs, audio of which is embedded below.
(Listen here at 6:30.)
Michael Collins Piper also has at least one connection to the previously discussed anti-Semitic blogger Noel "Ognir" Ryan. The below-embedded video, which I found on Ryan's website TheInformationUnderground.com (here), features audio from a recent Piper radio program. In that program, the administrator Ryan's internet forum and radio programs (under the name "LordLindsey" -- he goes by "Lindsey" here), tells Piper how pleased he was with Ognir's McKinney interview. (At about 3:20 of the video below.) The reason? McKinney alleged in that interview (at great length) that (in Lindsey's words) "Zionist Jews control more than 99% of the United States Congress". (You can listen here, at first link, to that McKinney interview.) [NOTE: Among the ever-growing list of incredibly offensive material available on the TheInformationUnderground.com, is a video which attempts to glorify Holocaust Museum murderer Jim von Brunn. View here.]
Considering that Michael Collins Piper does little else but promote the grossest bigotry, I would be very interested to hear from McKinney what it is about him that she supports. Maybe there's some aspect of his work that's escaped public notice that McKinney would like to draw attention to with her praise of him. I would also be interested in hearing the reactions of progressives to McKinney's support for this advocate of the racist far-right.
"I am in Turkey with Israel Shamir!!!"
That's how Cynthia McKinney giddily headlined her article on her meeting with Israel Shamir in Ankara last year (read here). She writes (here):
I can hardly believe this moment!! Israel Shamir has written about me and lifted my spirits when I was most down. Even from faraway Israel, he understood my plight and dared give voice to the truth. They say that sometimes distance gives clarity--and certainly in Israel's case, in observing my serial targeting, he saw what many inside the United States could not see. Despite his writings, I never met him until this moment, just a few minutes ago!! We are speaking together this afternoon in Ankara, Turkey. He has already sent his message out on his list and so I include it here for you. I will send my message to you later. I will bring these contacts from around the world that I have made on behalf of peace, home to the United States so that we can more easily achieve our objectives for justice and peace and dignity in the area of policy where we and the world need it the most. We are a part of something much bigger than us individually, and our moment is now.
I guess they hit it off. For those who don't know of Shamir, he's a shady character who got his start working as journalist for a prominent Russian, far-right, ultra-nationalist newspaper under the pen name "Robert David" . (His legal name has, at various times, been Jöran Jermas or Adam Ermash.) He spent some time living in Israel under the assumed name "Israel Shamir". After this, he Portrayed himself in the West as an Israeli and a leftist, and has focused largely on producing anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda. He has meanwhile continued to maintain an ideological double identity, publishing in Eastern European languages and Russian from an overtly far-right perspective. Although he is ethnically Russian and a naturalized citizen of Sweden, he touts the fact that he lived in Israel under his assumed name (read here and here and here and here), and is frequently cited as an "Israeli journalist" when used as source. This identity is useful to writers who either want to put an acceptable face on what they know to be anti-Israel disinformation, or are credulous enough to believe in the fairy tales he promotes. I wrote about one such instance, Alison Weir's reliance on Shamir's promotion of literal truth of the blood libel, here and here. Weir cited him as an "Israeli journalist" working to uncover what she and Shamir describe as Israel's campaign of murdering people to steal their organs. Both Weir and McKinney still work with Shamir and cite him as an authority in spite of his having been denounced as an anti-Semite by Hussein Ibish and Ali Abunimah (read here), and as an impostor and charlatan by countless others.
To cite one out of countless examples of Israel Shamir's extremism, he counts among his close ideological allies the infamous Horst Mahler, whom Shamir calls "(a) friend of Palestine and anti-zionist, an anti-imperialist freedom fighter". Read here. Mahler, formerly a leader of the far left Red Army Fraction, has been for many years a leader Germany's racist far right, largely motivated by extreme anti-Semitism (as evidenced here). In 2003, Mahler founded a Holocaust denial organization he called Verein zur Rehabilitierung der wegen Bestreitens des Holocaust Verfolgten. (Read their press release here. Co-signers of the organization's charter included Ernst Zündel, Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, and Frederick Töben.) In subsequent years, Mahler has been convicted several times of crimes connected to his activism connected to denial of Nazi war crimes. In a 2007 interview with the German edition of Vanity Fair, an English translation of which "Shamir" makes available on his website (read here), Mahler said of Jews that they "are the embodiment of a god, who according to our understanding is Satan, and they play a tragic role in the corruption and negation of the life of all the other Peoples". (In that interview, Mahler greeted his interviewer by saying "Heil Hitler!”, and went on to praise Hitler, defend his own father's Nazism, and equate it with leftist opposition to "American imperialism".)
