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Domestic terrorists and Militant Islamic Fundamentalists

Is there a possible connection between domestic terrorists and militant Islamic fundamentalists? The Public Eye has an article about the the subject. The article reports about the terrorist activities of both domestic terrorists and some foreign terrorist groups, their common motivations, and their efforts to buttress each other's terrorist activities. The article also discusses the same vision shared by many domestic and foreign terrorists. The following are excerpts.

The U.S. Extreme Right shares three ideological affinities with some Islamic clerical fascist movements such as the Taliban and the al Qaeda networks, and some Black nationalist groups:

• A hatred of Jews who are seen in the traditional antisemitic caricature of running the world through secret conspiracies.
• A hatred of the U.S. government, seen as not just a global bully but also controlled by Jews. U.S. neonazis sometimes refer the administration in Washington, D.C. as the Zionist Occupational Government--ZOG.
• A desire to overthrow existing governments and replace then with monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racial nationalism or supremacist religious nationalism or both mixed together. This ethnonationalist philosophy is sometimes called the "Third Position."

11.15.01 NPR senior correspondent Howard Berkes:

"Some investigators and researchers believe Osama bin Laden might still be getting help from within the United States. They suggest that help might not be coming solely from people with extreme views about Islam. It could also be coming from white supremacy groups." Hear the story using Real Player -- from Thursday's All Things Considered.

According to an article in the Washington Post:

A remote possibility is a collaborative effort. U.S. monitoring groups cite increased contacts between Middle Eastern radicals and some Americans on the far right. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center protested a planned meeting this year in Beirut between neo-Nazis and members of militant Islamic organizations. The gathering was shifted to Jordan, he said, and later canceled.

"It's a long, long way from rubbing elbows and giving hateful speeches to acting out or inspiring others to act out," Cooper said. "But those connections are there."1

In a Financial Times online article "Far-right has ties with Islamic extreme," by Hugh Williamson and Philipp Jaklin, Berlin, November 8 2001 the following is reported.

Ahmed Huber, a 74-year-old Swiss businessman and former journalist who converted to Islam in the 1960s, is a board member of Nada Management, a financial services and consultancy company which is part of the international Al Taqwa group. The US says this group has long acted as financial advisers to al-Qaeda. Mr Huber, who is based in Bern, is known in Switzerland and Germany as an Islamic fundamentalist who attempts to forge links to far-right and neo-Nazi movements.

A spokesman for Germany's office for the protection of the constitution, the internal intelligence agency, said on Thursday that Mr Huber "sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups". He also belongs to the revisionist movement, which believes the Holocaust did not take place, the spokesman said.

Klaus Beier, spokesman for the NPD, one of Germany's main far-right political parties, said Mr Huber has often addressed NPD events.

The report goes on to say.

Today there is a new form of fascism, a neofascism, called the Third Position, which seeks to overthrow existing governments and replace them with monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racial nationalism and/or supremacist religious nationalism. Third Position neofascists have organized in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and they maintain some kind of loose network, at least for the purposes of discussing their shared ideas and agenda, but in some cases involving meetings and even funding. For instance Libyan president of Mu'ammar Qadhafi has sponsored several international conferences in Libya promoting his special variation of racial nationalism and cultivating ideas congruent with Third Position ideology. Qadhafi has also offered funds to racial nationalist groups active in the U.S. and Canada.2 During the Gulf War, according to the Searchlight magazine, "Neo-nazis is several European countries have been queuing up to shoulder arms for Saddam Hussein's murderous Iraqi Regime."3 One organizer for this attempted neonazi brigade, claimed he had over 500 volunteers from "several countries, including Germany, the USA, the Netherlands, Austria and France."4 Revealing the Third Position motif, a racial nationalist journal, Nation und Europa, promoted the slogans "Arabia for the Arabs," and "the whole of Germany for the Germans."5 In Britain, some neofascists praised the regimes in Libya and Iran as allies in the fight against communism, capitalism, and Israel.6

The Third Position has a more intellectual aristocratic ally called the European New Right (Nouvelle Droit) which is different from the U.S. New Right.7 Intellectual leaders of the European New Right, such as Alain de Benoist, are hailed as profound thinkers in U.S. reactionary publications such as the Rockford Institute's Chronicles. The more overtly neo-Nazi segment of the Third Position has intellectual links to the Strasserite wing of German national socialism, and is critical of Hitler's brand of Nazism for having betrayed the working class. See magazines such as Scorpion or Third Way published in England. Third Position groups believe in a racially-homogeneous decentralized tribal form of nationalism, and claim to have evolved an ideology "beyond communism and capitalism."

