A Few Thoughts on the Amren Convention
By David Duke
March 2, 2006
As many are now aware, I recently attended the American Renaissance Conference held in Herndon Virginia over the weekend of February 24-26. To set the record straight, I was not an organizer of the event, nor even a speaker, but simply came as an individual who wanted to hear the very latest scientific and civic arguments on the issues directly affecting European mankind. In addition, I wanted to renew my contacts and friendship with many of the academics and others on the cutting edge of these disciplines. There are few meetings such as this where I can plumb the minds of so many of the brightest researchers and thinkers.
The conference was hosted by Jared Taylor, a man of immense ability and the courage commensurate and necessary for telling the long-suppressed truths of race. He and all the speakers at Amren have my admiration. While defending our people from the ethnic cleansing and genetic disaster that threatens us, Taylor, does not delve directly into the paramount Jewish supremacist role in the destruction of our heritage and freedom. Even though I focus on the overall picture, I have no problem with others focusing on important sectors of the overall struggle. In the battle for our European awakening there may even be advantages to having different organizations focus on different parts of the ideological battle.
In fact, as the readers of the Duke Report and Don Black’s Stormfront know, we have consistently linked and led our readers and listeners to the fine work of Jared Taylor. At the conference I talked with dozens of individuals present who were aware of Amren and the Conference from our recommendations and promotion of the event.
I was not at the conference to recruit for EURO or any other group. I could have easily passed out my brand new issue of the Duke Report to all the participants, but did not. I was there to listen and learn and pass on what I learned to my own readers and listeners in America around the world in my writings and many lectures and appearances. I was certainly not there to disrupt in any way the meeting. But, a disruption occurred and I think that is unfortunate.
On the last day of the conference, the wonderful French writer/philosopher Guillaume Faye spoke about the “Threat to the West.” In an excellent presentation he focused on the internal and external threat of fundamentalist Islam to Europe. It is my belief that we must stop the non-European immigration into our homelands, but I also firmly believe that supporting the Jewish extremist, Neocon ”Clash of Civilizations” external war is disastrous. The Iraq War and adventurism elsewhere are taking our focus from the real threats here at home. And the so-called war on terrorism has spawned the means they use to suppress our freedoms here at home. As all of you have heard me say repeatedly: “It is not the Iraqi borders that we should be concerned with, but the Mexican-American border.”
It is also my belief that the immigration problem itself and perhaps even more importantly, the destruction of European American consciousness and traditions, the advance of egalitarianism, feminism and multiculturalism, globalism — all have been driven by Jewish extremists in their relentless quest for supremacy. It was not the Arabs who opened our immigration floodgates, who took over our anthropological sciences, who led the multicultural and diversity march, who weakened us with Marxism, Freudianism, Feminism, pornography, abortion and acceptance of non-reproductive sexual deviance and every sort of debilitating cultural, physical and spiritual nihilism. Even more important, it has not been the Arabs who have seized the control points of mass media as well as the sources of political finance and influence that have led to the ethnic cleansing of our people across the European World. Although we must oppose massive immigration with all our ability, it is not Arabs or Muslims who have led the attack on our people. In fact, they weren’t even the ones who changed our immigration laws.
In short, the West, has not simply succumbed to an external or even a natural phenomenon among us. We have been subverted by extremists who have destroyed our own ethnic consciousness and ethnic dominance while they have relentlessly worked for their own genetic and political supremacy. While they have opened our gates in America and Europe, Israel’s own Jewish demographic mastery is foremost in all their considerations.
So I became concerned listening to a subtle message that we should be happy because the Zionists were now going to be our friends and allies, something that I think is a dangerous notion to our ultimate survival. There are certainly Jewish supremacists who fear the rising Muslim clout in Europe in America as a competing political interest group, but even that minority of Jews bemoan and admit the fact that the overwhelming Jewish extremist establishment supports open borders in the West. They believe that their control can be maintained the multiculturalism of the West under a Jewish cultural, media, music, and political umbrella. They think that they can thrive in what Jewish activist Stephen Steinlight calls their policy of “divide and conquer.” In my opinion, although Arab power is an important problem to them, the powers of Jewish supremacism still fear the European far more than the Arab. They believe that they can with their copious talents, subvert and eventually control the “Muslim problem.”
