Hate Groups

Ephraim Wolfe was walking down the street in Chicago with a friend early last month when a light blue car drove by.A few minutes later, the same car drove by again and stopped. A few seconds later, Wolfe saw a flash and heard a noise."I thought it was a firecracker," the 15-year-old said. "Then my leg felt heavy. I picked it up, and there was a hole the size of a dime and blood gushing out. I realized I'd been shot."The story of Benjamin Smith, who allegedly went on a shooting spree last month against several ethnic groups, made national news.

Computer-savvy kids in search of a focus for anger and adolescent rebellion can find both among the hundreds of Internet "hate" sites accessible at the click of a mouse.And the hate groups -- Christian Defense League, White Aryan Resistance, Posse Comitatus and many unprintable others -- are eager to have them."The Net has proved to be very useful for these groups in reaching what they see as the future leaders of tomorrow," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the United States.

BUFORD O'NEAL Furrow's shooting spree at a Jewish community center might have come straight from the biblical interpretations of America's white-supremacist movement, but it's not a theology most Christians would recognize.When Furrow walked into an FBI office in Las Vegas on Wednesday and confessed to gunning down five people at the Los Angeles facility and killing a Filipino-American postal worker, he told authorities he wanted his act to be "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews."Even before his chilling statement, the Washington state resident was linked to the country's sometimes-lethal hate movement.

WASHINGTON -- With the sting of anti-Semitic violence fresh in the nation's consciousness, dozens of Jewish leaders pressed President Clinton last night to do more to monitor, infiltrate and thwart hate groups around the nation.The 28 leaders of Jewish groups who met with Clinton for nearly two hours last night had previously planned the White House meeting. But the shooting this week of five people at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles gave urgency to the discussion. The suspect, Buford O. Furrow Jr., who is also charged in the killing of a Filipino-American postal worker, is a white supremacist who authorities say targeted Jews.

An article about online hate groups in yesterday's Plugged In section contained an outdated address for Raymond A. Franklin's Hate Directory Web site. The authorized site is located at http: //www.bcpl.net/(tilde)rfrankli/ hatedir.htm.The Sun regrets the error.The conference room in Ocean City is jammed with more than 100 people, all peering at an enlarged computer screen displaying an ominous image: a man in a white hood holding a pump shotgun.It's one of dozens of Ku Klux Klan sites on the World Wide Web, but the people studying it aren't hatemongers.

NOW SHOWING on a computer near you: White power, skinheads, neo-Nazis and Christian hate groups from Oslo to Utah.Parents who have been wringing their hands over their children's access to smut on the Internet have something else to consider: the easy availability of home pages touting hatred of blacks, Jews, Arabs, immigrants, homosexuals and - in a few cases - white people and cops. The engines of hate are all available within a few clicks of a mouse on the World Wide Web.Ironically, a soft-spoken, 33-year-old Harvard librarian has made the hate pages even easier to find.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- For nearly two years, a gang of bank robbers roamed the Midwest, displaying a warped sense of humor, a fondness for pipe bombs and sympathy for the militia movement.Depending on the season, they left their bombs in a Santa's hat or nestled in the grass of an Easter basket. In one holdup, they wore caps that said ATF, as in the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- the agency involved in the fiery siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993. They rented a getaway car in the name of an FBI agent involved in the 1992 shootings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

A boy, maybe 7 years old, is photographed in a Nazi salute before a backdrop of Confederate Stars and Bars. A North Carolina militia leader, pictured in fatigues, insists that a hot summer is caused by a Jewish conspiracy to alter the jet stream. A white supremacist group's handbill depicts a black man in cross hairs and reads, "If it ain't white, waste it."These are images of American hate presented yesterday in Towson by national experts on the future of law enforcement and domestic terrorism.

WASHINGTON -- The Army, shocked by last week's arrest of two openly white-supremacist paratroopers for allegedly murdering a black couple near Fort Bragg, N.C., launched a new probe yesterday to determine the extent to which soldiers are participating in hate groups.The investigation, to be conducted by the Army inspector-general, was announced by Army Secretary Togo D. West Jr. after he conferred with Defense Secretary William J. FTC Perry and Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, the Army chief of staff.

WASHINGTON -- A virulently racist book that fosters hatred of the federal government and depicts a car bombing of FBI headquarters using ammonium nitrate fertilizer -- the type of explosive used in the Oklahoma City attack -- has circulated among some of the nation's most extreme right-wing groups for almost two decades.The bombing portrayed in "The Turner Diaries" bears a striking resemblance to what happened in Oklahoma City, according to some experts who study hate groups. For example, in the book -- which the FBI has called "a blueprint for revolution" -- the bombing takes place at 9:15 a.m., almost precisely the time of day of the Oklahoma City explosion.

