Topic: Holding Terrorists Accountable? It Depends on the Color and the Cause... - Part 1

topic by
Sandra
11/30/2001 (14:47)

Zmag.org
November 04, 2001
Holding Terrorists Accountable? It Depends on the Color and the Cause... - Part 1
By Tim Wise

Members of his terrorist organization and network have killed Americans, on American soil. Those inspired by his message have engaged in a mass atrocity: blowing innocent people out of their offices as the building where they worked crumbled to the ground.

He himself has called for total war against the enemy in an effort to 'cleanse' the United States. He has said that although innocent people will die in such an effort, 'it is necessary, and because it is necessary, it is good.' Seven years ago he warned of potential pending attacks when he wrote: 'New Yorkers who work in tall office buildings--anything close to the size of the World Trade Center--might consider wearing hardhats to work...'

Osama bin Laden? Not even close. And unlike bin Laden, who is now a marked man despite little concrete evidence linking him to the attacks of September 11th, this individual has not been targeted for elimination by the United States government. No one is speaking of 'bringing him to justice,' or holding him accountable for the actions attributable to his associates and devotees.

And unlike bin Laden, whose whereabouts are unknown, the address of the person about whom I speak is well known. He is not in hiding, and doesn’t move around.

He’s so easy to find that 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace simply sauntered up to his home a couple of years ago and had a chat with him. His phone number is (304) 653-4600.

His name is William Pierce, and he lives in Mill Point, West Virginia, with a P.O. Box at the post office in nearby Hillsboro. He is a longtime neo-Nazi who calls Hitler the 'greatest man of our era' and advocates the liquidation of all non-whites in the U.S.

His novel, The Turner Diaries (written under a pseudonym) apparently served as the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, much the way we are told Osama bin Laden’s words have inspired Islamic terrorism, even if he is not directly involved in the planning process.

In Pierce’s book, white 'patriots' blow up a federal building using the same materials as those used by McVeigh, packed in a truck like the one McVeigh used, at the same time of day as the one exploded by McVeigh. They then launch a race war, slaughtering non-whites, race-'mixers,' gays, lesbians and Jews, before dropping nuclear weapons on Israel.

McVeigh was, according to former soldiers who served with him in the Persian Gulf, obsessed with the book, and inspired by its author. In the days before the bombing he sent clippings of the book to his sister, explaining that 'something big' was going to happen, and when arrested had copies of Turner Diaries’ passages in his car.

Over the years, other followers of Pierce and members of his group, the National Alliance, have engaged in armed robberies, shootouts with law enforcement, and murders in at least a half dozen states.

They have plotted to commit mass murder in multiple bombings, foiled only by premature detonation of the devices in question.

The Order--a neo-Nazi gang that committed a series of robberies and killed Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984--was led by Alliance members, including Robert Matthews who left Pierce $50,000 in life insurance benefits after his death during a shootout with the FBI.

Pierce’s weekly radio broadcasts regularly call for the elimination of anyone who isn’t white, and his group encourages members to raid military bases in search of weapons and ammunition. Yet no one is calling for him to be brought in 'dead or alive' as President Bush recently did regarding bin Laden.

While President Bush and media pundits warn of bin-Laden’s associates 'living among us,' the National Alliance has at least 16 active cells nationwide, engaged in activity in at least 26 states, a membership hovering around 1,000, and thousands more listening to their shortwave radio broadcasts and reading the materials on their website.

On those broadcasts and the website, readers and listeners can see and hear Pierce call for 'a racially clean area of the earth for the development of our people,' with 'no non-whites in our living space.' They can hear him speak of the mass slaughter that he terms the 'final cleansing,' and the need to eliminate all Jews and race 'traitors.' For these latter groups he says, 'we must hunt them down and get rid of them.'

On August 15th of this year, Pierce broadcast the following message: 'We really have become too civilized and have forgotten one of Mother Nature's most basic rules: Two different types of animal cannot permanently occupy exactly the same ecological niche. One eventually must drive the other into extinction...'

'We must have exclusive possession of those portions of this planet which constitute suitable habitat for us...in order to obtain and maintain that exclusive possession, we must be prepared to kill, to annihilate, any and all competitors.'

But despite the open support for mass murder, and despite the actual violence carried out by Alliance members and Pierce acolytes over the past two decades, few people are aware of this neo-Nazi terror network, nor does the President seem concerned about it.

One gets the impression that in the eyes of American officialdom, some terrorists pose a threat to the country and others don’t. Some terrorist actions result in calls for racial or ethnic profiling of those 'fitting the description' and others don’t.

After all, when have white guys ever been profiled just because some white guys like McVeigh, or Pierce, or others of their ilk committed atrocities, advocated murder, and engaged in criminal activity? The answer is never, of course.