White supremacist leader Tom Metzger promotes Third Position politics in his newspaper WAR which stands for White Aryan Resistance. In Europe, the Third Position defines its racial-nationalist theories in publications such as Third Way and The Scorpion. Third Position adherents actively seek to recruit from the left. One such group is the American Front in Portland, Oregon, which ran a phone hotline that in late November, 1991 featured an attack on critics of left/right coalitions. Some Third Position themes have surfaced in the ecology movement and other movements championed by progressives.8

While the Third Position is an obscure ideology, there have been published reports that have reported on it. An excellent discussion of the emergence of the Third Position and the revivial of a national socialist/Strasserite version of intrernational fascism can be found in Kevin Coogan's 1999 book, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International and in Martin A. Lee's 1997 book, The Beast Reawakens. The convergence among racial nationalists in North America and Western and Eastern Europe is discussed at length in Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo, eds., Nation and Race, and Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right.9 There is a theoretical discussion of the European Third Position and racially separate nation-states by Robert Antonio in "After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism.10 The anti-U.S. aspect of the Third Position is examined in "´Neither Left Nor Right´" in the Southern Poverty Law Center magazine, Intelligence Report.11

The Third Position-which rejects both capitalism and communism-traces its roots to the most "radical" anticapitalist wing of Hitler's Nazi Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, neonazis in several European countries advocated the Third Position.13 Its leading proponent in the United States was White Aryan Resistance, headed by former California Klan leader Tom Metzger. Metzger, who was a Democratic candidate for Congress in 1980, expounded his philosophy at the 1987 Aryan Nations Congress:

"WAR is dedicated to the White working people, the farmers, the White poor. . . . This is a working class movement. . . . Our problem is with monopoly capitalism. The Jews first went with Capitalism and then created their Marxist game. You go for the throat of the Capitalist. You must go for the throat of the corporates. You take the game away from the left. It's our game! We're not going to fight your whore wars no more! We've got one war, that is right here, the same war the SA fought in Germany, right here; in the streets of America."14

Metzger's organization vividly illustrated fascism's tendency to appropriate elements of leftist politics in distorted form. WAR supported "white working-class" militancy such as the lengthy "P-9" labor union strike against Hormel in Minnesota, stressed environmentalism, and opposed U.S. military intervention in Central America and the Persian Gulf. The Aryan Women's League, affiliated with WAR, claimed that Jews invented male supremacy and called for "Women's Power as well as White Power."15 Metzger's television program, "Race and Reason," was broadcast on cable TV in dozens of cities and aided cooperation among White supremacist groups. Through its Aryan Youth Movement wing, WAR was particularly successful in the 1980s in recruiting racist skinheads, who include thousands of young people clustered in scores of violent pro-Nazi formations. (Not all skinheads are racist and there are antiracist and antifascist skinhead groups.) Metzger and WAR's position in the neonazi movement was weakened in October 1990 when they were fined $12.5 million in a civil suit for inciting three Portland skinheads who murdered Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw.16

Out of the stew of the Third Position, and the European New Right theories of intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist, came a new version of White Nationalism that championed racially separate nation-states.17 In the United States this filtered down to White supremacists, who began to call themselves White Separatists.18 Dobratz and Shanks-Meile believe that "most, if not all, whites in this movement feel they are superior to blacks."19 Instead of segregation, however, White Separatism called for "geographic separation of the world's races" and in the United States this prompted calls for an Aryan Homeland in the Pacific Northwest.20 [Excerpt: Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, Chapter 13, pp. 265-286.]

Maybe the FBI, the ATF and other federal agencies involved in homeland security should (if they're not already) take a closer look at the connections between domestic terrorists and foreign terrorists.

Local police departments simply don't have the resources or the intelligence to be able to deal with local terrorists or foreign terrorists in any realistic way. Local police departments don't even have the resources to deal with minor interstate criminal gangs.

By the way, a few local anti-government groups here in Washington County, Oregon have been able to effectively tie up the resources of a few local police departments just by having one or two groups of white female supremacists make false complaints against a variety of people while at the same time another group of both females and males descend upon various courthouses and threaten chaos and all sorts of mayhem. Many of the local police departments haven't even figured out that there are connections between the various local groups and that they are, in fact, working hand in hand to befuddle the local law enforcement authorities.

Posted by John at March 23, 2004 08:06 AM | TrackBack