"The existing order in America - today - is intolerable and must be destroyed." - "Geoff Beck" at Majority Rights

I normally despise the Southern Poverty Law Center; no leftist organization today devotes as much energy to slandering and comparing immigration restrictionists to the most vile elements in society, while ignoring extremists on the radical-left, as they do (there is one possible exception: Political Research Associates). However, their recent Intelligence Report on terrorist incidents by the radical-right in the US over the past 10 years is extremely important and should not be ignored. I urge everyone to read it or, at the very least, browse over it.

The report is wrong to understate the threat of animal-rights-extremists like Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, simply because none of their attacks have yet resulted in any deaths. Simply because nobody was killed does not mean that it was not a terrorist incident. Many of the incidents mentioned in their report did not result in any deaths, yet they reported them anyways. This is at the height of hypocrisy and they downplayed the threat of them for a simple reason: as a leftist organization, they sympathize with many of the goals of these two groups. You see this sort of thing regularly on leftist blogs (such as this one where the ALF and ELF are simply called "activists," despite the fact that they bomb and burn various targets in order to discourage [read: terrorize] and stop activities they disagree with) and you see none of them mentioning that the ALF and ELF developed out of the Earth First! organization, which publishes materials designed to help followers develop devices to kill people and terrorize the populace. The exact same things happened with some rightists back in the 1990s when the Clinton Administration proceeded to crack down on radical militia groups and white nationalist organizations.

And, contrary to the SPLC report, the FBI and the myriad of law enforcement agencies in the US have not ignored the threat from the radical-right. The most recent Congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller devotes the same amount of space to the radical-right as they do to animal-rights radicals (three paragraphs; most of the report is focused on Islamist terrorist activity). If law enforcement has been ignoring the radical-right so much, then how come they have stopped so many of the incidents described in their report?

One thing that many have ignored is the moral support and sympathy that the radical-right [and radical-left] has provided to Islamist terrorists. Just to give you a small slice of this phenomenon, here's a quote from Walter Laqueur's article, "What to Read (and Not to Read) about Terrorism," in the Summer 2002 issue of Partisan Review (sorry, not online):

Leaders of the American neo-Nazi scene were full of admiration for the attackers of September 11. Billy Roper of the National Alliance said that he wished his followers had half as much testicular fortitude as the suicide pilots. Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) declared that 9/11 was a victory for Walhalla, because the enemy of our enemy is our friend; and he also wished that his comrades were as brave as the Arabs. Rocky Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party was quoted saying that a dozen-and-a-half very brave people were willing to die for what they believed and that it was a disgrace that among a hundred and fifty million white Aryans in America, so few were willing to do the same. Martin Lindstedt of the Missouri Militia declared that he wished the Arabs had stolen a hundred jumbo jets full of "Talmudic Khazar mamzers, criminal regimeist whiggers, niggers, gooks, beaners, etc." and crashed them into the Supreme Court, Congress, the FBI building, all fifty state capitols, and the TV stations--he would have called it a damn good start. Other spokesmen of this camp recalled Blitzkrieg and the exploits of Otto Skorzeny, who had been the commander of Hitler's praetorian guard.

There was a little problem. The attackers had not, after all, been pure Aryans. But William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the bible of American neo-Nazis, overcame this difficulty. Not all people in Afghanistan were greasy, black haired, swarthy, and hooknosed. Some of these people were of Aryan origin, following the Aryan conquests and colonization of Central Asia thirty-five hundred years ago. The terrorists were obviously the descendants of the Aryans.

Holocaust deniers such as David Irving and Robert Faurisson in France pleaded that they had been right all along. Irving compared the killing of innocents in New York by "nineteen intelligent and virile young Muslims" to the killing of innocents in World War II by Allied bombings. Like Faurisson, he believed that it was all Israel's fault, with one imaginary Holocaust leading to a real one.

Thus, the great majority of American neo-Nazis took the position that the terrorists had been right. The U.S. government was the guilty party, and they welcomed the attacks. From the superpatriots of forty years ago, they have been moving to nihilism and pan-destructionism. The enemy was not just Washington, but the American people in its majority, because they were either too stupid or too lazy to share Nazi ideas. The primary loyalty of these people was no longer to their country (which was no longer theirs), certainly not to places like Washington and New York. All this would be of limited interest except for the fact that some neo-Nazis have been dabbling in terrorism. In their bookshops they sell things such as the Militiaman's Handbook and handbooks by pseudonymous authors such as "Macaba," and some of them have been trying to obtain biological agents and chemical poisons. This opens perturbing perspectives on homeland defense against future terrorist attacks, at a time when such attacks can be carried out by very small groups of people. The publications of these circles are neither in Arabic nor in Pushtu, and there is a distinct paper trail. The question is whether anyone is paying attention, even though it may amount to group profiling and a violation of human rights.

The European extreme Right and the neo-Nazis reacted similarly. Horst Mahler, once upon a time a pillar of Baader-Meinhof, today the most prominent spokesman of the German extreme Right, congratulated the terrorists and expressed solidarity. So did the Russian neo-fascists--they believed it served the Americans right for having brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union, for interfering in Chechnya, Serbia, and Central Asia. A few European neo-Nazis came out in favor of neutralism--let imperialist America and the crazy Arabs fight it out somewhere. But the consensus of the overwhelming majority of neo-Nazis from Sweden to Italy was solidarity with the terrorists.

Why has so little attention been paid to the reaction of the extreme Right and the neo-fascists? They have little access to the mass media, to be sure, and their numbers are not that great (nor are they as small as often believed). But in the age of easy access to weapons of mass destruction, large armies are not needed to launch deadly attacks. Could it be that there is an uncomfortable resemblance between anti-globalization, antiAmericanism, and anti-Zionism? The Italian Red Brigades also welcomed the attacks. In a long programmatic statement published a day after their murder of a Labour Ministry official they warmly welcomed September 11. If one were to delete certain words such as "armed struggle," "revolutionary strategy," and "permanent offensive," this could have been written by someone on the extreme Right or even one of the jihadists.

This is why these radical-right groups should not be ignored. It's only a matter of time before we start seeing the Islamist terrorists and the radical-right developing mutually beneficial relationships like they did in the past that may develop into outright collaboration in terrorist attacks. Already we see this happening with radical-right black nationalist groups like the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, Hispanic nationalists like the Nation of Aztlan, and white nationalist groupings like the Aryan Nations, Alhusseini Dynasty, and Divine Right Order.

Read the report. Know thy enemy.