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Date Posted: 09:01:59 06/11/06 Sun
Neo-Nazis
Freed from prison, David Duke mounts a comeback
When David Duke
was convicted last year of fraud — including pocketing his supporters'
contributions — some people thought he might never regain his status as the
superstar of the neo-Nazi world. They thought wrong.
Over the
Memorial Day weekend, more than 300 extremists gathered in New Orleans in the
less-than-glamorous Airport Plaza Hotel to cheer the end of Duke's
one-and-a-half year prison term, which the former Klan leader calls his stint in
"The Gulag."
By the end of
the gathering, it looked like Duke could be poised to fill the power vacuum left
two summers ago by the death of America's most powerful neo-Nazi, National
Alliance founder William Pierce.
While the event
was put on by Duke's European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), it
was sponsored by several other hate groups, including the National Alliance, the
white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), and the
Holocaust-denying Barnes Review.
Speakers from
four countries warned the audience about the evils of international Jewry — a
particular concern for Duke, who told his fans, "Anything that strikes out
and weakens the Jewish supremacist power is good for us."
To promote
unity between hate groups, Duke asked assembled leaders to sign his "New
Orleans Protocol," a set of principles "pledging adherents to a
pan-European outlook."
Several key
white supremacists signed on, including former Klan leader Don Black, who runs
the neo-Nazi Web site stormfront.org; Willis Carto, publisher of The Barnes
Review; Sam Dickson of the CCC; Ed Fields, publisher of the
white-supremacist newspaper The Truth at Last; and National Alliance
leaders David Pringle and Kevin Strom.
With no
apparent irony, Duke's Protocol mandates "honorable and ethical
behavior" among its signatories, along with zero tolerance for violence and
a "high tone" in public presentations.
The pledge to
maintain a "high tone" didn't hold up for long. Dickson took the
podium to mock Secretary of State Colin Powell as "someone who can't even
pronounce his own name, Colin ["Caw-lin"], and has it confused with
his lower intestine."
Dickson also
ranted about the "very, very destructive" effect of opposing the Nazis
in World War ii — opposition that caused people to view Hitler's "normal,
healthy racial values" as evil.
Paul Fromm, a
Canadian racist who spent an hour raging against immigration and
multiculturalism, mocked a Muslim woman as "a hag in a bag" and called
Toronto's Sikh community "a nasty lot."
Nobody but Duke
himself could have predicted the size of the audience that received these
messages — not just the hundreds in attendance, but a whopping 67,000
visitors, according to Duke, who logged onto EURO's Web site for a Saturday
simulcast.
Duke's fraud
conviction has done little to dim the popularity of his books, either; longtime
aide Roy Armstrong says that more than 580,000 copies of Duke's Jewish
Supremacism have been sold worldwide. Duke hopes to stoke even more
anti-Semitic sentiment — and profit — when his books are translated in the
near future into Arabic and sold in the Middle East.
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