Category: Hate Groups

“Now let me speak generally to those who are advocates for white supremacy, or white nationalism.”

“Now let me speak generally to those who are advocates for white supremacy, or white nationalism.”

 

Comments by Justin Herdman United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio:

Remarks as prepared announcing federal criminal charges against James Reardon:

. . .

Now let me speak generally to those who are advocates for white supremacy, or white nationalism.  I am talking directly to you.  The Constitution protects your right to speak, your right to think, and your right to believe. If you want to waste the blessings of liberty by going down a path of hatred and failed ideologies, that is your choice.

Democracy allows you to test those ideas in the public forum.  If you want to submit your beliefs to the American people and get their reaction, please be my guest.  Keep this in mind, though.  Thousands and thousands of young Americans already voted with their lives to ensure that this same message of intolerance, death, and destruction would not prevail – you can count their ballots by visiting any American cemetery in North Africa, Italy, France, or Belgium and tallying the white headstones.  You can also recite the many names of civil rights advocates who bled and died in opposing supporters of those same ideologies of hatred.  Their voices may be distant, but they can still be heard.

Go ahead and make your case for Nazism, a white nation, and racial superiority.  The Constitution may give you a voice, but it doesn’t guarantee you a receptive audience.

Your right to free speech does not automatically mean that people will agree with you.  In fact, you have an absolute God-given and inalienable right to be on the losing end of this argument.

What you don’t have, though, is the right to take out your frustration at failure in the political arena by resorting to violence.  You don’t have any right to threaten the lives and well-being of our neighbors.  They have an absolute God-given and inalienable right to live peacefully, to worship as they please, to be free from fear that they might become a target simply because of the color of their skin, the country of their birth, or the form of their prayer.

Threatening to kill Jewish people, gunning down innocent Latinos on a weekend shopping trip, planning and plotting to perpetrate murders in the name of a nonsense racial theory, sitting to pray with God-fearing people who you execute moments later – those actions don’t make you soldiers, they make you criminals.  Law enforcement doesn’t go to war with cowards who break the law, we arrest them and send them to prison.

As I said, this case was made by a concerned member of the public and a responsive police officer.  That’s all it takes to stop you.  The men and women of our community are allied with law enforcement.  And every single member of law enforcement took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Many of us have taken that oath several times – as police officers, federal agents, prosecutors, military members, and elected officials.

Together, we represent the absolute best of what America has to offer.  Our skin is every color you can imagine, our families come from a hundred different countries and a hundred different faiths.  What makes us different doesn’t split us apart, though.  Those differences are insignificant compared to what is the same about us – we are united in our commitment to each other, to our families, and to our communities.  We are the living embodiment of everything you say is impossible.

Together, we are united to ensure that you commit no further acts of violence in the name of your beliefs.  When you wake up tomorrow morning, no matter what time, I want you to remember something.  You can’t set your alarm clock early enough to beat us out of bed.  The men and women of law enforcement don’t wake up.  We never went to sleep.  We are always awake.  And arm in arm with the public, when your hatred leads you to break the law, we will do everything we can to be there to stop you.

 

‘We Can’t Walk Away From This Truth’

‘We Can’t Walk Away From This Truth’

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu explains to his city why four monuments commemorating the Lost Cause and the Confederacy had to come down.

‘Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid.

“If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.”

So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.

As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history.

Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause.

Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right; let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds … to do all which may achieve and cherish—a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”’

Full Text:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/we-cant-walk-away-from-this-truth/527721/

Why we stay

I’m not thinking about going anywhere.  Maybe this is surprising because of the already large increase in reported hate incidents since the election.  Maybe this is surprising because I am the child of a refugee from the Nazis who managed to escape just in time whose parents were not able to leave because they left it until it was just too late.  Despite all this and the dark reality we have arrived in and the previously unimaginable darkness ahead of us I am not thinking of leaving and these are the reasons why:

  • Because dissent and bearing witness to injustice is a patriotic duty and expressing love for your country is something that you do when it is hard and not just when things are going well for you.
  • Because if the idea of inclusiveness, of full citizenship for all and not just for the members of one ethnic / national group, dies here where it was created, then it dies everywhere.  Then there is ultimately nowhere safe to go to, or at least nowhere to go to where it will be possible to live without a permanently packed bag.
  • Because leaving and running to somewhere we feel is safe is a privilege that is not shared by tens of millions of less privileged vulnerable Americans who are counting on us to to stand by them and speak out with them.
  • Because when the Nazis came for my family they were vulnerable because no one was left to stand by them.
  • Because as Americans we have the example of our forbears who have stood against much greater darkness in the past who did not run and doubled down to force a flawed nation to try harder to live up to its founding principles.

There may be a time to leave – My family should have run much sooner – But this is not it.

We stay because we have the example of the descendents of enslaved people who maintained their dignity as human beings through centuries of racial injustice and stood up and marched and bore witness to injustice and awoke the conscience of a nation.

We stay because they did this in the face of solid organized state repression, Hoover’s FBI, lynchings, bombings of churches and other acts of domestic terrorism and the original overwhelming indifference of the majority of white America.

We stay because of the those who travelled south and stood by them and withstood beatings, dogs and the threat of renewed McCarthyism.

If they could rise up and stare down what they faced then and bear witness to injustice then what we are being asked to do now and what we are facing ahead of us are small things.  We stay.

UNSPECIFIED - MARCH 13:
UNSPECIFIED – MARCH 13: “Leaders of the protest, holding flags, from left Bishop James Shannon, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath.” Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington Cemetery, February 6, 1968. Published February 7, 1968. (Photo by Charles Del Vecchio/Washington Post/Getty Images)