So far, authorities believe James von Brunn, the Maryland man accused of killing a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, acted alone. But the anti-Semitic and racist views he has expressed in decades of rants - in court testimony, on his Web site and in a self-published book - represent the convictions of a deeply rooted community of extremists now taking advantage of technology to attract new recruits. At least 13 such outfits now operate in Maryland, according to trackers of hate groups.

ST. LOUIS - White supremacist groups around the country are moving aggressively to recruit new members by promoting their violent, racist ideologies on billboards, in radio commercials and in leaflets tossed on suburban driveways. Watching with mounting alarm, civil rights monitors say these tactics stake out a much bolder, more public role for many hate groups, which are trying to shed their image as shadowy extremists and claim more mainstream support. Watchdog groups fear increased violence from these organizations as they grow.

HBO's "Hate.com" is only 41 minutes long, yet it's filled with what seems like volumes of information you won't find anywhere else. Producers Vince DiPersio and William Guttentag not only chronicle the explosion of hate groups on the Internet (350 at last count), but also manage to get the leaders of most of the major groups to lay out their agendas and acknowledge the links between their Web pages and some of the most notorious hate crimes of the last decade. You'll not only hear William Pierce, author of "The Turner Diaries," a novel about a fictional race war, talking about his work and his white supremacist National Alliance Web site, you'll see the relationship between the author, the book and Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Ephraim Wolfe was walking down the street in Chicago with a friend early last month when a light blue car drove by.A few minutes later, the same car drove by again and stopped. A few seconds later, Wolfe saw a flash and heard a noise."I thought it was a firecracker," the 15-year-old said. "Then my leg felt heavy. I picked it up, and there was a hole the size of a dime and blood gushing out. I realized I'd been shot."The story of Benjamin Smith, who allegedly went on a shooting spree last month against several ethnic groups, made national news.

BUFORD O'NEAL Furrow's shooting spree at a Jewish community center might have come straight from the biblical interpretations of America's white-supremacist movement, but it's not a theology most Christians would recognize.When Furrow walked into an FBI office in Las Vegas on Wednesday and confessed to gunning down five people at the Los Angeles facility and killing a Filipino-American postal worker, he told authorities he wanted his act to be "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews."Even before his chilling statement, the Washington state resident was linked to the country's sometimes-lethal hate movement.

WASHINGTON -- With the sting of anti-Semitic violence fresh in the nation's consciousness, dozens of Jewish leaders pressed President Clinton last night to do more to monitor, infiltrate and thwart hate groups around the nation.The 28 leaders of Jewish groups who met with Clinton for nearly two hours last night had previously planned the White House meeting. But the shooting this week of five people at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles gave urgency to the discussion. The suspect, Buford O. Furrow Jr., who is also charged in the killing of a Filipino-American postal worker, is a white supremacist who authorities say targeted Jews.

Computer-savvy kids in search of a focus for anger and adolescent rebellion can find both among the hundreds of Internet "hate" sites accessible at the click of a mouse.And the hate groups -- Christian Defense League, White Aryan Resistance, Posse Comitatus and many unprintable others -- are eager to have them."The Net has proved to be very useful for these groups in reaching what they see as the future leaders of tomorrow," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups in the United States.

An article about online hate groups in yesterday's Plugged In section contained an outdated address for Raymond A. Franklin's Hate Directory Web site. The authorized site is located at http: //www.bcpl.net/(tilde)rfrankli/ hatedir.htm.The Sun regrets the error.The conference room in Ocean City is jammed with more than 100 people, all peering at an enlarged computer screen displaying an ominous image: a man in a white hood holding a pump shotgun.It's one of dozens of Ku Klux Klan sites on the World Wide Web, but the people studying it aren't hatemongers.

NOW SHOWING on a computer near you: White power, skinheads, neo-Nazis and Christian hate groups from Oslo to Utah.Parents who have been wringing their hands over their children's access to smut on the Internet have something else to consider: the easy availability of home pages touting hatred of blacks, Jews, Arabs, immigrants, homosexuals and - in a few cases - white people and cops. The engines of hate are all available within a few clicks of a mouse on the World Wide Web.Ironically, a soft-spoken, 33-year-old Harvard librarian has made the hate pages even easier to find.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- For nearly two years, a gang of bank robbers roamed the Midwest, displaying a warped sense of humor, a fondness for pipe bombs and sympathy for the militia movement.Depending on the season, they left their bombs in a Santa's hat or nestled in the grass of an Easter basket. In one holdup, they wore caps that said ATF, as in the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- the agency involved in the fiery siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993. They rented a getaway car in the name of an FBI agent involved in the 1992 shootings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.