The Hate Handbook by Oppenheimer Martin;

Author:Oppenheimer, Martin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1331621
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

5

Yes, Virginia, There Are Conspiracies and Sometimes They’re Out to Get You

On February 13, 1999, a young Algerian refugee living in a camp for asylum applicants in a small eastern German town died after a group of neo-Nazi skinheads chased him and some buddies out of a bar and he crashed through a glass door in an effort to get away. He severed an artery and bled to death. An incident of this kind takes place somewhere in Germany about every three days, though usually not with such fatal consequences.

On August 9, 2004, five men were indicted in the beating of a Sikh in Queens, New York. They were charged with second-degree assault as a hate crime, and other assault-related crimes. The victim was a fifty-four-year-old limousine driver, who was punched and kicked unconscious and sustained multiple fractures, according to The New York Times. If convicted, the assailants would face up to fifteen years in prison.

Are these two incidents related? Yes and no. In many incidents such as the first one the assailants are young, are likely to lack skills and be unemployed, are school dropouts, come from problem-ridden families characterized by alcoholism, and probably had been on a beer-drinking spree. The assailants in the Sikh case were not skinheads. They ranged in age from twenty-two to fifty-eight and lived in solid middle-income neighborhoods. Three were members of the same family, including two brothers and their stepfather. The skinheads could easily have committed this assault, however; it fit into their normal, everyday activities. What these men all have in common is one thing: hatred of at least one minority. But the skinheads are part of a larger, organized regional and possibly even national movement, even though they were acting spontaneously. The men from Queens were not part of an organized group. But they may be recruitable to a larger enterprise, and in other instances it is clear that “hate crimes” have been influenced, instigated, or directly organized by extreme right-wing organizations.

The April 19, 1995 bombing of a U.S. federal government building in Oklahoma City focused national attention on extremism of the right for the first time in many years. (This incident falls into the definition of “terrorism.” More on that in the next chapter.) It put the spotlight in particular on the “militia movement,” with which Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the two convicted bombers, had had some contact. Yet the news that the perpetrators had associations with extreme right-wing groups should hardly have been a surprise. A number of private watchdog organizations had been trying for years to publicize the growing menace of right-wing extremism. The Turner Diaries, a kind of right-wing bible, had been available and known to watchdog organizations since 1978. A long series of incidents of right-wing violence had already taken place: Alan Berg, a Jewish radio commentator, had been murdered by members of a group called “The Order” in 1984 (two men were convicted and imprisoned). Jack Oliphant, a member of the “Arizona Patriots,” was convicted of planning a robbery, the proceeds of which were to finance his organization, in 1987.

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