As a side note, their clever subversion of their enemies can be seen in the recent sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims of Iraq. It is exactly what Israel has historically sought among its Arab neighbors. In Jewish Supremacism, I note the diaries of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett in discussing how Israel did everything it could in false flag operations to foster and promote the Lebanese Civil War. Even Ariel Sharon’s facilitation of the Sabre and Shatila massacre in Beirut can be seen as expressions of that divide and conquer policy. Israel cannot afford an “American liberated Iraq” to now be dominated by a Shiite, pro-Iran, anti-Israel, American refurbished state. How elementally easy it would have been for the Mossad to have perpetrated the Askariya mosque bombing either directly through their own agents or their steering of Mossad-infiltrated Arab organizations. It is in their interest to destabilize the country, for such offers no danger to Israel.
During the Amren convention it seemed some speakers were practically cheer leading for the Neocon foreign adventurism. Perle, Wolfowitz, Crystal, Feith, Abrams, Libby and their ilk would have loved to hear our leaders enlisted in their proposed World War IV for Israel. I need not remind you that almost all these men in the Neoconservative movement are in fact former Trotskyites who subverted traditional conservatives and have been for open immigration as well as every kind of movement destructive of European American heritage and rights. These facts are abundantly clear.
It was in that context that I asked the question of Guillaume Faye, I praised his stirring speech, and asked as politely as I could, that in regard to the old Islamic invasions of hundreds of years ago, another middle eastern group in Western society worked to undermine our defenses. That historic fact shows them to have opened the gates at both Constantinople and at Grenada to the invaders, and that they have been the primary force that has opened the immigration gates of the West in the last 50 years. I asked him what suggestions he had in dealing with the internal part of our problem, the subversion of our means and our will?
I let the question be open-ended, I didn’t want to disrupt or debate with him, and I proceeded to sit down and let him answer unimpeded and unchallenged. But, when I finished my question, Mr. Michael Hart rose up in an almost perfect Jewish caricature, and started to scream at me,
This is how the Jewish publication The Forward reported it.
But Michael Hart, a squat, balding Jewish astrophysicist from Maryland, was not amused. He rose from his seat, strode toward Duke (who loomed over him like an Aryan giant), spit out a curse — “You f…ing Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting” — and exited.
Still, I did not debate with him, or even attempt to defend myself from his vile attack; I just sat down so that Faye could answer the question.
I had no intention, or purpose of disruption, just wanted to see what ideas Guillaume had on the issue. He could take it as softly or rigorously as he chose.
My question was rather mild, in fact, far less stringent that the strong remarks of Amren’s recently featured Conference speaker, Joseph Sobran. Faye responded by saying “The danger of the Jews is not the same as danger of the Arabs,'’ he said. He continued: “The Jew is” — and here he had to have Taylor interpret a French expression — “the hole in the dike.”
“The water is immigration,” he continued. “We must fight on two fronts, but not by the same means. We must be very acute in our strategy. The best thing is to not speak about the Jews. They don’t exist. For me, they are like Eskimos.”
I could have responded that the ocean will be out there no matter what. That we can do little about the level of the ocean but we can maintain our dikes. And, if indeed extremist Jews are “the hole in the dike,” how do we address this hole in our dike if we are not even allowed to speak or even know of it?
Still, I regret the incident, for it wasn’t my intention to foment any disruption among men I both admire and respect. If I had any idea that there were such hate-filled, Jewish extremists present who would have made such a scene, I would have remained silent in respect for the decorum of the conference. After, all it wasn’t my meeting.
Yet, in the end it should be clear that Michael Hart was the one who chose to make a disruption in a reptilian response to my rather mild question. It was he that acted in a stereotypical Jewish way and screamed obscenities at someone asking a perfectly legitimate question. He should apologize to Jared Taylor, all the participants of the conference, and frankly, to me as well. I don’t expect such as our major opponents have never been gentlemen or should I say, gentile-men.
Here are some quotes about it from the Jewish Neocon newspaper The Forward,
Note: I decided to post the entire article below instead of David Duke's selective quotes. Editor
White Nationalist Conference Ponders Whether Jews and Nazis Can Get Along.
Jonathan Tilove Forward.com Fri. Mar 03, 2006
LETTER FROM HERNDON, VA.
For the small, hardy band of right-wing Jews who attended this past weekend’s American Renaissance Conference, the biennial gathering of white nationalists ended on a sour note.
The events Saturday, February 25, passed without major incident. But then, late Sunday morning, none other than former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke approached the microphone on the floor during the question-and-answer session for French writer Guillaume Faye. After congratulating Faye for stirring remarks that “touched my genes,” Duke asked if there weren’t an even more insidious threat to the West than Islam.
