Delaware Online reports:

Over the summer, DelDOT blocked Edward McBride III’s application to adopt Cedar Grove Road under the name of the National Socialist Freedom Movement Nazi Party.

Citing concerns that the state could be seen as endorsing a hate group, DelDOT also rejected McBride’s counter-offer to have an abbreviated Adopt-a-Highway sign carry the name “NSFM88 Nazi Party.”

The approved signs read ‘Freedom Party.’ McBride and his wife are believed to be the only local members of the Neo-Nazi group on behalf of which they sought the signage, though they have reportedly said there are 45 members in Delaware. As for what the ‘adoption’ entails?

Groups are required to clean their designated roadways at least three times a year. Volunteers in Sussex County spent 711 hours collecting 2,106 bags of trash, according to DelDOT.

McBride said he intends to clean up the ditches along Cedar Grove Road on Tuesday or Wednesday, his days off from a job as a cook at a local restaurant.

“I plan to get out there and take care of my obligation,” McBride said.

Delaware OKs neo-Nazi group in ‘Adopt A Highway’ program [USA Today]
Neo-Nazi group adopts Sussex roadway [Delaware Online]
This Exists: Nazi Group Adopts Delaware Highway [Mediaite]

• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

Moscow police believe that the attack on Darkei Shalom synagogue were retaliation for the previous days verdict. The five gang members were found guilty in the murder of twenty-seven migrants from southern Muslim republics and the Central Asian states, but entering the courtroom, they shouted anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi slogans.

There isn’t much doubt that since the bad old days, Russia’s Jews are flourishing. As U.S. Ambassador John Beyre wrote in a 2009 cable (subsequently released by Wikileaks), Russia has shown “clear signs of throwing off its long and tragic history of anti-Semitism.” But that progress, which Beyre cautioned could be fragile, and the progress of the Russian Jewish community since the fall of the Soviet Union, was partly possible because, as Julia Ioffe explained in Tablet Magazine, “the target of nationalist discrimination shifted from the Jews—most of whom had left—to migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.”

Somehow, though, Jews keep getting hit, shifts or not. After all, in European countries like the Netherlands, which just passed an anti-ritual slaughter bill, far-right parties keep managing to harm smaller Jewish populations with legislation targeted at Muslim immigrants. Most likely many of the proponents see Jews as acceptable “collateral damage” in their mission, but it’s hard to imagine that there aren’t a few, like the Russian neo-Nazis would, who see it as a happy accident.

“Antisemitism has been a part of Russian culture for such a long time,” noted Beyre in 2009. “It would be unrealistic to expect it to disappear overnight.”

Synagogue Attacked After Neo-Nazi Verdict [Australia Broadcasting Corporation]
Six Firebombs Thrown At Moscow Synagogue In Suspected Anti-Semitic Act [Haaretz]
Neo-Nazi Gets Life For 27 Murders [Australia Broadcasting Corporation]
Dutch Anti-Ritual Slaughter Ban Passes [JPost]
In Dutch Schehitah Ban, Jews See A Sign They Are Unwanted [JTA]

Earlier: Cable Reports Lower Russian Anti-Semitism
Related: Royal Wedding
Kosher Rules

• George Mitchell resigned as U.S. special envoy for the Mideast, ostensibly for having served his two years but actually because the peace process is on life support. [Politico]

• “I don’t see Hamas as a terror organization,” said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “Hamas is a political party.” [JPost]

• Nakba Day is Sunday, but the clashes have already begun in East Jerusalem. [Al-Jazeera]

• A fascinating look at the Alawite sect—it’s like a non-mainstream, neo-Platonic version of Shiism—and how its adherents came to power in Syria despite comprising only 12 percent of the population. The Alawites of French Syria are eerily reminiscent of the Jews of British Palestine. [NYRB]

• Jordan has agreed to buy natural gas from Egypt at a higher price than it did under the Mubarak regime, making it likely that Israel will eventually do so as well. [JPost]

• Reflections from a Times reporter on Jeff Hall, the neo-Nazi whose son allegedly shot and killed him on May 1. [NYT]

• Jeffrey Herf argues that the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt is bad not only for Israel but for Egypt itself as well. [TNR]

• Some ultra-Orthodox newspapers airbrush women out of more than just photos. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• The head of an Orthodox day school in Buenos Aires was assaulted to shouts of “Jew, Jew!” [ADL]

Wishing you a sunny afternoon.

Hall, 32, was a young star—the de facto leader of the southern California branch—in the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, the largest U.S. white supremacist group, which claims more than 400 members throughout the country and is seen as a successor to the much-diminished Aryan Nation. The group taps into and capitalizes on more mainstream grievances commonly heard from the populist right—anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-bailout rhetoric, and the like. But Jeff Hall, a plumber, was no Joe the Plumber: The N.S.M. unmistakably advances a separatist, racist agenda that holds whites above all others and directly pays homage to the Nazis. In fact, shortly before his death, Hall had given his son a belt with an SS insignia; at one rally, he wore a black Nazi uniform. (To see many photographs of Hall and others, go here.) The Times quotes N.S.M. head Jeff Schoep at a New Jersey rally telling an assembled group, “The government tells us we’re in recovery. Well yeah, if you’re a fat cat on Wall Street, if you’re some greedy Jew running a bank that got a whole bunch of kickbacks, maybe it is better. But not for us.”

In April 2009, a Department of Homeland Security report stated, “The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.” The prospect that President Obama would liberalize immigration (much as his predecessor had wished to do) was cited as an additional potential impetus to the growth of right-wing extremism. Last fall, Hall ran in a local election, for a seat on a water district. He lived in Riverside, California, in the so-called Inland Empire east of Los Angeles—a region that was among the hardest hit by the 2008-9 housing crash. Running on the National Socialist ticket, Hall received 28 percent of the vote. He had planned to run again.

Neo-Nazi Father Is Killed; Son, 10, Steeped in Beliefs, Is Accused [NYT]

• Defense Minister Barak argued that Iran would never drop a nuclear bomb on Israel and that Israel should stop scaring people to the effect that such a thing was possible. He did say the ayatollahs are unreliable. [Haaretz]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s military attaché had to bow out of his boss’s trip to London for fear of war crimes prosecution. [AP/WP]

• Nathan Thrall argues that Israel is most effective when it works to improve Palestinian life and engages Palestininan moderates—including some Hamas elements—to deter the real radicals. He discussed reconciliation in The Scroll last week. [NYT]

• Various directions the Arab spring has taken have actually undermined Turkey’s hegemony. [NYT]

• A 10-year-old allegedly shot his father, a member of the country’s largest neo-Nazi party, to death, although the father’s beliefs appear not to have been a motive. I feel bad. For the kid. [AP]

* This was a typo; it should read “right to exist.” However, it is a compelling enough typo that it will remain.

• You know how the Last Supper was a Seder? Yeah, it probably wasn’t. [Menachem Mendel/JI Daily]

• Gal Beckerman profiles the left-wing group Jewish Voice for Peace. [Forward]

• Neo-Nazis are marching in Trenton, New Jersey, tomorrow. Enjoy the rain, scumbags. [NYC ANTIFA]

• People are really excited about an Israel slasher film called Rabies, and now I am, too. [Capital]

• Kehinde Wiley—L.A.-born, of Nigerian descent—paints Israelis. [LAT]

• Some 1300 Ethiopian immigrants in Israel will hopefully set the Guinness World Record for largest Seder on Monday. [JPost]

• Unbeatable headline: “Cohen Media Acquires ‘Chasing Madoff.’” [Variety]

• In some Orthodox communities, only immodest women vote, or so they say. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• President Obama acknowledges the Lubavitcher Rebbe. [JTA]

Helen Mirren as a former Mossad agent? Yes, please.

• George Will briefly profiles Netanyahu, getting at the heart of the recent disconnect between Israel and America. [WP]

• After Hezbollah claimed it had proof that Israel was involved in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the U.N. probe is asking for the evidence. [NYT]

• Turkey is establishing its own flotilla probe, answerable to Prime Minister Erdogan. [Haaretz]

• New York Gov. David Paterson announced that the developers behind Park51, the Ground Zero Islamic center, were not interested in his offers to help them relocate. “I certainly respect that,” he said. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• A win for the good guys: A cartoon stork that looks like (and is meant to mock) a similar-looking logo of a clothes company favored by neo-Nazis was found not to be injuring or disparaging the right-wing outfit (get it, outfit?). [NYT]

Alexander Palloch arrived at the station a bit after 6 p.m. At 20, Palloch had already built a reputation as an unemployed drunk; he’d twice been arrested for distributing extreme right-wing propaganda. He spent much of his free time getting into fistfights.

According to police reports, eyewitnesses later testified that Palloch wasn’t particularly drunk when he approached the 16-year-old—his parents have requested he not be identified, so we’ll call him “Leo”—at the bus station. Still, Palloch was belligerent. “Jewish pig!” he yelled at Leo, and began pounding the stunned boy’s face. Leo struggled and managed to get away. He ran onto Bahnhofstrasse, too fast to notice that Palloch was giving chase. But Palloch was faster: After 30 or 40 meters, he caught up with Leo, knocked him to the ground, and punched him again.

Watching the scene unfold from his car, Mario Traebert, a local resident, slammed the breaks and opened the door. He yelled at Palloch to stop. The bully froze for a second, just long enough for Leo to escape. Traebert opened the passenger door and yelled at Leo to jump in. The bruised boy obliged. Watching his prey speed away, Palloch ran after the car and managed to kick its back door.

The incident could have easily been regarded as just another fight between two teenagers. It could have been filed as just another one in the 150 assaults instigated each year, according to local police records, by young men associated with the extreme right: thugs attacking immigrants, left-wing activists, or homosexuals.

But the words Alexander Palloch chose to shout just before attacking Leo prompted the police to classify the crime as an anti-Semitic attack, a far more infrequent occurrence in Laucha. With very few Jews living in the region, the number of attacks in Saxony-Anhalt usually hovers around one or two per year, though these incidents are treated more seriously than other hate crimes. Indeed, the more one looked into the attack, the more visible were the dark specters of history. As I learned from in-depth conversations with local authorities, activists, and residents, Laucha, which on the surface seemed to be the locus of a successful story of German reunification, was going through a battle for its very soul.

***

As a native-born Israeli who has lived in Germany for three years, I am constantly fascinated by this battle. Whenever a news report offers a glimpse of the old demons thrashing beneath the blanket of postwar German sensitivity and tolerance, I rush to the scene. So as soon as I heard about Leo, I headed to Laucha.

Leo makes a compelling protagonist. His maternal grandfather, Yoseph Lev, survived the Holocaust by hiding in the empty building of the Warsaw ghetto as the rest of his family was hauled off to Auschwitz. His paternal grandfather, Amitzur Shapira, was one of the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered in the terrorist attack during the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Born in Israel, Leo moved to Laucha as a child after his mother, Tzipi Lev, divorced his father and fell in love with a German man, Olaf Osteroth. She was a choreographer specializing in mass gymnastics; he, an avid hot-air balloonist and a notable figure in the world of German aerial sports. They met on an athletes’ exchange program between Israel and Germany, and before too long Tzipi and her two sons were headed to Laucha.

In many ways, the tiny German town wasn’t too dissimilar from their home, Oranit, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank named for the pine trees that surround it. Like Oranit, Laucha was quiet and rural, the sort of place where everybody knew everybody else. And despite their historical baggage, Tzipi and her sons found little in Laucha to make them feel unwelcome. Little, that is, except for the house on 14 Obere Hauptstrasse: Every year on April 20, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, the resident of the second floor of the two-story house would place a small statue of the Führer in the window, along with the Reich’s black, white, and red war flag. Anyone walking by the house on April 20 could also hear loud Nazi-era music booming from within. But everyone assumed it was just an isolated incident, one loose screw in an otherwise orderly town.

***

In 1999, a handful of people from Laucha decided to organize a soccer team known as BCS99. It was conceived as an educational enterprise—the idea was to set up a place for Laucha’s youth to learn the lessons of good sportsmanship—and as such was funded by the municipality, the regional council, the German Football Federation, and a host of local businesses.

The driving force behind the team was Lutz Battke, a chimney-sweep and the resident of the second-floor apartment on 14 Obere Hauptstrasse. Everyone in Laucha knew that Battke was involved with some sort of right-wing politics, but this didn’t seem to trouble any parents, who were happy to have somewhere to send their kids. As far as most parents were concerned, Battke was helping their kids stay out of trouble, turning them into athletes instead of hooligans, teaching them discipline. And if the man who could keep the local kids off the streets and inspire them to invest their hours training rather than drinking or fighting also held a few extremely unkind opinions, so be it. As long as he didn’t act out on these opinions, went the common logic, no damage was done. Tzipi Lev herself subscribed to this logic, sending her oldest son, Leo’s brother, to play for the club. Another player was Alexander Palloch, Leo’s attacker.

From his perch as the club’s coach, Battke devoted a considerable chunk of his time to his other passion, politics. Using the clubhouse as a meeting place, he oversaw the local branch of the National Democratic Party, or NPD, an extreme right-wing party widely considered to be a neo-Nazi organization. A few local politicians objected, but the community at large showed no support for these protests—as far as they were concerned, Battke was an upstanding member of the community and whatever political activity he engaged in was acceptable.

But as time passed, Battke took steps toward gaining real power, and his sporting activity started to merge with his political goals. In 2001, for example, he designed a flag for the football club that—with its black, white, and red palette—suspiciously resembled Nazi iconography. Jana Grandy, Laucha’s then mayor, vowed to boycott the club and tried to stop its public funding. She failed. Two years later, in 2003, Battke formed a political party, which he named after the club, and was elected to local office. In 2007, when Tzipi Lev and Olaf Osteroth brought an Israeli dance group to perform in Laucha, Battke tried, according to local news reports, to recruit a few of the club’s players to march in protest; when the club’s managers told him that was a step too far, he canceled the march. Instead, he printed posters featuring a blood-dripping Star of David and hung them all over town. Again, the local press reported about Battke’s actions, which he explained as being in opposition to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. And again, nobody seemed to care: By 2009, when he was up for re-election as a city councilman, Battke ran as an independent, landing a spot on the NPD ticket, and won more votes than any other candidate.

Alarmed by Battke’s rise, Saxony-Anhalt’s Ministry of Economy tried to suspend Battke from his job as regional chimney sweeper, a position that resembles that of rural volunteer fireman. Battke fought the move in court and won—the NPD, after all, is not outlawed in Germany.

Its legal status aside, however, the NPD still alarms most of Germany’s human rights organizations, who treat the party as dangerous and extremist. When I called the Mobile Beratung für Opfer rechter Gewalt—a nonprofit group that aids victims of right-wing attacks—and expressed an interest in traveling to Laucha, the helpful social worker on the other end of the line went silent. Then she suggested I might need bodyguards, and assigned two of her volunteers to join me and my photographer on our visit to the small town.

As the four of us drove into Laucha, the possibility of violence seemed remote. To the east and the west, vineyards dotted the landscape, and a cheerful sign at the entrance to town toasted the local resident crowned that year’s Wine Queen. The town’s medieval houses and narrow streets sat under a looming church spire, watching sternly over the small square at Laucha’s center.

Leo’s house looks no different than the other stone houses in town. Sitting at the simple dinner table shortly after returning from high school, Leo bore no marks from the attack. His attitude, too, was defiant; even though he had lived in Laucha for most of his life, his accent made him sound more Israeli than German.

“I’m not afraid,” Leo said to me in Hebrew about living in this remote town. “I consider myself also an Israeli, but I can’t see myself living in Israel. My friends are here, my connections are here, I’ve been here from the age of 7. As a Jew, I cannot run or hide. To the contrary, I have a right to live where I want. Precisely because of what happened to my grandparents.”

When asked if he’s angry with the Germans—a question that many of his relatives in Israel raised in the days immediately following the attack—Leo shook his head. But he did feel, he admitted, that what happened to him was brushed off by far too many of his schoolmates as a mere act of bullying. He wished, he said, that people in Laucha would realize the attack was very different from a mere violent outburst.

“My generation is all the time asking not to connect them to the past,” he said. “But if that’s the case then they are supposed to be much more angry than me about this incident. They cannot let that happen. Unless they like to be called Nazis.”

As I was talking to Leo, Frank Rothe, a photographer, left to take some snapshots of Laucha. He shot the pastoral countryside, the ancient municipal plaza, people going about their daily lives. Then, he arrived at the field where Lutz Battke was presiding over soccer practice. Rothe introduced himself to Battke, and Battke told him curtly that no photography was allowed at the club. Rothe replied that since the club was municipal property, he could snap shots whenever he wished. Battke pulled out his battered Nokia cell phone, said a few things to the person on the other end of the line, and handed the phone over to Rothe. Michael Bilstein, the soccer team’s vice president and Laucha’s current mayor, tried to convince Rothe to leave, but Rothe wouldn’t budge. When the conversation finally came to an end, Rothe flipped the cell phone shut. A screen saver came on the phone’s small display. It was a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

***

After hearing Rothe’s account, I wanted to chat with Lutz Battke. He wasn’t at the practice field, so, accompanied by my volunteer bodyguards, I drove to his house and climbed up to the second floor. The shoes Battke had just worn during the football practice were outside the door. I knocked. A woman opened the door, saw my face, and slammed it immediately. I knocked again. There was no answer.

Outside in the street, a young man with short blond hair agreed to answer our questions. He claimed he had never heard of Leo. We told him he was an Israeli-born boy who was beat up by a bully for being a Jew. “Should he even be here?” the young blond asked. “And should you?”

The young man, we later learned from neighbors, was Ronnie, Lutz Battke’s adopted son.

As Battke himself was nowhere to be found, I decided to talk to those residents of Laucha who supported his enterprise. One is Olaf Pleitz, the proprietor of a local company that supplies sanitary appliances and tools for hospitals. Pleitz is one of the key financial sponsors of Battke’s football club. When I called to ask why he was sponsoring a man who had Hitler on his screen saver and goons on his football squad, Pleitz erupted. He shouted that he had the right to sponsor whomever he damn pleased, and that he can’t possibly know what goes on in all of the many organizations he supports.

He was right—as a business owner, he owed no explanation for his actions. That, however, wasn’t the case with Rotkäppchen, a producer of sparkling wine and another enthusiastic sponsor of Battke’s club. The company’s owner, a man with the surname Heise, lives on Tannengartnen Strasse in Laucha, a three-minute ride from Tzipi Lev and Olaf Osteroth’s house and from the practice field where his firm’s sign decorates the fence. When we pulled into his driveway, his wife was leaving the house. We asked her if it was possible talk to Heise, and she said he wasn’t home and asked what we wanted. We said we wanted to know whether Heise could tell us why his firm sponsors a football club that employs a known right-wing extremist as one of its leaders. She took our contacts.

Eight minutes later, Claudia Korenke, one of the firm’s spokespeople, called us from Frankfurt. She talked at length about Herr Heise’s activities to strengthen Germany’s relations with Israel. After I pressed her on the company’s ties to Battke, she promised to get back to me. The next day, she emailed to let me know that Rotkäppchen had decided to cut all ties and sponsorship deals with the club.

I called Alexander Palloch, the bully; his mother said her boy was innocent because he was a Protestant, and therefore forbidden by God from hating foreigners. I called the police to complain about Battke’s Hitler screen saver—based on German laws prohibiting display of Nazi imagery—but the police said that whatever Battke chose to do with his cell phone was his private business. I also called Mayor Bilstein. I wasn’t expecting much; after the attack, Bilstein told local media that there was no evidence that Battke was connected to the attack, and that the children adored him. “[Battke] works with young children, and I do not believe he has bad influence on them,” he said. “We’ve never heard complaints from parents about him. If there were complaints, that would be another story.” But when I finally got him on the phone, the mayor sounded contrite. Leo’s attacker, he said, “comes from a broken home, he escaped from school, and the only guidance he had came from the football club. We can’t allow NPD supporters to coach and teach in this club.” He promised to look into Battke’s politics and vowed that he would resign his position as the club’s vice president if Battke wasn’t removed from his position as coach.

“In 1999, we thought that the club would help to integrate people like Battke into society,” Bilstein told me on the phone. “It is now 2010, and we must admit that we failed. We have succeeded in sports, but everyone is just talking about the Nazi team of Laucha.”

The following day, the Laucha police called again. They told me that they had decided to open an investigation concerning Lutz Battke’s screen saver.

Hearing this bit of news, Lev and Osteroth were happy but not thrilled. They were fighting, they said, for their hometown, a place ravaged by decades of dictatorship before the reunification and years of economic hardship after it. They believed that if people in Laucha had the chance to meet Jewish people, the old animosities would disappear. They also believed that anti-Semitism in Laucha was just a convenient vehicle for material frustrations, not some deep-seated belief. They believed all that, but they weren’t sure. If they turned out to be wrong, they said, they’d pack up and leave, maybe for Israel.

Toward the end of our stay in Laucha, Osteroth took me up in one of his hot-air balloons, and we floated above the region’s green fields. Osteroth said that as long as his family was here, they had to fight. “The role of my generation is not to look back in shame, but to ensure that there will be no closing of the eyes in the present,” he said. He pointed down, toward the center of town. “Otherwise,” he added, “place after place here will become Naziland.”

Ze’ev Avrahami is a writer living in Berlin.

• Regardless, the New York Times reports that as Israel marks the holiday, “there is something about the mood this year that feels darker than usual.” [NYT]

• And meanwhile, Egypt is beseeching the UN to pressure Israel to join in “an internationally and effectively verifiable treaty for the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.” [Reuters]

• A Neo-Nazi rally in Los Angeles, counterprotestors threw “rocks, bottles, eggs and other items,” injuring two white supremacists; five assailants (of various races) were arrested. [L.A. Independent]

CREDIT: Justin Gabbard

The number of extremist groups in the United States exploded in 2009 as militias and other groups steeped in wild, antigovernment conspiracy theories exploited populist anger across the country and infiltrated the mainstream, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009. Their numbers grew from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, an astonishing addition of 363 new groups in a single year. Militias—the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement—were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 militias in 2008 to 127 in 2009.

—SPLCenter.org

The population of the town in which I live is roughly 2,400 people. Of those people, I know approximately 50 or so by name, and of those 50, there are only 17 who I think will let me hide with my wife and children in their attic during the next genocide. This is assuming those 17 people haven’t already promised their attics to other Jews, blacks, homosexuals, Asians, Europeans, immigrants, etc., which I’m fairly sure at least six of them already have.

First come, first saved.

Heh.

The trouble is, I have a wife, two small children, and two large dogs; realistically, we’ll probably need a whole attic to ourselves. My oldest son is 5, he can sleep on the floor with us, but my youngest is only 9 months, so we’ll need the portable crib and possibly the walker (there are locks on the walker’s wheels, so we can keep him from moving around if the authorities arrive and question the family below). I’m not being greedy, just pragmatic, and, of course, if the attic is big enough, we would be more than willing to share it with another young couple, or maybe some children whose parents have been arrested by the authorities. (They’ll need constant reassuring, which I’ll be happy to give them in the early days, but as the genocide drags on, they’re going to get on my nerves, I know that now; man up, kids, this isn’t easy for anyone.) My infant, though, has a very sensitive stomach (he gets it from me), so whoever shares the attic with us, if that’s the only situation we can arrange, ought to know straight away that we’re not sharing his baby food, I don’t care how grim the situation becomes; he pretty much eats only strained carrots and the occasional jar of pears, so forget about it. I’ll bring an extra loaf of bread, they can have some of that. (The truth is, if we really do end up sharing the attic with two small children whose parents have been arrested by the authorities, I’ll probably change my mind and share with them even though I’m saying now that I won’t; I’ll bring extra jars of the strained carrots, just in case.) If you fail to plan, the saying goes, you plan to have your windows shattered and your family arrested, their heads shaved and thrown into gas chambers.

Heh.

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation. Hate groups stayed at record levels—almost 1,000—despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America.

I don’t actually believe there will be gas chambers this time around. Genocidaires (and we’re all genocidaires eventually) are nothing if not proud, and they hate to repeat the extermination methods of others. Concentration camps, yes, there’ll definitely be camps. Some things are just basic. I used to think that there would be another Jewish Holocaust, but now I’m just sure there’ll be another Holocaust, Jewish or otherwise; when I was younger, the only genocide I knew about was the Jewish one. It was the only one I was taught about, the only one that mattered. Since shouting “Never again” about the genocide 60 years ago, there have been at least a couple more, and it soon becomes depressingly clear: As bad as the world seems if you’re standing in the Jewish part of town, it’s really no picnic anywhere else.

It would be nice if the attic we hide in is somewhere close to our home, not just so that we can get something if we forget it (I’ll definitely forget my iPod, I always do), but so that when the genocide is over, we don’t have too far to travel. We won’t be in the mood for it, I can tell you that. (This is assuming we all live, which we probably won’t, and that our house hasn’t been burned down, which it probably will be; to be totally honest, given the choice between the house being burned down and some high-level genocidaire taking it over and using it as some upstate New York command center, I’d go with the burning down—I don’t like having people in my house even when I’m there, let alone when I’m not.) That’s why, of the 11 people I think would let me and my family hide in their attic that haven’t already promised their attic to someone else, my first choice would be my neighbors, the Andersons. Unfortunately, their dog died recently, and they now have a puppy (Lab-Bernese mix); even if the damn thing doesn’t spend all day barking at the attic (dead giveaway), she’ll drive my own dogs crazy, and they’ll want to go down and play with her. I’ll feel bad about keeping them locked up there with me (Did the Germans kill the dogs of Jews, too, or just the Jews? I assume that they did, but I don’t know for sure; maybe they just killed the dogs that seemed Jewish, like beagles), and it will only get worse when the puppy goes outside to play.

The anger seething across the American political landscape—over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as “socialist” or even “fascist”— goes beyond the radical right. The “tea parties” and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

Jason, my other neighbor, would definitely let my family and me hide in his attic, except that he has no attic, and, like the Andersons, he also has dogs. He would no doubt ask his friend Amanda if she would hide us instead, but she is going through a separation at the moment and may not be in her house by the time the genocide starts. (Even if she is, and even if she had an attic we can stay in, I think it’d be best if we found somewhere else; I like her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but people going through break-ups can be erratic, and he might report us to the authorities just to get her in trouble.) That leaves our nanny Elsa, who is from Eritrea, and I can only assume would be a target of whatever round-ups the rounder-uppers were rounding up, or Erin, our other nanny; Erin’s mother is white and her father is African, so I assume they would be rounded up as well, Erin along with them. All that leaves is Mike and Rose, friends of ours a few miles away. I’m sure that Mike would let us stay in his attic, but Rose is a devout Christian and though she has never said so, I suspect she silently resents my writings about God. And so that will be the big ironic ending—after years of worrying that God will kill me for the things that I write, a genocide (at last—you were right, Mom) will start here in America and, with nowhere left to turn, I’ll pack up my wife, my children, and my dogs, and we’ll run under the cover of darkness to the only friends we have who might be able to hide us in their attic, and they’ll turn us away, because of what I wrote about God.

Heh.

Oh well: praemonitus praemunitus as the saying goes—forewarned is forearmed, which is not just a good idea, it’s also the title of the second American edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Heh.

No, really.

Now look at this cartoon, a poster actually, which is part of a display—called the “Wailing Wall”—in the town square of Cologne, Germany. In case you don’t “get it,” the ostensible point of the cartoon is that Israel is using Gaza—maybe the Gaza blockade? the politics, needless to say, aren’t the most sophisticated in the world—to kill innocent Palestinians. In case you still don’t “ get it,” this is a depiction of the blood libel: the centuries-old anti-Semitic myth that Jews murder and feed on Gentiles (note not just what’s on the plate, but what’s in the glass, too).

The poster has been removed, although the “Wailing Wall” proprietor pledges to try to put it up elsewhere. Meanwhile, however, the public prosecutor has declined to charge the poster-maker under a German law that bans the incitement of racial hatred. “It is not a tendency of hostility toward Jews, but an actual criticism of the situation in Gaza,” he explained of the poster. “The cartoon is a sarcastic expression of the Israeli army in Gaza.”

This puts me in a tricky position. I think cartoons like that should be allowed. Only by allowing a full public airing of atrocious views can we ensure that decent people know about them, condemn their makers, and educate the ignorant. So I don’t want the person who made them to be prosecuted.

However, it’s very, very disturbing that local authorities think that this doesn’t violate their law. It plainly does; it plainly incites anti-Semitism. Believeing that it doesn’t indicates a lack of knowledge about and sensitivity to the history of anti-Semitism that would be troubling anywhere, and is particularly chilling in, well, Germany. And ignorance is a charitable explanation for this lapse.

But this is also a lesson, right? Maybe if anti-Semitism weren’t a crime in Germany, then Germans would be more willing to call people on it!

Cologne Refuses Action Against Artist ‘Blood Libel’ [Jewish Chronicle]

In 2008, the FBI reported that “[m]ilitary experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement,” says reporter Matt Kennard. He adds: “In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans.” And it’s probably getting worse, as the growing need for new soldiers to fight the war in Iraq has led recruiters to overlook signs, such as swastika tattoos, that might indicate potentially violent racism. This may be new evidence of the “Obama Effect”—a theory posited by a criminologist that having diversity in the White House has led to an upsurge in white supremacy.

Or, as Geoffrey Millard, an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War, says, it could be that “the military is attractive to white supremacists … because the war itself is racist.”

Neo-Nazis Are in the Army Now [Salon]

Griffin could do without these kinds of encomiums. As one of the new BNP European Parliamentary members, Griffin’s electoral success demonstrates the effectiveness of his strategy to emphasize the party’s British nationalism while adopting an amnesiac approach to its neo-Nazi origins. The elections marked a breakthrough.

The party has never secured any kind of parliamentary representation before. However, Griffin and his supporters know that the European parliament does not have the significance or the prestige of the British parliament at Westminster. Those who bother to vote in European elections often do so to register a protest against the establishment parties. When the time comes for a Westminster election, the good sense and caution of the voters kicks back in. If Griffin is to buck that trend, he must cast away any associations with de Nugent, Von Brunn, and people of that ilk.

To be sure, the BNP has quite a history to overcome. Nothing better symbolizes the unashamedly Nazi roots of the party than the October 1963 wedding between Colin Jordan and Françoise Dior. Jordan was the founder of the National Socialist Movement, from which the BNP is directly descended. His bride, the niece of fashion designer Christian Dior, was a Hitler worshipper who had spent most of her life on the edges of the moldering French aristocracy. Their nuptials were a macabre celebration of Nazi occultism. Having sworn that they were both of pure Aryan stock, Dior and Jordan pricked their fingers and let their mingled blood drip onto a virgin copy of Mein Kampf.

A Royal Air Force reject, Jordan founded the National Socialist Movement on what would have been Hitler’s 73rd birthday, April 20, 1962. He was the most foul of racists, obsessed with the image of black males as sexual predators. (“Semi-savages are given material rewards to mate with the women of one of the leading civilized nations in the world,” he spat.) These demons in his head were fueled by the svelte, hard-faced Dior, who taunted him about her previous relationship with John Tyndall, Jordan’s deputy. When Jordan eventually dismissed Tyndall, Dior said: “I once thought Colin was weak. Now he has proved his strength.” A few months later, she dumped him.

Such melodrama makes it easy to forget that Jordan and Tyndall—when they were not fighting each other or doing time for such offenses as an arson campaign against synagogues—were at the helm of a group that never had more than a few hundred members. By the end of the 1960s, Jordan had been eclipsed and Tyndall was slowly realizing that winning elections was a necessary condition of political success. He reasoned that labels like “British nationalist” were probably more appealing to the public than “National Socialist.”

Tyndall became one of the leaders of the National Front, which dominated the British far right during the 1970s. What distinguished the National Front was not so much its hostility to immigrants—a plentiful sentiment in the Conservative Party of the time—as its strident racism and proclivity for violence. These were never moderated for electoral purposes. Rude Boy, a film released in 1980 starring The Clash, features documentary footage of a National Front candidate ranting menacingly about an opponent who is “half wog, half Jew!” For nationalists like these, race and nation were one and the same—and always would be.

In his public statements, Nick Griffin may have eschewed the racist verbiage of his predecessors—
“wog,” “coon,” “yid,” and so forth—but racial nationalism remains the thread which links the British National Party with the National Socialist Movement. The BNP’s constitution restricts membership to “indigenous Caucasians.” “Rights for Whites,” a racial slogan, is one of the party’s favorites. Moreover, most political reformers will tend to disown or at least apologize for an unsavory past. Griffin has not done so, either on behalf of himself—his career highlights include teenage activism in the National Front, Holocaust denial and authorship of a brazenly anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled
“The Mindbenders”—or his party.

However, the BNP only won two seats, and not to the national legislature, so how worried should Jews and liberals in the United Kingdom be? Wasn’t it possible, I asked Mark Gardner, head of the Community Security Trust—the British Jewish communal body which tracks antisemitic incidents and trends—that the BNP could suffer the same kind of humiliation that the National Front did in the 1979 election, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to power with British pride as one of their themes? “The Conservatives will need to say to that sector of the electorate, ‘we hear your concerns, we won’t let you down,’” he answered. “They might not be as blunt as that.”

So who is politically in a position to shape the fight against the BNP? Historically, that role has been fallen to the far left—but to allow it to do so now might mean courting further disaster. As one of the Britain’s more outspoken bloggers put it, “The first step towards defeating the BNP is to take the fight against the far right out of the hands of the far left.”

As 10 years of Israel fixation on the far left can attest, the tropes of anti-Semitism are not just the preserve of the farthest right. Indeed, they have become so embedded on the left that one British advocate of an academic boycott of Israel has promoted the latest crackpot myth doing the rounds of anti-Semites, namely that Lehman Brothers transferred its assets to Israel before going under. Other characteristics of the far right—the scorning of internationalism in the name of a selfish, parochial isolationism, admiration for tyrants, depicting terrorists as “resistors” or “political soldiers”—have also penetrated the far left. All of which suggests that if the people who might vote for the BNP are to vote for someone else, they need a credible centrist voice to persuade them accordingly.

Ben Cohen is the associate director of communications for the American Jewish Committee. He blogs at Z Word.