Horst Mahler and "Israel Shamir" in 2008
Mahler (second from left) with sign reading "There was no Holocaust"
"Israel Shamir" has found a very willing subject for his disinformation in Cynthia McKinney. With the instincts of a gifted con artist he found the sweet spot where her prejudices intersect with his agenda. Via McKinney, Shamir promotes the idea that Europe's neo-Nazis and Russia's ultra-nationalists are funded by Jews as part of a global war on Islam, and that this purported covert war is intrinsic to Israel's existence. This is a bit of misdirection that someone with Shamir's connections to Russian ultra-nationalists -- connections he has been careful to conceal -- might find very useful.
Shamir's writing style can be a bit diffuse, but while following his train of thought might be tricky, you can be certain as to its destination. Here's a portion of the text of his Ankara speech as posted by McKinney on her Facebook page:
The problem is the Jewish state. Not only does it besiege Gaza and destroy a football stadium in el Bireh. These are local problems, painful but local. The Jewish state (It is not a Jewish state. It is a Zionist state. S1000+) focuses Jewish power all over the world into action. Without a Jewish state, this power would disperse; it would remain local, it would remain chaotic, probably it would be subdued by the forces of assimilation. Israel focuses these chaotic forces and concentrates them into action.
This action is against Islam. Not only against Islam, but Dar ul Islam (the Islamic world) is a prime target. In the US , the Jewish Neocons led their country into a crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan ; now they are spearheading the push against Iran.
They have formed a powerful front against President Obama and have turned him into a laughing stock after he uttered a few words of wisdom about Palestine .
In Europe , if you inspect the coffers of anti-Muslim neo-Nazi groups, you'll find that they thrive on Jewish support. In Russia , Jewish nationalists and Zionists try to rally the Russians against their Muslim brethren. Sometimes they do it under cover of the Russian Church , or of Russian nationalism. I wrote about this recently, as I had discovered that the most fervently anti-Muslim forces in Russia are organised by crypto-Zionists.
Even if a Palestinian state were to be established and recognised, it wouldn’t stop Israeli attempts to undermine its neighbours, to bomb Iran , to sow the seeds of discord from Russia to France , from Turkey to India . Israel 's too powerful intelligence services would keep meddling. Neither would it neutralise the armed forces of Israel , and you know as well as anybody that the generals do not give up their toys, their privileges or their influence easily. The Israeli military machine is so powerful that it would seek to exercise its might.
Consider that the source for this incoherent conspiracy theory has been associated with precisely the far-right Russian nationalist movement most ardently connected to both anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic violence in Russia. I tend to believe that McKinney (like the rest of Shamir's audience in Ankara) is oblivious to this fact and is taking him at face value to be an Israeli leftist. But that sort of gullibility is no excuse for the promotion of this sort of deranged and hateful conspiracy theory. Regardless of whom McKinney believes Shamir to be, the intent of this string of lies is clearly stated: to drive further wedges between Muslims and Jews, to oppose a Palestinian peace agreement with Israel and to deny Israel's right to exist. In promoting these views, McKinney, like Shamir, should be regarded as an anti-peace activist.
"Guilt by association": a catch-all defense for supporting the indefensible
Cynthia McKinney and her supporters may call any condemnation of her work with Matthias Chang, Michelle Renouf, David Pidcock, Mahathir Tun, Michael Collins Piper, Jöran "Israel Shamir" Jermas, Daryl Bradford Smith and Noel "Ognir" Ryan guilt by association, but by doing so, they help legitimize racism, anti-Semitism and far-right extremism, as does McKinney herself. While guilt by association might be a legitimate defense to merely talking with, attending the same meetings as, or even belonging to the same organizations as bigots, it is quite another matter to support them politically, tout their writings, promote their views, or actually work in their employ. By doing this, and by doing this with increasing frequency, McKinney has made precisely her association with bigotry the centerpiece of her message.
More importantly "guilt by association" refers to a legal standard for criminal acts: people cannot be held legally responsible for the acts of others unless they criminally participate in those acts as well. The standard by which we judge the character of political figures should be much higher than that. McKinney's supporters, in defending her work with racists and extremists, say "only hold her to the standard by which we judge criminal acts". A political figure whose followers hold to such a low standard must be doing something wrong. Besides, as I have shown above and in my earlier articles, this defense ignores what is now painfully obvious. McKinney is not just associating with people who do and say bad things, she is actively supporting those malicious acts and participating in them herself.
Other McKinney supporters defend her differently, claiming that she is well-intentioned, but is recklessly making ill-advised alliances. As the number of these alliances grows, and the connections grow deeper, this defense becomes less and less plausible. The fact that Cynthia McKinney has made common cause with bigots of the far-right with at least some knowledge of who they are indicates that her actions are based on a malice she shares with them. Cynthia McKinney has done nothing to distance herself from the overtly bigoted views espoused by so many of those she works with, even when they espouse these views to her in public forums. On the contrary, she has gone out of her way to agree with many of these views, and even to publish them on websites maintained by her or by the Green Party on her behalf. While in the past she mostly avoided using the word "Jew" in favor of "Zionist", with her publication of Shamir's speech, even this thin veil of propriety has disappeared. If McKinney had sincerely wished to distance herself from these views, she would have denounced her friends' bigotry long ago; instead, she has repeatedly gone out of her way to support it.
The idea that her guilt is merely "by association" is laughable. Her guilt is sometimes that of a silent, grinning supporter of her friends' racist rants, and at other times that of an active promoter of those views herself. Sometimes she has couched her feelings about Jews in language vague enough to hypocritically disavow ill intent, but no one with any pretense of opposing bigotry should be deceived. Nor should they tolerate the fact that she claims to support peace for Israel and Palestine while campaigning against a peace settlement. Those who have supported McKinney or have been drawn to any part of her message owe it to themselves to speak out against this.
Screen shot from Cynthia McKinney's Facebook page.
(NOTE: I've revised this article to include a paragraph about Horst Mahler's connection to "Israel Shamir" and two additional photographs. Thanks to Karl Pfeifer for much of that information. Pfeifer's 2005 article on "Shamir" and Mahler can be read here. Thanks as well to Gene of Harry's Place for his kind words and his link to this article -- read here.)
A senior blogger at the Ron Paul supporter website "Daily Paul" has warned that the virulently racist content on Ron Paul's websites has been noticed by outsiders such as me. (Read here: rhino: What gets posted here ... matters a great deal. | Ron Paul 2012 | Campaign for Liberty at the Daily Paul.) The post links to examples of how Ron Paul supporters' wacky conspiracy theories, bigoted rants, Holocaust denial and sales pitches for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are viewed by others. Here it is, in its entirety:
Judging by the comments this post has elicited, it seems that this warning has fallen on deaf ears. They've taken this warning as an opportunity to double down on bigotry.
Submitted by quiltingsando on Fri, 03/19/2010 - 16:33.
spin it when we go to war with Iran because of Israel. When the war spreads and Russia and China take us on maybe these critics asses will be on the front lines. I can only hope.
Zionists will no more save the Iranian Jews from being bombed than *they* did the European Jews before and during WWII--
ah, well, time to take my break from trying to expose the Zionists--
—
it's hard to be awake; it's easier to dream--
One of my blog posts linked to a tribute to Eustace Mullins, America's most prolific anti-Semitic author, posted on the official Ron Paul Campaign Forum website. (Mullins was the author of "Adolf Hitler: An Appreciation" , "The Biological Jew" and "The Curse of Canaan", among countless other similar books and pamphlets.) The comments here respond to the implicit warning to cease praising Mullins... with additional praise of him.
I think Eustace Mullens passing has earned atleast a reposting...
Legendary author of scores of books and pamphlets demolishing the lies of warmaking mainstream media, historian Eustace Mullins died Tuesday, Feb. 2, at the home of his caretaker in a small town in Texas.
“He was absolutely BRILLIANT in his research, writing and verbal presentations, and as honest a man and scholar as our country has ever produced. In all the interviews I had the great honor of doing with Eustace, he never ceased to amaze me…and to teach all of us critically-important truths about our world and the evil, satanic group that is and has been dominating it for far too long. HIs knowledge and wisdom about the controllers was simply astonishing.” said Jeff Rense.
Mullins, who would have been 87 in March, suffered a stroke three weeks ago in Columbus, Ohio. He had been on an extended tour of his admirers for much of the past year, visiting and chatting with many of his thousands of fans who jumped at the chance to buy his books from him in person.
The author of such incendiary books as “Secrets of the Federal Reserve, “Murder by Injection, and “The Curse of Canaan, Mullins was harrassed by the FBI for almost a half century, and had one of his books burned in Germany in the 1950s. These stories are recounted in one of his books, “A Writ for Martyrs.
A protege of the imprisoned patriotic poet Ezra Pound, Mullins compiled a well-researched raft of works that detailed the passage down through time of a hereditary group of banker killers who have essentially ruled the world from behind the scenes since ancient times.
“Eustace Mullins was the greatest political historian of the 20th century, and not just because he was not beholden to the power structure that deters candid reports about significant events, but because, guided by the greatest poet of the 20th century who was imprisoned for broadcasting for peace, his meticulous research eventually uncovered virtually every significant political secret of the last 400 years. “It, is a pity so many people are afraid to believe what Mullins told them, because it was much more of the truth than has ever been seen in our schools or our media.
Funeral arrangements and appropriate memorial information have yet to be released.
for his courage.
Maybe the angels in heaven will let him go and make a mercy visit to the global bankers who are cooling their heels in the 'hot place'--
(sorry, couldn't resist that)
—
it's hard to be awake; it's easier to dream--
Maybe I'm misreading the intentions of the Daily Paul. Are they warning Ron Paul supporters to be more discrete about their bigotry, or are they mocking the idea that such a thing should matter?
UPDATE: Since I wrote this post, I decided to post a link to it in the comments to the Daily Paul post described above. Since my comment appeared there, the comment string has taken on a Lord of the Flies tone, with Paul supporters attacking each other (and me) viciously. Not surprisingly, those who frequent the Daily Paul are a bit paranoid about being observed, and have devised a web of conspiracies to explain the very obvious: that I found their post because it linked to my website. Through some sort of top secret illuminati technology, I'm able to tell how readers get to this blog. But, like 9/11, they believe that this blog post was an inside job. If you want a good laugh, go to the Daily Paul and check out how deranged these comments are. (Read here.)
Citizens Against the Far Right (Civilek a Szélsőjobb Ellen Mozgalom) International Day of Peaceful Protest Against the Far Right
Saturday 15 August 2009, 5.30-10 pm Budapest (5th district), Városház park
The Citizens Against the Far Right movement was born when the Hungarian Leftwing Feminist Network held a peaceful demonstration on 15 August 2000.
To date, 54 civic groups, including anti-Fascists, Jewish organizations, Roma organizations, gay rights groups, green organizations and humanists, have come together under the umbrella of Citizens against the Far Right, to protest against the racism and anti-Semitism that is increasingly widespread in Hungarian society.
The two pressing reasons for our demonstration now are the following:
First, neo-Nazi groups from across Europe plan to come in their thousands to Hungary on 15 August 2009 to commemorate the death of Rudolph Hess (Hitler’s deputy). Numerous neo-Nazi organizations and their supporters plan to occupy popular public squares across Budapest.
Second, in the past few days, Hungary has witnessed yet another racially-motivated fatal shooting of a 45-year-old Roma woman, and the critical wounding of her 13-year-old daughter, now in a medically-induced coma to help her survive her gunshot wounds. Racially-motivated violent crimes have become an everyday occurrence from the smallest village to the streets of the capital city.
Citizens Against the Far Right welcomes all those who reject hatred, homophobia, anti-Semitism, who want to fight against national fundamentalist, national socialist ideas, who reject exclusion, racism and violence to take part in an International Day of Peaceful Protest Against the Far Right, on Saturday, 15 August 2009, in Budapest (5th district), Városház park (City Hall Park, near Deák tér Metro), from 5.30 to 10 pm.
An anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and racist minority that openly advocates political terrorism is running rampant in Hungary today.
They openly proclaim their violent nationalist-fundamentalist, militant, hateful slogans, favoring discrimination against ethnic groups and alternative lifestyles. The results of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections show that Hungarian society is not willing to accept cultural differences, nor to accept that all ethnic groups have an equal place in contemporary Hungary.
Radical Far Right groups are offering easy solutions to that layer of Hungarian society which is frustrated with the political culture, and seeks security in the face of economic crisis. They use twisted logic and historical falsification to mislead the frustrated masses with the promise of a ‘better future’. We can see through their efforts to glorify the perpetrators of crimes against humanity in twentieth-century Europe. Their actions are destroying the international reputation of our country, and creating fear in the hearts and minds of our democratic citizens.
Under these circumstances, we, the Citizens Against the Far Right – with the support of international democratic forces – are committed to fighting against the violent politics and program of the Far Right.
We can only fight barbarism with humanism!
Local politicians have not been invited to lead the demonstration; rather, we have invited a number of prominent public figures to speak, including the philosopher Miklós Gáspár Tamás, poet András Simon, writer Ákos Kertész, and feminist historian Andrea Alföldi. The demonstration will also welcome a number of musicians and groups on stage.
International communities and activists are standing together to fight the recent rise of the Far Right.
Citizens Against the Far Right (Civilek a Szélsőjobb Ellen Mozgalom) antiracismmovement@gmail.com
