Volume 1 Number 1 Sept-November 1988
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TURNING THE TIDE L.A. Anti-Racism Newsletter
September-November 1988
Volume 1 number 1
For years, the menace of neo-nazi skinheads, organized by conscious anti-Semitic, anti-gay and racist forces, has been growing in Los Angeles and southern California generally.
* In Westminster, in July, a campaign of racist harassment and vandalism culminated in a cross-burning at the home of a Black former head of the Orange County NAACP. Police have arrested 23-year-old Gary Skillman, a former skinhead. He was carrying a racist poem, “KKK Youth Camp”, urging the killing of Blacks and Jews, at the time of his arrest. Since his arrest, rock-throwing, death threats and other attacks by skin heads against Black, Asian and Hispanic residents have continued.
* In Laguna Beach, three skinheads have been arrested and charged with attempted murder in the brutal beatings of two gay men. The three, John Moore, Steven Walter, and Aaron Cornpean, in their teens and early 20’s, have also been accused of violating their victims’ civil rights by singling them out for attack by reason of their sexual orientation. But again, other attacks by skins, including the firing of shots into a gay-owned business, have continued. Similar organized attacks against lesbians, as well as gay men, are taking place in West Hollywood and in the Silverlake area. At least one killing has resulted.
* Last year in the San Fernando Valley, the leaders of two separate gangs of racist skins, Mike Martin and Pete McGurk, were arrested in separate incidents of attacks on Latinos. Martin, head of the Reich Skins, which carried out an organized campaign of racist terror for several months in the Chatsworth area, was arrested for breaking into a Latino student’s home at gun point and threatening him and his family. He received probation. McGurk was arrested for driving a car through Sepulveda attacking Latino pedestrians; a passenger sprayed them with foam from a fire extinguisher while shouting racist slogans. McGurk, too, received probation for his crimes.
* Last year, skinheads from the San Gabriel Valley were arrested for attacking an anti-racist demonstration in Glendale protesting the appearance of convicted Birmingham church bomber, J.B. Stoner. Skinheads from Riverside, affiliated with Tom Metzger’s racist WAR organization were arrested in a van with baseball bats and lead pipes on their way to a King Day memorial march in Fontana being addressed by Martin Luther King III. Metzger had issued a highly inflammatory leaflet, depicting civil rights marchers being killed by bombs planted in mailboxes along the route.
* Metzger himself and his son John, head of the Aryan Youth Movement/ White Student Union, have been involved in a series of violent confrontations on TV talk shows around the country, the most recent on Geraldo Rivera’s. Metzger’s own racist cable TV show, “Race and Reason”, airs on cable systems in the San Fernando Valley, and is produced in Fullerton. Tom Padgett, a producer and co-host of the show who lives with Metzger’s daughter, has pleaded guilty to fraud in the ZZZZ Best carpet cleaner scandal; He funneled money from the company to Metzger. Owner Barry Minkow, on trial currently in federal court, claims the company was controlled by the mob for stock frauds and money laundering.
* Tom and John Metzger were arrested at a triple cross burning in the city of LA more than four years ago. Other participants later became federal fugitives and were involved in the racist underground “The Order” which robbed banks and killed a Jewish talk show host. John Metzger, however, was merely released to his mother’s custody, and the D.A. dropped the charges against Tom. When they were reinstated by the city attorney, they were twice dismissed by Judges who called the cross-burning “odious but not illegal.” The second dismissal came earlier this year.
Rogue’s Gallery:
Los Angeles Racists & Neo-Nazis
White Aryan Resistance:
The local chapter of Tom Metzger’s racist WAR organization and its affiliated Aryan Youth Movement White Student Union (AYM/WSU), led by his son John, is based in Canoga Park. The group has organized the distribution of racist propaganda, oven through the means of school break-ins to oppose the Martin Luther King Day holiday. It has arranged to air Metzger’s cable TV show, “Race and Reason”, which has provided a platform for neo-nazi skinheads, members of the Order, the KKK and the Aryan Nations to preach their hateful ideas and spout racist threats and diatribes. The show, carried on Valley Cable, is produced at a local cable production facility in Fullerton since it was chased off the Cal State Fullerton campus.
League of Pace Amendment Advocates:
This group, which always denies it is racist but has aligned itself with the Aryan Nations and other racist formations, espouses a Constitutional amendment to revoke the 14th amendment and restrict U.S. citizenships to Aryans. Based in Glendale, it has precipitated a number of violent confrontations in that city by its racist preaching. Like Metzger’s WAR, it is actively seeking to organize nazi-oriented skinheads to its ranks through-out California, and has met with a group of KKK-affiliated skinheads from central and northern California to try to organize a white power rock concert.
Willian Daniel Johnson, AKA James O. Pace. head of League of Pace Amendment Advocates to restrict US citizenship to white people.
The Jewish Defense League (JDL):
This racist formation, while purporting to be anti-nazi, seems to have a lot in common with its opponents. A former nazi temple arsonist, Mike Canale, is now a leading member of the JDL. Other JDL members have been implicated in bombings in L.A. and elsewhere, such as the one which took the life of Palestinian spokesman AIex Odeh in Orange County. The JDL has attacked anti-Klan and anti-intervention demonstrations in L.A., aligning itself with right wing groups such as Nemesis in harassing the Central America solidarity movement. It especially targets what it calls “self-hating” Jews, that is, any Jew who is not sufficiently anti-Arab and pro-Zionist to meet its rabid specifications. JDL thugs roughed up a crowd of supporters of the Israeli Peace Now movement in the Fairfax area, including actor Richard Dreyfuss.
Irv Rubin of racist JDL attacks an anti-Klan rally in the Valley.
The National Socialist White Peoples, White Workers and White Aryan Parties:
These and assorted other neo-nazi formations and splinter groups form and schism periodically in L.A. The NSWPP is based in Pacific Palisades, and its racist propaganda has been distributed in lockers at Pali High. Stan Witek, head of the NSWWP, is a rabid racist and a close associate of Tom Metzger’s over the years. He has been involved in the cultivation of a neo-nazi wing of the old style Klan thru participation in such events as the World Aryan Congress, held annually at the Aryan Nations paramilitary compound in Idaho under the auspices of former L.A. aerospace engineer, Richard Butler, (recently acquitted in a federal seditious conspiracy trial). A self-proclaimed Nazi Party candidate for president has made himself a fixture at Burbank City Council meetings in order to spout his racist rhetoric during the Council’s televised hearings.
LA Nazis marching against Tom Bradley’s inauguaration as mayor of LA
The WAR Skins, the Reich Skins, etc.:
Organized in gangs that have carried out attacks in L.A. and most of the surrounding suburbs, these neo-nazi skinheads are increasingly affiliating with avowed ‘revolutionary racist’ like Tom Metzger, who espouse armed struggle to build a white separatist state, overthrowing what they call the Zionist Occupation Government of the U.S. They see themselves as the shock troops and street fighters of this coming race war.
more listings in the next issue
UPDATE:
NAZI STAN WITEK CONVICTED FOR 1983 L.A. CROSS-BURNING! HE FACES THREE YEARS IN PRISON. SENTENCING DECEMBER 7TH. METZGER, OTHERS AWAIT TRIAL.
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