A Split In the Racist Right

By Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok, Intelligence Report. Posted August 16, 2006.

For a gathering of people devoted to denouncing the inferiority of blacks and sounding the alarm about civilization-threatening Muslims, the biannual conferences thrown by the New Century Foundation, publisher of the racist newsletter American Renaissance, are decidedly genteel affairs. Men dress in suits and ties, women in formal business attire, and there are no uniformed skinheads or Klansmen to be seen. Large plasma television screens, Starbucks coffee spreads and fancy linens adorn the hotel meeting hall. Epithets have no place here.

Or at least they didn't. At the latest edition of the conferences that began in 1994, held this February at the Hyatt Dulles hotel, a nasty spat broke out that upset the gathering's decorum -- and may even shape the future of the radical right.

It began when David Duke, the former Klan leader and author of Jewish Supremacism, strode to a microphone after French author Guillaume Faye wrapped up a talk vilifying Muslims entitled "The Threat to the West." Duke thanked Faye for remarks that "touched my genes." But then he went one further.

"There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit," Duke said, according to an undisputed account in The Forward newspaper.

"Tell us, tell us," someone in the back yelled.

"I'm not going to say it," Duke replied. Laughter began to fill the room, until a short, angry man leaped from his seat, walked up to Duke and began to curse.

"You fucking Nazi, you've disgraced this meeting!" he said.

And with that, Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and long-time attendee at American Renaissance conferences, headed for the door. As many as 50 people at the conference began to jeer and point at the rapidly disappearing Hart.

This extraordinary incident marked the beginning of an open rift between those on the radical right who see blacks, Hispanics and Muslims as the primary enemy, and those who say "the Jews" are ultimately behind every evil -- a split that has usually stayed just below the surface but now threatens a leading institution of American extremism. While in the past he has managed to bridge this divide mainly by ignoring it, American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor now must finally come to terms with the split. His dilemma boils down to this: Throw out the anti-Semites and try to build a larger movement with electoral possibilities like those increasingly seen in Britain and Germany; or openly join hands with the very energetic neo-Nazis, even though that means the loss of any remaining shred of respectability.

"These are the makings of a major schism," wrote Shawn Mercer, co-founder and moderator of American Renaissance's AR List, an E-mail group. "If American Renaissance ultimately fails as a result of this donnybrook at the convention, it will be a sad, possibly fatal turn of events for the future of whites."

Jews and the radical right

The traditional enemy of the American radical right, going back to the Civil War and even before, has been the black man. Given the numbers of voters who would be created by enfranchising former slaves -- and the historical fact that blacks outnumbered whites in many southern counties -- that is no surprise. But radical anger also has been directed throughout U.S. history at each new wave of foreign immigrants, and, in both the 19th century and the 20th, that included Jews.

European anti-Semitism made its way across the ocean as well, infecting Americans with ideas about secret Jewish plans for world domination and alleged ritual practices like the murder of Christian children. Increasingly, hatred of Jews filtered into groups like the Klan -- most famously, in 1915, when the group was reborn on the strength of the lynching of Jewish businessman Leo Frank of Atlanta. (Frank was falsely accused of the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl.)

In the 1920s, auto tycoon Henry Ford published anti-Semitic treatises culminating in the book, The International Jew. In the following decade, Father Charles Coughlin, a radical Catholic, railed against Jews in radio broadcasts heard by millions. There followed a brief lull in anti-Semitism due to revelations about the Nazi genocide, but it wasn't long before Jew-hatred came roaring back.

This was partly due to the spread of Christian Identity, a radical theology that claims that Jews are biologically descended from Satan and are the chief enemy of the white man. This ideology, which increasingly crept into traditionally Christian groups like the Klan, helped to start the broad-based change that has occurred over the last half century or so -- the Nazification of the American radical right. Growing anti-Semitism also reflected the view of many segregationists that Jews were behind the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The bombings of several Southern synagogues by white supremacists underlined this conviction.

In recent decades, however, mainstream American society has rejected anti-Semitism, to the point where it is generally seen as more acceptable to voice ugly views of blacks than Jews. And this has not been lost on certain sectors of the radical right that have become increasingly interested in gaining real political power. Given recent developments in the United States -- especially large-scale Latin American immigration and the threat of radical Islamist terror -- these sectors have wondered if it wasn't better to direct their hate at people of color, rather than Jews who are seen by most Americans as white. Seeing the electoral success of neofascists in Germany and Britain who aim their wrath at dark-skinned immigrants and Muslims generally, many American radical leaders have sought to dispense with anti-Semitism.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »