Radical Islam, Neo-Nazis Are Seen Sharing Hate Rhetoric

November 23, 2001
Forward News

From a racist church in Illinois to a neo-Nazi Web site to a Muslim weekly newspaper in New York, domestic white supremacist and Islamic extremist groups have been finding common cause since September 11 in anti-Jewish invective, hate-group monitors are warning.

In recent weeks, opinion essays by white supremacists such as David Duke and William Pierce have cropped up in Islamic publications and Web sites in the United States and abroad. At the same time, several American neo-Nazi Web sites offer links to Islamic sites. On these sites, the rhetoric ranges from harsh criticism of Israel to tirades against "jews" (with a lowercase J). Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories also abound.

Organizations that track hate groups are debating the degree to which the shared anti- Jewish views of Islamic extremists and neo-Nazi groups indicate organizational collusion or just rhetorical affinities. Yet they agree that the invective has grown increasingly worrisome since the September terrorist attacks and note that law enforcement officials have been investigating possible ties.

"They're making common cause," said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups. "That's a different thing than to say they're working hand in glove, shoulder to shoulder."

Some Muslim groups are also tracking the issue. "We have always been courted by white supremacists," said Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor of genetics at Yale University who moderates the two-year-old listserv of Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, which has 12,000 subscribers. "We unsubscribe many people who try to post things that are objectionable and anti-Semitic," he said.

In the past year there have been concrete signs of coordination. European and American neo-Nazis organized a Holocaust denial conference that was to have taken place in Beirut in late March. The conference, "Zionism and Revisionism," was billed as an opportunity for Western extremists to meet their counterparts in the Islamic world.

The Lebanese government called off the event under pressure from American diplomats and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization that monitors anti-Semitism. A scaled-down conference took place in April in Jordan.

The coordination and money that went into the conference "means that there are relationships that already exist and that can deepen," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, a dean at the Wiesenthal Center.

This week, the Wiesenthal Center published a new study of hate sites, "9/11 Digital Lies: A Survey of Online Apologists for Global Terrorism.'' Available on its Web site, the center's report concludes that "the Internet is a new staging ground for a new type of war. We ignore it at our own peril."

The Anti-Defamation League has also weighed in. On November 9, Abraham Foxman, ADL's national director, said the terrorist attacks have "created a new dynamic where the rhetoric of anti-Semites in this country is being picked up and recycled in some segments of the Muslim and Arab world to advance hateful myths and conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews."

Abroad, essays by Mr. Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, have cropped up on http://www.tanzeem.com, an extremist Web site based in Pakistan.

In addition, the on-line "Syria Times" reprinted an article called "Anthrax Terrorists May be Zionists," by Hector Carreon, head of the "Nation of Aztlan," which ADL called "a fringe California-based Hispanic nationalist organization."


Radio speeches by Mr. Pierce, the leader of the National Alliance, have been broadcast several times on Iranian radio since September 11. Mr. Pierce told the Forward via email that his weekly broadcasts "reach the whole world, including the Arab world, via short-wave radio and via the Internet."

Mr. Pierce is the author of "The Turner Diaries," a widely circulated anti-government novel that Timothy McVeigh said inspired him to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995. The National Alliance Web site features images of blonde children and warns that multiculturalism is a "disease."

In New York, Muslims, a Queens-based English-language weekly newspaper, has recently printed opinion pieces by Mr. Duke and Mr. Pierce, although neither was identified in the newspaper as a white supremacist.

Anver Saad, a contributing writer at Muslims, said that the editors had found the articles by Mr. Pierce and Mr. Duke on the Internet and didn't know the writers' "exact background."

They decided to stop publishing the two after "a lot of African-American brothers complained," Mr. Saad said.

The two-year-old weekly is distributed in local mosques, shops and restaurants. Muslims's founding editor, Jawed Anwar, did not return repeated calls for comment.

Meanwhile, under the heading "Let's stop being human shields for Israel," the World Church of the Creator in East Peoria, Ill., quotes Osama bin Laden on its Web site. "So we tell the Americans... If they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews."

A Florida-based neo-Nazi group, Aryan Action, features an Arabic inscription on its Web site alongside the English message: "Support Taliban, Smash ZOG," or Zionist Occupied Government, a common reference in neo-Nazi circles to the supposed Jewish control over world affairs. "It's your choice, comrades," the site reads. "Either you're fighting with the jews [sic] against al Qaeda, or you support al Qaeda fighting against the jews."

According to Mr. Potok, groups like the National Alliance viewed the September 11 attacks with "slack-jawed admiration."

"They watched the towers fall and were blind with envy," he said.

Indeed, Billy Roper, a leader of the National Alliance, expressed his awe in a members-only chat room monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center. "The enemy of our enemy is, for now, our friend," Mr. Roper wrote, referring to extremist Muslims.

"We may not want them marrying our daughters, just as they wouldn't want us marrying theirs.... But anyone who's willing to drive a plane into a building to kill jews is alright [sic] by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude," he wrote.

While they may agree about Israel and Jews, by and large radical Muslim groups and white supremacists still dislike one another.

"The fact that most Muslims and I are in agreement on the issue of U.S. support for Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with multiculturalism," Mr. Pierce told the Forward in an email message. "I neither like nor dislike Muslims, as long they stay in the Middle East. I believe that we can agree on Israel without living together in the same country."

According to Mr. Potok, there isn't "any big organizational bridge" between Muslims and domestic American extremists. "There are obviously a few contacts, but I don't think it's well developed."

However, Mr. Potok said, "That kind of connection is pretty well developed in Europe."

Such connections came to the fore last spring, when the Beirut Holocaust denial conference was cancelled. The event was co-organized by the Institute for Historic Review, a California-based Holocaust denial outfit, and Verité et Justice, a Swiss neo-Nazi group.

The Swiss group is headed by Jurgen Graf, who fled to Iran after a Swiss court charged him with Holocaust denial in 1988. Speakers on the program included Muslim academics, journalists and political activists.

The conference piqued the interest of law enforcement, said the Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Cooper. "It set off alarm bells everywhere," he said.

More recently, some press reports have indicated that authorities are looking into a possible domestic source for last month's anthrax attacks. Investigators, however, are tight-lipped about whether they're tracing threads between white supremacists and radical Islamist groups.

"The FBI is unable to comment on any potential investigative matters," said Steven Barry, an FBI spokesman.