From CNN today:

By Brian Levin
Special to CNN


Editor's note: Brian Levin is director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism and an associate professor at California State University, San Bernardino. He is the editor of the recently published book: "Hate Crimes: Understanding and Defining Hate Crime" (Praeger, 2009) and was a 2004 Summer Seminar Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Brian Levin says hate groups feel marginalized by the growing tolerance of diversity in the larger society.

Brian Levin says hate groups feel marginalized by the growing tolerance of diversity in the larger society.

SAN BERNARDINO, California (CNN) -- Last Saturday, a young African-American president used eloquent prose to challenge the world to learn from the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust at Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp: "To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened -- a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history."

Yesterday, less than a mile from the White House, an old bigoted white man was suspected of firing back his response at the place where America tries to draw lessons from that hatred.

Yesterday's shooting is the latest in a series of murderous attacks by erratic far-right-wing extremist "lone wolves" over the past three months. When shocking violence like this arises, commentators point to various factors including mental illness, political debates and the availability of guns.

We, however, must first acknowledge the hand of a small but expanding hate movement as a potent, yet invisible, accomplice that incites and inspires society's disaffected to serve as its most violent warriors. Ironically, it is the movement's decline that makes its violent fringe feel most compelled to act.

In April the Department of Homeland Security in a controversial, though ultimately prescient, report concluded, "the historical election of an African-American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for right-wing extremist recruitment and radicalization."
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That month Richard Poplawski, a 22-year-old with a history of both job failures and anti-Semitic conspiratorial Internet rants, was charged with gunning down and killing three Pittsburgh police officers during an ambush at his home. He was in fear of the "Obama gun ban" and the "evil of the Jews," according to the Anti-Defamation League.

At the end of May, Scott Roeder, 51, a divorcee with a criminal record and a history of financial difficulties, shot a controversial abortion provider to death at his church in Kansas. Years earlier, after his life began to unravel into fanaticism, he joined an anti-government and anti-Semitic movement called "The Freemen."

Only days after President Obama's Buchenwald speech, authorities suspect, longtime anti-Semite James von Brunn, an itinerant 88-year-old divorcee from Maryland, decided to make his second armed foray to combat an imagined Jewish plot. Both involved a symbolic government-operated Washington landmark.

On December 7, 1981, the 40th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, during another economic downturn, the then 61-year-old Holocaust denier attempted to enter the Federal Reserve building to kidnap Fed board governors at gunpoint.

Von Brunn and other anti-Semites believe that the Federal Reserve is part of a Jewish conspiracy to control the country by subverting the banking system. Similarly, in their view, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is yet another Jewish government plot to subvert history.

For years he railed against the "browning of America," the "poisoning" of the gene pool and the "Holocaust hoax." Despite the fact that he says he worked for Noontide Press, a publishing outfit owned by arguably the most notorious Holocaust denier, he was never able to get his own anti-Semitic book published.

Von Brunn's latest desperate attack comes as he nears the end of his life, and when the hate movement itself as well as the nation are at a crossroads. The shooting comes at a time when society as a whole increasingly rejects the bigotry he strove so long and unsuccessfully to entrench. As a young child, he lived in a nation where the Invisible Empire numbered 4.5 million, thousands of hooded Klansmen marched on the capital, and blacks were segregated and many were lynched.

Today, a somewhat resurgent hate movement has grown to a record 926 groups -- up more than 50 percent alone this decade, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Still, the news has not been great for hate groups.

The increase comes off of a historic low and appears to be caused in part by a splintering of large groups and the emergence of smaller, less effective ones. In addition, a leadership vacuum has emerged as many of the charismatic hatemongers of the past have died, retired or been incapacitated by prison, ill health or scandal.

Unlike the millions of Klansmen of the 1920s, today's hardest core probably number no more than a couple of hundred thousand. More tourists probably visit the Holocaust Museum on a busy day than the total national membership of the Klan.

Notwithstanding a spike in some very disturbing racial incidents related to the election of Obama, except for Washington state, the most recent data trickling out shows a decrease or stability in the handful of jurisdictions reporting 2008 hate crimes.

The Anti-Defamation League just reported the fourth annual decline in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, and 65 percent of whites and a record number of blacks, 59 percent, say race relations are good, according to a New York Times/CBS poll.

However, all the good news about tolerance, a pending federal hate crime bill, the election of an African-American president and our increasing diversity are seen as nothing less than a final frontal attack on white nationalism itself. For the remaining haters, desperate times and recent attacks may in fact be taken as one last violent call to arms.

Mr. Cimino -

Hello, and welcome. It's good to see a new mind at work here.

In regards to your first post, I'd like to make this suggestive analogy. Assuming your habitation comes with a front yard (and if it does, I'm sure you enjoy it), you should donate your yard to homeless people, so you'll spend less time mowing it and more time doing whatever it is you think is your contribution to society. Let's get to work, buddy!

Hi Steve, I haven't seen you here before but good to make your acquaintance.


