Ron Paul group members petition to include neo-Nazi in forum

You may remember an earlier post on this blog concerning Will Williams (read here). Williams, who is also known as "White Will" has been a leading racist and neo-Nazi activist in this country for 30 years. He has played a leadership role in the National Alliance Party, the largest neo-Nazi group in the U.S., and has been associated with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups. His specialty has been recruitment, targeting various demographic groups considered susceptible to a racist, anti-Semitic message. He authored and distributed to teenagers an eponymous comic book ("White Will") which features its hero attacking a Jewish teenager. He's an organizer of Ron Paul internet "meetups" in his native Tennessee, and a frequent poster of bigoted commentary in forums devoted to support for Ron Paul -- comments which met little opposition other than "don't scare away non-racists with this stuff" -- not exactly righteous indignation. Williams has also organized meetings of Paul supporters at which he may be recruiting for racist groups. He has a history of staging innocuous sounding events which turn out to be neo-Nazi recruitment rallies, like the time he staged an Irish and Slavic music festival in Cleveland where the audience was subjected to multiple speeches by neo-Nazis.

Since I've posted about this, and more importantly, since this was picked up by some big league bloggers (read here), Williams meetup organizing privileges have been suspended. He is now reduced to posting racist comments as "Former Member", still listing his hometown, Mountain City, TN, and readily identifiable by both tone and content (read here: "Must Dr. Paul capitulate to our Jewish masters' demands?"). This material is still available on the Ron Paul Meetup website, as are the responses of the supposedly mainstream ronpaulians, which can be summarized as "are you sure it's a good idea to say this publicly?"

Now Williams' supporters in the Ron Paul campaign have organized a petition to restore his presence on Ron Paul forums. You can read it here: Petition to restore forum privs for Will Williams - Ron Paul 2008 Meetups.

It seems that it may be hard for Paul to distance himself from racists when they make up such a significant part of his base of support. Too decisive a distancing might just alienate those who are less overtly bigoted than Williams, but who don't really object to his views. So the Paul campaign is still on the fence about its neo-Nazis supporters who organize, petition and comment freely in his internet forums. I wouldn't expect a complete clean break any time soon.

Racist Website "Gamed" Aspen Daily News Poll on Holocaust Denial

The racist website Newsnet14.net "gamed" an Aspen Daily News poll concerning whether a Holocaust denial TV show should be aired on a local cable station. (Read about that controversy here and here and here and here).

The request to air the Holocaust denial program came from Steve Campbell, a former member of the Roaring Fork Peace Coalition and founder of Citizens for 9/11 Truth. For a number of years, Campbell programmed a film series sponsored by the Roaring Fork Peace Coalition that was accused of promoting anti-Semitism. Campbell apparently purchased the TV program from Mark Farrell, a neo-Nazi video distributor and publisher from Cincinnati who disseminates Nazi and racist themed DVDs for broadcast on public access stations. The broadcast was supported by Roaring Fork Peace Coalition board member Sue Gray, who blogs under the appropriate name "reckless G".

Multiple votes can be cast in such polls using a variety of simple techniques (such as deleting cookies or using software to change IP addresses) to defeat protections against "gaming" or deliberately skewing poll results. To read the solicitation for racists to vote in the poll click the following link. WARNING: link to hate-group website.

Newsnet14.com

Who's Editing Wikipedia and Why?

As someone who's created, edited and pulled out my little remaining hair over Wikipedia articles (under my real name if you're interested) I found the following from little green footballs interesting. Wikipedia has a huge impact on public opinion and, frequently, is subject to campaigns of willful distortion for ideological or arbitrary reasons. The anonymity of the editing process makes that sort of campaign possible. I'd like to thank those who are taking this issue seriously and doing something about it.

from little green footballs: "Who's Editing Wikipedia and Why?"

Here’s a very interesting tool built by Caltech graduate student Virgil Griffith, which searches the list of edits at Wikipedia and correlates them with known IP addresses of groups and organizations—revealing edits made by The New York Times and Al Jazeera, among others: List anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations.

The site is currently struggling under high traffic, so it may not be available; but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that someone at Al Jazeera has been adding blatantly anti-Israel statements to many Wikipedia pages, or that the New York Times has been sanitizing their own page.

Another interesting IP to look up is the Reuters Canary Wharf office, the origin of a death threat sent to LGF last year. Someone using that IP has been going around Wikipedia and editing entries related to Islam; before the site went down, I discovered several places in which that IP had inserted the word “Prophet” in front of “Muhammad,” for example. Here’s the Reuters IP search.

Here’s an article at Wired: See Who’s Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign.