UPDATE: May 8 a reader in Buffalo sent us the following:
No one in Buffalo knows about this. We thought Hand was dead. Last time he tried this thdere were three Nazis and over 5,000 counterprotestors. He fled town immediately after that, declaring Buffalo a lost cause, and moved to the Carolinas. This timing is questionable. It’s right around the time of the big international peace fest in Buffalo with Cindy Sheehan and all.
The following April 30 article should thus be taken with that grain of salt —
Yuck. From an April 26 press release of the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group:
NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT’S “NAZI JUGGERNAUT” TO RALLY IN BUFFALO, NEW YORK AND SHARPSBURG, MARYLAND JUNE 10, 2006
Protests To Focus On US Support For Zionism, Anti-Southern Bias
Brown shirted, arm-banded and swastika flying members of the National Socialist Movement, “America’s Nazi Party”, will rally June 10, 2006, in Buffalo, New York and in Sharpsburg, Maryland.
Between 30 and 40 members of the National Socialist Movement are expected to attend a Buffalo, New York march against the War in Iraq and continued US government support of the Zionist occupation in Palestine. The rally has been called by Karl Hand and the Racial Nationalist Party of America.
Approximately a dozen members of the National Socialist Movement will attend a demonstration called by Gordon Young of the World Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Sharpsburg, Maryland at the Antietam battlefield, to address anti-Southern bias.
The demonstrations come on the heels of recent National Socialist Movement rallies and marches in Lansing, Michigan, Orlando, Florida and Toledo, Ohio, among others.
The National Socialist Movement, founded in 1974, is led by Commander Jeff Schoep, and is a direct descedant of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party of Adolf Hitler and the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell. Its recent immense growth and power has been described by anti-racist groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “Nazi juggernaut.”
Video of recent NSM rally:
Nazis were effectively countered at a 2002 rally in DC:
Neo-Nazis, Foes Clash At Israeli Embassy
Washington Post/May 12, 2002
By Allan LengelTheir disparate, passionate views threw them together yesterday. Dozens of police officers kept them apart.
Under clear blue skies, in a normally serene neighborhood, about 250 neo-Nazis and white separatists rallied outside the Israeli Embassy, exchanging angry rhetoric with about 150 counter-demonstrators across the street.
The white supremacists, from states including Ohio, Florida and Georgia, gathered outside the embassy on Van Ness Street in upper Northwest Washington to protest U.S. support for Israel. Occasionally, they pumped their arms in the air in unison and yelled, “Sieg Heil.” Some also voiced support for the Palestinians, waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want your Jewish state.” They interspersed their chants with obscenities and racial and ethnic slurs.
The counter-demonstrators, who included Palestinians, Jews and African Americans, came to voice opposition to the neo-Nazis and support for Palestinian independence. Many were outraged that the white separatists would take on the Palestinian cause as their own. Some counter-demonstrators responded by displaying their middle fingers and chanting, “Nazi picketers always lie, they don’t care if Arabs die.”
“It’s not right,” said Isis Nusair, 35, a Palestinian and D.C. resident who screamed, “Put that flag down!” to a white supremacist protester across the street who was waving a Palestinian flag. “It drives me crazy. They’re using the Palestinian issue for their own racism.”
Rami Elamine, another counter-demonstrator, said he came to tell the white supremacists: “We don’t need your help in this struggle. You would just as well go after Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians just as you do the Jews. But you’re using the situation to whip up anti-Semitism. We can stand against the Israeli policies and against anti-Semitism.”
D.C. officers and uniformed U.S. Secret Service police — some in riot gear — stood between the two groups, which took up positions on sidewalks opposite one another in the 2600 block of Van Ness. There were no arrests during the rally, but one 16-year-old counter-demonstrator was arrested after the rally ended at 2 p.m. for slowing traffic and refusing to move on, in an incident involving the separatists, police said.
The white supremacist rally was sponsored by the National Alliance, which advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government and a white separatist nation. The Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People and the Youth Leadership Support Network sponsored the counter-demonstration.
The National Alliance circulated fliers among its members that displayed pictures of Osama bin Laden and the Trade Center with the heading, “Let’s Stop Being Human Shields for Israel . . . Let’s Cut Off aid to Israel now.”
Billy Roper, deputy membership coordinator of the National Alliance, said he was pleased with the turnout. He said Jews have a disproportional influence in the country, and he urged the United States to stop supporting Israel.
Above the yelling of demonstrators, he said the counter-demonstrators agreed with his organization’s message, but “they just dislike us personally. They’re dysfunctional societal misfits.”
Counter-demonstrator Jerry Bellow, of the Columbus, Ohio, chapter of Anti-Racist Action, said he has been a counter-demonstrator at many white supremacist rallies. He surveyed the crowd across the street and expressed concern about the group’s push to raise its visibility.
“I’m angry,” he said. “There are too many of them.”
The following is from the website of the antifa-sympathetic One People’s project:
BUFFALO, NY–Karl Hand of the Racial Nationalist Party of America and the relics from the Nationalist Party of Canada from the early 90s is going to hook up with the National Socialist Movement to try and hold a march and rally against Israel. They plan to march from Lafayette Square at 3 PM and give speeches at Niagara Square at 4 PM. Here’s the fun part: This is Josh Hoyt territory, and over the past year a lot of antifa have been cropping up in the area because of him This is also a half hour away from Rochester, and a chapter of the JDL hails from there. We expect to hear a call from someone real soon.
See our last post on Israel/Palestine, and on resurgent neo-Nazi activity.
