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Political can of snakesByTOMTEEPENCox Hews Service IThe trial of accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh seems I sure to take us deeper into the spooky world of freelance militias and I hyper-right paranoids who. fearing conspiracies, conspire. 1It will not be a pretty sight. ISome thousands of Americans live in what amounts to a parallel | universe, an imagined world weirdly landscaped, like the fantasies that keep science fiction writers in groceries and gas money.There, race war ever impends. The federal government, building secret concentration camps, is the greatest menace facing its citizens.. The United Nations is infiltrating troops, ready to take us over whenever some power — shadowy but undoubted — gives the signal.There; tod, God beams on what the rest of us would call hate crimes, his will rightly done by terrorism against racial and religious minorities.In just the past month:♦ TVvo former Ku Klux Klansmen were sentenced in Charleston, S.C.,for burning down African-American churches.♦ An Aryan Nations leader pleaded guilty in Pennsylvania to plotting seven Midwest bank robberies to fund extremist activities. Four others are to be tried. Three militia members in Georgia were sentenced to prison for building bombs to use in a war against the federal government. .For a stubble-close look at some of the creeps who crawl the fringes, try Vincent Coppola’s new book, “Dragons of God; A-Journey-Through Far-Right America,” published by Longstreet Press. (For the record, owned by Cox Enterprises, which signs my paycheck. So far.)Coppola tracked the dragons to their lairs in the Ozarks, the Rockies, desert trailer parks.. Here is Keith Gilbert, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which worships Hitler as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. And William Potter Gale, whose radio sermons.call for roadblock ambushes of Jews.' •;Jim Ellison, convicted of bombing a Missouri church and a Jewish community center in Indiana, now sleeps with four wives — and a stolen U.S. Army LAW anti-tank missile next to his bed — in the cause of a Christian America.Johnny Bob Harrell warns paramilitary followers in his newsletter: “Hispanic aliens with large sums of money are moving up the banks of the Mississippi. Tanks with Russian insignia have been spotted 150 miles inside the Texas border.” And Vietnamese refugees are Viet Cong cadres, secretly here for war.The groups ally, squabble, fall out, go dormant, stir anew. But proliferate.;The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 859 last year, 6 percent more than in '95. Some 300 are armed militias, at least a third openly racist or anti-Semitic.Often more silly than sinister, endlessly self-absorbed, the fringe still poisons the attitudes of scores of thousands, largely out of the hearing of the mainstream, with newsletters, videotapes and radio broadcasts. And at its worst, it breaks into spasms of bloodshed.It would be a mistake to take the zealots loo seriously, but an equal mistake to take them lightly: You could ask the 168 killed in the Murrah Federal Building. lt;Actually, of course, you couldn’t ask them.jim Teepen is national correspondent of Cox Newspapers.
Newspaper Details
Indiana Gazette
Indiana, Pennsylvania, US
Sat, Apr 05, 1997
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Sandi C.
USA 17 Jun 2023
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