“There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit,” Duke said.
“Tell us, tell us,” came a call from the back of the room.
“I’m not going to say it,” Duke said to rising laughter.
But Michael Hart, a squat, balding Jewish astrophysicist from Maryland, was not amused. He rose from his seat, strode toward Duke (who loomed over him like an Aryan giant), spit out a curse — “You f…ing Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting” — and exited.
As it happens, only a few minutes earlier Hart, a mainstay of American Renaissance conferences, had been trying to reassure Herschel Elias, a first-time attendee from suburban Philadelphia, that he should not let his observation that the meeting was “infiltrated by Nazis and Holocaust deniers” ruin his impression of American Renaissance.
“The speakers aren’t Nazis,” Hart assured him. “Jared isn’t a Nazi.”
Jared is Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance magazine. He founded the publication 1990, and since 1994 he had sponsored the biennial conference that bears its name. A former liberal, Taylor is glib, gracious and genial, capable of putting his white nationalism in the most benign and commonsense terms.
“We mean well to all people,” he said in his address at this year’s conference, “but our own people come first.”
The conference has attracted ever larger crowds, with this year’s event drawing about 300 people — all white (no more than 5% Jewish) and most of them male. The attendees are united by a common belief in black intellectual inferiority, opposition to non-white immigration and ardor for maintaining America’s white majority. By the end of this seventh biennial conference, however, the delicate state of his coalition seemed apparent.
Hart, who spoke at the 1996 conference about his plan for a racial partition of the United States, said that Taylor now had to face the fact that he must purge the Nazis or lose the Jews. “He can’t expect Jews to come if there are Nazis here,’’ Hart said.
And therein lies Taylor’s dilemma.
From the start, he has been trying to de-Nazify the movement and draw the white nationalist circle wider to include Jews of European descent. But to many on the far right, taking the Jew-hatred out of white nationalism is like taking the Christ out of Christmas — a sacrilege. Actually inviting Jews into the movement is an act of lunacy, or betrayal, to them.
Still, just before dinner Saturday, Taylor sounded resolute.
“Ultimately, for all the things I care about to happen, Jews must be part of the movement,” he said in an interview. The reason, he added, is that Jews have influence and are widely seen as “the conscience of our society.”
For example, Taylor said, without Jewish support it will be nearly impossible to restrict immigration. Besides, the conference organizer said, as far as he is concerned, a white Jew is white.
In its dossier on Taylor, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Review speculates that his conspicuous lack of antisemitism “may be related to his wife, who some in the movement have said is Jewish.” The Atlanta-based organization, which monitors hate groups, has described Taylor as “the race hater.”
“What kind of ‘intelligence’ is that?” Taylor asked. He said that his wife, Evelyn Rich, is not Jewish.
According to the Intelligence Review: “Evelyn Rich became well known because of her 1985 and 1986 interviews of Duke, conducted as part of her dissertation research… [which] were used by anti-Duke forces to make radio ads attacking Duke during his run for Louisiana governor in 1991.” This may help explain the wary relationship between Duke and Taylor, opposites in many ways.
In May 2003, American Renaissance published a piece by Michael Berman about his racial awakening, headlined “I Was a Red-diaper Baby.”
Son of a card-carrying Communist, Berman marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. But, he wrote, that was before two of his sisters were raped by black men and before he served eight years as the dean of boys at Brooklyn’s George W. Wingate High School, where “we averaged five arrests a day.” These days he attends American Renaissance conferences, and this year he brought a likeminded former teaching colleague to serve as his shabbos goy.
“It has not been easy for me as a New York Jew, embracing the views that I do. I am regarded as a pariah,” Berman wrote in his 2003 essay.
Four of the 10 speakers were Jewish at the first conference in 1994 in Atlanta, including New York writer Lawrence Auster and City College philosophy professor Michael Levin. The after-dinner speaker that year was Rabbi Mayer Schiller, a teacher at Yeshiva University High School for Boys who believes in racial separatism. Schiller brought a cadre of yeshiva students with him. Kosher dinners were provided.
At the 2000 conference in Herndon, Robert Weissberg — a political scientist who then worked at the University of Illinois — delivered a speech titled “Jews and Blacks: Everything the Goyim Want To Know but Were Afraid To Ask.” His thesis was that although Jews and blacks loathe one another, Jews remain frightened of the white right.
Weissberg delivered his remarks with his trademark blend of erudition, Yiddishisms and Borscht Belt timing. He was not a big hit. Taylor heard the complaints: “Now the Jews want to take over this, too.”
Weissberg, who is living in New York once again, keeps coming to the conferences. He enjoys the open talk about race, perhaps also the whiff of intellectual danger. At the Saturday morning session, the man sitting next to him doodled on his pad: “No good Jew.”
Despite such sentiments, Taylor is not the only one looking to include Jews.
Gordon Baum, the amiable, chain-smoking CEO of the Council of Conservative Citizens, said that his organization has good Jewish members, including a member of the board from St. Louis. “We’re in Mensa together,” Baum said. He also said that obsessing over Jews “sidetracks you from the real issue.”
But Louis Calabro, a retired San Francisco police officer who heads the European/American Issues Forum in the Bay Area, said his sense is that most of those at the conference consider Jews a problem. He revealed that, in his own experience, any time he does anything to rally white European American pride, those who object are almost invariably Jews.
There is also the question of whether any subordination of antisemitism is merely strategic.
Nick Griffin has been credited with trying to root out antisemitism from the British National Party, which he leads. But in answer to a question at the recent conference, he said: “The proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst. The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.’’
Faye, the French writer, offered a similar response to Duke’s not-so-veiled reference to Jews.
“The danger of the Jews is not the same as danger of the Arabs,’’ he said. He continued: “The Jew is” — and here he had to have Taylor interpret a French expression — “the hole in the dike.”
“The water is immigration,” he continued. “We must fight on two fronts, but not by the same means. We must be very acute in our strategy. The best thing is to not speak about the Jews. They don’t exist. For me, they are like Eskimos.”
Not everyone at last weekend’s meeting could stay cool on the Jewish question. Before Faye spoke, Michael Matthews, an attendee from New Jersey, passed Michael Berman in the hotel foyer.
“Are you a Jew?” Matthews demanded. “I don’t think you should be here.”
Berman was hurt.
“You see, there’s no home for me,’’ he sighed after Matthews had left. “I’m like a black sheep here and everywhere I go.”
(http://www.forward.com/articles/6615/
By David Duke
March 2, 2006
As many are now aware, I recently attended the American Renaissance Conference held in Herndon Virginia over the weekend of February 24-26. To set the record straight, I was not an organizer of the event, nor even a speaker, but simply came as an individual who wanted to hear the very latest scientific and civic arguments on the issues directly affecting European mankind. In addition, I wanted to renew my contacts and friendship with many of the academics and others on the cutting edge of these disciplines. There are few meetings such as this where I can plumb the minds of so many of the brightest researchers and thinkers.
The conference was hosted by Jared Taylor, a man of immense ability and the courage commensurate and necessary for telling the long-suppressed truths of race. He and all the speakers at Amren have my admiration. While defending our people from the ethnic cleansing and genetic disaster that threatens us, Taylor, does not delve directly into the paramount Jewish supremacist role in the destruction of our heritage and freedom. Even though I focus on the overall picture, I have no problem with others focusing on important sectors of the overall struggle. In the battle for our European awakening there may even be advantages to having different organizations focus on different parts of the ideological battle.
In fact, as the readers of the Duke Report and Don Black’s Stormfront know, we have consistently linked and led our readers and listeners to the fine work of Jared Taylor. At the conference I talked with dozens of individuals present who were aware of Amren and the Conference from our recommendations and promotion of the event.
I was not at the conference to recruit for EURO or any other group. I could have easily passed out my brand new issue of the Duke Report to all the participants, but did not. I was there to listen and learn and pass on what I learned to my own readers and listeners in America around the world in my writings and many lectures and appearances. I was certainly not there to disrupt in any way the meeting. But, a disruption occurred and I think that is unfortunate.
On the last day of the conference, the wonderful French writer/philosopher Guillaume Faye spoke about the “Threat to the West.” In an excellent presentation he focused on the internal and external threat of fundamentalist Islam to Europe. It is my belief that we must stop the non-European immigration into our homelands, but I also firmly believe that supporting the Jewish extremist, Neocon ”Clash of Civilizations” external war is disastrous. The Iraq War and adventurism elsewhere are taking our focus from the real threats here at home. And the so-called war on terrorism has spawned the means they use to suppress our freedoms here at home. As all of you have heard me say repeatedly: “It is not the Iraqi borders that we should be concerned with, but the Mexican-American border.”
It is also my belief that the immigration problem itself and perhaps even more importantly, the destruction of European American consciousness and traditions, the advance of egalitarianism, feminism and multiculturalism, globalism — all have been driven by Jewish extremists in their relentless quest for supremacy. It was not the Arabs who opened our immigration floodgates, who took over our anthropological sciences, who led the multicultural and diversity march, who weakened us with Marxism, Freudianism, Feminism, pornography, abortion and acceptance of non-reproductive sexual deviance and every sort of debilitating cultural, physical and spiritual nihilism. Even more important, it has not been the Arabs who have seized the control points of mass media as well as the sources of political finance and influence that have led to the ethnic cleansing of our people across the European World. Although we must oppose massive immigration with all our ability, it is not Arabs or Muslims who have led the attack on our people. In fact, they weren’t even the ones who changed our immigration laws.
In short, the West, has not simply succumbed to an external or even a natural phenomenon among us. We have been subverted by extremists who have destroyed our own ethnic consciousness and ethnic dominance while they have relentlessly worked for their own genetic and political supremacy. While they have opened our gates in America and Europe, Israel’s own Jewish demographic mastery is foremost in all their considerations.
So I became concerned listening to a subtle message that we should be happy because the Zionists were now going to be our friends and allies, something that I think is a dangerous notion to our ultimate survival. There are certainly Jewish supremacists who fear the rising Muslim clout in Europe in America as a competing political interest group, but even that minority of Jews bemoan and admit the fact that the overwhelming Jewish extremist establishment supports open borders in the West. They believe that their control can be maintained the multiculturalism of the West under a Jewish cultural, media, music, and political umbrella. They think that they can thrive in what Jewish activist Stephen Steinlight calls their policy of “divide and conquer.” In my opinion, although Arab power is an important problem to them, the powers of Jewish supremacism still fear the European far more than the Arab. They believe that they can with their copious talents, subvert and eventually control the “Muslim problem.”
As a side note, their clever subversion of their enemies can be seen in the recent sectarian violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims of Iraq. It is exactly what Israel has historically sought among its Arab neighbors. In Jewish Supremacism, I note the diaries of Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett in discussing how Israel did everything it could in false flag operations to foster and promote the Lebanese Civil War. Even Ariel Sharon’s facilitation of the Sabre and Shatila massacre in Beirut can be seen as expressions of that divide and conquer policy. Israel cannot afford an “American liberated Iraq” to now be dominated by a Shiite, pro-Iran, anti-Israel, American refurbished state. How elementally easy it would have been for the Mossad to have perpetrated the Askariya mosque bombing either directly through their own agents or their steering of Mossad-infiltrated Arab organizations. It is in their interest to destabilize the country, for such offers no danger to Israel.
During the Amren convention it seemed some speakers were practically cheer leading for the Neocon foreign adventurism. Perle, Wolfowitz, Crystal, Feith, Abrams, Libby and their ilk would have loved to hear our leaders enlisted in their proposed World War IV for Israel. I need not remind you that almost all these men in the Neoconservative movement are in fact former Trotskyites who subverted traditional conservatives and have been for open immigration as well as every kind of movement destructive of European American heritage and rights. These facts are abundantly clear.
It was in that context that I asked the question of Guillaume Faye, I praised his stirring speech, and asked as politely as I could, that in regard to the old Islamic invasions of hundreds of years ago, another middle eastern group in Western society worked to undermine our defenses. That historic fact shows them to have opened the gates at both Constantinople and at Grenada to the invaders, and that they have been the primary force that has opened the immigration gates of the West in the last 50 years. I asked him what suggestions he had in dealing with the internal part of our problem, the subversion of our means and our will?
I let the question be open-ended, I didn’t want to disrupt or debate with him, and I proceeded to sit down and let him answer unimpeded and unchallenged. But, when I finished my question, Mr. Michael Hart rose up in an almost perfect Jewish caricature, and started to scream at me,
This is how the Jewish publication The Forward reported it.
But Michael Hart, a squat, balding Jewish astrophysicist from Maryland, was not amused. He rose from his seat, strode toward Duke (who loomed over him like an Aryan giant), spit out a curse — “You f…ing Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting” — and exited.
Still, I did not debate with him, or even attempt to defend myself from his vile attack; I just sat down so that Faye could answer the question.
I had no intention, or purpose of disruption, just wanted to see what ideas Guillaume had on the issue. He could take it as softly or rigorously as he chose.
My question was rather mild, in fact, far less stringent that the strong remarks of Amren’s recently featured Conference speaker, Joseph Sobran. Faye responded by saying “The danger of the Jews is not the same as danger of the Arabs,'’ he said. He continued: “The Jew is” — and here he had to have Taylor interpret a French expression — “the hole in the dike.”
“The water is immigration,” he continued. “We must fight on two fronts, but not by the same means. We must be very acute in our strategy. The best thing is to not speak about the Jews. They don’t exist. For me, they are like Eskimos.”
I could have responded that the ocean will be out there no matter what. That we can do little about the level of the ocean but we can maintain our dikes. And, if indeed extremist Jews are “the hole in the dike,” how do we address this hole in our dike if we are not even allowed to speak or even know of it?
Still, I regret the incident, for it wasn’t my intention to foment any disruption among men I both admire and respect. If I had any idea that there were such hate-filled, Jewish extremists present who would have made such a scene, I would have remained silent in respect for the decorum of the conference. After, all it wasn’t my meeting.
Yet, in the end it should be clear that Michael Hart was the one who chose to make a disruption in a reptilian response to my rather mild question. It was he that acted in a stereotypical Jewish way and screamed obscenities at someone asking a perfectly legitimate question. He should apologize to Jared Taylor, all the participants of the conference, and frankly, to me as well. I don’t expect such as our major opponents have never been gentlemen or should I say, gentile-men.
Here are some quotes about it from the Jewish Neocon newspaper The Forward,
Note: I decided to post the entire article below instead of David Duke's selective quotes. Editor
White Nationalist Conference Ponders Whether Jews and Nazis Can Get Along.
Jonathan Tilove Forward.com Fri. Mar 03, 2006
LETTER FROM HERNDON, VA.
For the small, hardy band of right-wing Jews who attended this past weekend’s American Renaissance Conference, the biennial gathering of white nationalists ended on a sour note.
The events Saturday, February 25, passed without major incident. But then, late Sunday morning, none other than former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke approached the microphone on the floor during the question-and-answer session for French writer Guillaume Faye. After congratulating Faye for stirring remarks that “touched my genes,” Duke asked if there weren’t an even more insidious threat to the West than Islam.
“There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit,” Duke said.
“Tell us, tell us,” came a call from the back of the room.
“I’m not going to say it,” Duke said to rising laughter.
But Michael Hart, a squat, balding Jewish astrophysicist from Maryland, was not amused. He rose from his seat, strode toward Duke (who loomed over him like an Aryan giant), spit out a curse — “You f…ing Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting” — and exited.
As it happens, only a few minutes earlier Hart, a mainstay of American Renaissance conferences, had been trying to reassure Herschel Elias, a first-time attendee from suburban Philadelphia, that he should not let his observation that the meeting was “infiltrated by Nazis and Holocaust deniers” ruin his impression of American Renaissance.
“The speakers aren’t Nazis,” Hart assured him. “Jared isn’t a Nazi.”
Jared is Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance magazine. He founded the publication 1990, and since 1994 he had sponsored the biennial conference that bears its name. A former liberal, Taylor is glib, gracious and genial, capable of putting his white nationalism in the most benign and commonsense terms.
“We mean well to all people,” he said in his address at this year’s conference, “but our own people come first.”
The conference has attracted ever larger crowds, with this year’s event drawing about 300 people — all white (no more than 5% Jewish) and most of them male. The attendees are united by a common belief in black intellectual inferiority, opposition to non-white immigration and ardor for maintaining America’s white majority. By the end of this seventh biennial conference, however, the delicate state of his coalition seemed apparent.
Hart, who spoke at the 1996 conference about his plan for a racial partition of the United States, said that Taylor now had to face the fact that he must purge the Nazis or lose the Jews. “He can’t expect Jews to come if there are Nazis here,’’ Hart said.
And therein lies Taylor’s dilemma.
From the start, he has been trying to de-Nazify the movement and draw the white nationalist circle wider to include Jews of European descent. But to many on the far right, taking the Jew-hatred out of white nationalism is like taking the Christ out of Christmas — a sacrilege. Actually inviting Jews into the movement is an act of lunacy, or betrayal, to them.
Still, just before dinner Saturday, Taylor sounded resolute.
“Ultimately, for all the things I care about to happen, Jews must be part of the movement,” he said in an interview. The reason, he added, is that Jews have influence and are widely seen as “the conscience of our society.”
For example, Taylor said, without Jewish support it will be nearly impossible to restrict immigration. Besides, the conference organizer said, as far as he is concerned, a white Jew is white.
In its dossier on Taylor, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Review speculates that his conspicuous lack of antisemitism “may be related to his wife, who some in the movement have said is Jewish.” The Atlanta-based organization, which monitors hate groups, has described Taylor as “the race hater.”
“What kind of ‘intelligence’ is that?” Taylor asked. He said that his wife, Evelyn Rich, is not Jewish.
According to the Intelligence Review: “Evelyn Rich became well known because of her 1985 and 1986 interviews of Duke, conducted as part of her dissertation research… [which] were used by anti-Duke forces to make radio ads attacking Duke during his run for Louisiana governor in 1991.” This may help explain the wary relationship between Duke and Taylor, opposites in many ways.
In May 2003, American Renaissance published a piece by Michael Berman about his racial awakening, headlined “I Was a Red-diaper Baby.”
Son of a card-carrying Communist, Berman marched on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. But, he wrote, that was before two of his sisters were raped by black men and before he served eight years as the dean of boys at Brooklyn’s George W. Wingate High School, where “we averaged five arrests a day.” These days he attends American Renaissance conferences, and this year he brought a likeminded former teaching colleague to serve as his shabbos goy.
“It has not been easy for me as a New York Jew, embracing the views that I do. I am regarded as a pariah,” Berman wrote in his 2003 essay.
Four of the 10 speakers were Jewish at the first conference in 1994 in Atlanta, including New York writer Lawrence Auster and City College philosophy professor Michael Levin. The after-dinner speaker that year was Rabbi Mayer Schiller, a teacher at Yeshiva University High School for Boys who believes in racial separatism. Schiller brought a cadre of yeshiva students with him. Kosher dinners were provided.
At the 2000 conference in Herndon, Robert Weissberg — a political scientist who then worked at the University of Illinois — delivered a speech titled “Jews and Blacks: Everything the Goyim Want To Know but Were Afraid To Ask.” His thesis was that although Jews and blacks loathe one another, Jews remain frightened of the white right.
Weissberg delivered his remarks with his trademark blend of erudition, Yiddishisms and Borscht Belt timing. He was not a big hit. Taylor heard the complaints: “Now the Jews want to take over this, too.”
Weissberg, who is living in New York once again, keeps coming to the conferences. He enjoys the open talk about race, perhaps also the whiff of intellectual danger. At the Saturday morning session, the man sitting next to him doodled on his pad: “No good Jew.”
Despite such sentiments, Taylor is not the only one looking to include Jews.
Gordon Baum, the amiable, chain-smoking CEO of the Council of Conservative Citizens, said that his organization has good Jewish members, including a member of the board from St. Louis. “We’re in Mensa together,” Baum said. He also said that obsessing over Jews “sidetracks you from the real issue.”
But Louis Calabro, a retired San Francisco police officer who heads the European/American Issues Forum in the Bay Area, said his sense is that most of those at the conference consider Jews a problem. He revealed that, in his own experience, any time he does anything to rally white European American pride, those who object are almost invariably Jews.
There is also the question of whether any subordination of antisemitism is merely strategic.
Nick Griffin has been credited with trying to root out antisemitism from the British National Party, which he leads. But in answer to a question at the recent conference, he said: “The proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst. The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.’’
Faye, the French writer, offered a similar response to Duke’s not-so-veiled reference to Jews.
“The danger of the Jews is not the same as danger of the Arabs,’’ he said. He continued: “The Jew is” — and here he had to have Taylor interpret a French expression — “the hole in the dike.”
“The water is immigration,” he continued. “We must fight on two fronts, but not by the same means. We must be very acute in our strategy. The best thing is to not speak about the Jews. They don’t exist. For me, they are like Eskimos.”
Not everyone at last weekend’s meeting could stay cool on the Jewish question. Before Faye spoke, Michael Matthews, an attendee from New Jersey, passed Michael Berman in the hotel foyer.
“Are you a Jew?” Matthews demanded. “I don’t think you should be here.”
Berman was hurt.
“You see, there’s no home for me,’’ he sighed after Matthews had left. “I’m like a black sheep here and everywhere I go.”
(http://www.forward.com/articles/6615/