The real problem Steve, is that the geography of the state of Israel is such that it is extremely vulnerable in several places. It is so narrow in places, we're talking about less than 20 miles across. Across those boundaries lie the West Bank, the disputed areas between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

The Israelis need to keep some of this land to protect itself from ever more sophisticated missiles brought into The WB and Gaza from Iran, which give the militant Palestinians an opportunity to succeed in killing more Israeli citizens. The reason that Israel built the wall or partition if you like around the Palestinian areas is because before it was built, suicide bombers were blowing themselves and many innocent civilians up with them on buses, cafes, places of worship etc. almost daily, killing and maiming many innocents. Now there are no more suicide bombings. Now the problem mainly is from Hamas in Gaza raining hundreds of missiles at communities in south Israel, despite the fact Israel left Gaza entirely almost five years ago. They do not want or can afford a similar situation to develop in the WB.


Yes, you are right, Israel has much to offer the world, if it can manage to survive the next ten years from those who want to destroy her, we're talking nukes, homemade or imported from the DPRK and hundreds or thousands of missiles aimed at Israel as we speak. Frankly, I think it will be a miracle if Israel survives.

All of this is only possible if the Jews manage to survive. That is why security is so important to Israel, a lot of players in the ME want them dead, some not even in the ME.

We would love to, let us make sure the agreements we make Israel sign allow for defensible borders for them and a demilitarized state for the Palestinians to use to build their state (assuming they can stop rocket attacks against Israel by militants) except for police and such, so both can realize their dreams. It would be a wonderful thing, achieving it will be harder.

Hey Jim, how are you?

Thank you for the insightful post. I have only two things, maybe three that I would like to add. The Jews had a reason for getting into the money lending business--they were prevented from most other vocations in Old Europe and in the ME, they could not be doctors or lawyers for instance, except in their ghettos, and working for their own people. They could not go to the same schools as the Christians, so they lacked proper educations for other vocations.

I worry about the safety of Israel, but I do not agree that Israel is not sustainable, or is in fact a detriment to US interests. Actually, Israel has done an awful lot for the US in terms of intelligence in that region, that is why I think, the US has been such a fervent supporter of Israel. Israel also produces all kinds of high technology, makes amazing advances in medicine and biotechnology, in other words Israel has been and is a boon to civilization. Not the only one of course, but the ratio of contribution versus population is really amazing.

As to bringing all the Jews to America, (all five million in Israel) I think the Israelis might have something to say about that. They will not leave their biblical homeland without a life and death struggle, they have given too much in blood and hard work to make Israel what it is, and they will never leave voluntarily.

I know you like to read history, let me turn you onto something here, a brief history of antisemitism in chronological order.

http://christianactionforisrael.org/antiholo/summanti.html

And this, http://christianactionforisrael.org/antiholo/non2many.html

First off, hell would completely freeze over before I would ever attempt to shop on Black Friday. The lines, the crowds and the nonsense one would have to put up with to save a few pesos are just not worth it.

Rumor has it that another customer, a pregnant woman, was also trampled in that same stampede. That same rumor says that she survived, but her pregnancy did not.

Just my two cents worth.

Only the existential power of the post-modern, nuclear age and three of its polities -- the U.S., the U.K., and Israel -- have re-established Judeo-Christian hegemony in any part of the Levant, and only since 1948. Since that blip in the course of the millennia, Mideast history has been a crazy-quilt of U.S. (and Israeli) military operations, U.S. dictatorial proxies, and strategic resource exploitation by Western powers.

After lurching into each catastrophe, the national Republican Party deflects attention from the results by ginning up a "new" issue that will further radicalize the right-wing base and distract the media. The current furor over immigration is the latest and most egregious example. The loss of American blood and treasure in Iraq is the story of the current generation, and the Republican Party is entirely responsible. (The Bush administration pushed for the war -- to put it mildly -- and ninety-seven percent of Congressional Republicans voted for it, whereas almost sixty percent of Congressional Democrats voted against it.) Yet the ongoing American tragedy in Iraq is relegated to a few columns deep within the newspapers, while the Republican Party's mouthpieces raise a front page hue and cry over a natural demographic phenomenon that has gone on for generations.

I think I know what would persuade Congress to act on immigration reform. If young Hispanic men and women were to stop volunteering to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces, the Republican Party, Congress, and the media would likely kill the immigration "story" with a shudder and an apology.

My congratulations and a coupon for the Pat Buchanan Kool-Aid Stand go to Ed Uthman, who now finds himself to the right of demiseofman on immigration.

Protectionism is a lose-lose proposition; free trade is win-win. All we’re doing by keeping the bright Indians out is making Bangalore the next Silicon Valley. Jobs are streaming to these bright kids overseas who could be building businesses and hiring Americans here, if only we’d let them.

If Ed thinks bringing more talent to the U.S. will make us poor – and that keeping it out will make us rich – he’s ignoring some of the biggest economic lessons of the 20th Century.

Globalization is here, and there is nothing we can do about it (even if, foolishly, we tried). We can either embrace the new world and thrive, or immolate ourselves by trying to stop it.

I have only one quibble with Steve Cimino’s fine post. The United States foolishly limits the number of highly trained, professional immigrants it accepts each year. Bill Gates is right when he says this does us far more harm than good.