Posts Tagged ‘white supremacist’
 
September 5, 2012 402

Former Youth for Western Civilization Leader Promotes White Student Union at Towson

Matthew Heim­bach

Matthew Heim­bach, the for­mer stu­dent leader of the now-defunct chap­ter of Youth for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (YWC) at Tow­son Uni­ver­sity in Mary­land, wants to estab­lish a white stu­dent union at the school.

In a Sep­tem­ber 2 let­ter to Towson’s cam­pus news­pa­per, The Tow­erlight, at the start of the school year, Heim­bach claimed that “a White Stu­dent Union would rep­re­sent the unique cul­tural her­itage, folk cus­toms and strong Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions that define white civilization.”

At the end of his let­ter, Heim­bach claimed that the iden­tity of white “folk” has been “tram­pled and attacked for gen­er­a­tions” and that it was time for white stu­dents to “stand up for our rights.”

He then focused on two issues that have become ardent causes for the white suprema­cist move­ment in the United States: alleged geno­cide against whites in South Africa, and alleged anti-white assaults and dis­crim­i­na­tion in the United States.

Heim­bach ended his let­ter with a para­phrase of the “14 words,” the ral­ly­ing cry of white suprema­cists world­wide: “We must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white chil­dren.” Instead, Heim­bach, wrote another 14-word phrase, “We must pro­tect the secu­rity of Euro­peans and a future for the next generation.”

Heim­bach has become more openly white suprema­cist in his views since YWC was dis­banded at Tow­son in March 2012.  At that time, YWC received neg­a­tive media pub­lic­ity when mem­bers of the group chalked “white pride” around the cam­pus. Soon after­wards, the group’s stu­dent advi­sor resigned and YWC lost its stand­ing as an offi­cial stu­dent organization.

In July 2012, Heim­bach attended the national con­fer­ence of the white suprema­cist Coun­cil of Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens. A year ear­lier, Heim­bach also attended a con­fer­ence of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that wants to pre­serve the South’s “Anglo-Celtic culture.”

In many ways, Heim­bach was the model YWC mem­ber. He founded the YWC chap­ter at Tow­son in Sep­tem­ber 2011 and couched his lan­guage in non-racial terms to gain accep­tance from fel­low stu­dents. This was a strat­egy pro­moted by the national YWC when it began orga­niz­ing stu­dent chap­ters at var­i­ous universities.

YWC has been rel­a­tively inac­tive as a national orga­ni­za­tion since its founder Kevin DeAnna stepped down as pres­i­dent of the group in Feb­ru­ary 2012.

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August 23, 2012 3

Extremist-Related Police Killings Continue to Mount

The recent shoot­ings in St. John the Bap­tist Parish in Louisiana, in which two offi­cers were killed and two more injured, high­light the con­tin­u­ing dan­ger domes­tic extrem­ists pose to offi­cer safety in the United States. Research by the Anti-Defamation League has found that at least one of the sus­pects has ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings that would put him within the over­ar­ch­ing anti-government “Patriot” movement.

The Louisiana shoot­ings were unfor­tu­nately only the lat­est in a series of lethal encoun­ters in the United States between law enforce­ment offi­cers and domes­tic extrem­ists.  Ear­lier this year, six police offi­cers were shot, one fatally, in Ogden, Utah, after police entered a res­i­dence to exe­cute a search war­rant. Infor­ma­tion from the search war­rant affi­davit strongly sug­gests that the sus­pect, David Stew­art, was an anti-government extrem­ist.  In 2010, two peo­ple asso­ci­ated with the sov­er­eign cit­i­zen move­ment killed two East Mem­phis police offi­cers and wounded two other offi­cers in a pair of shootouts.

All in all, at least 28 offi­cers have been killed since 2001 in encoun­ters with extrem­ists from one move­ment or another. The killings have ranged from inci­dents in which police offi­cers were delib­er­ately tar­geted by extrem­ists to sit­u­a­tions in which police offi­cers hap­pened to encounter extrem­ists engag­ing in ide­o­log­i­cal or non-ideological crim­i­nal activity.

Over­whelm­ingly, the per­pe­tra­tors or sus­pects in these lethal inci­dents have been right-wing extrem­ists, adher­ents of one or another of the pri­mary white suprema­cist move­ments or anti-government extrem­ist move­ments active in the United States today.  This is part of a long-term trend since the 1980s, in which right-wing extrem­ists grad­u­ally replaced left-wing extrem­ists as the main source of extremist-related offi­cer killings in the United States.  Though the fig­ures here are solely for fatal­i­ties, anec­do­tal evi­dence sug­gests that the same trends hold for non-lethal extremist-related attacks on police offi­cers as well.

The resur­gence of right-wing extrem­ism in the United States since 2009 has undoubt­edly con­tributed to the level of vio­lence:  between 2009 and 2012, eight of nine extremist-related offi­cer deaths have been linked to right-wing extremists.

Among right-wing extrem­ists, anti-government extrem­ists have been the most lethal in recent years, per­pe­trat­ing or sus­pected of hav­ing per­pe­trated half of the extremist-related offi­cer deaths this cen­tury.  How­ever, white suprema­cists have slain nearly as many offi­cers in the same time period and, in a prac­ti­cal sense, rep­re­sent vir­tu­ally the same level of threat to offi­cer safety.

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August 15, 2012 2

Neo-Nazi Leader Arrested for Alleged Rape of 13-Year-Old Girl

Las Vegas Metro Police arrested the Nevada state leader of the neo-Nazi National Social­ist Move­ment (NSM), Josh Dav­en­port, 24, on August 11 on charges of kid­nap­ping and rap­ing a 13-year-old girl.  Police inves­ti­gat­ing a miss­ing child report were led to Davenport’s nearby apart­ment, but left when no one answered their knocks. However, mem­bers of the kid­napped girl’s fam­ily sub­se­quently sur­veilled the apart­ment and later in the night allegedly saw the cry­ing girl leav­ing his apart­ment. They called the police again, who returned and arrested Dav­en­port with­out incident.

Accord­ing to police, the vic­tim said she had been sex­u­ally assaulted at gun­point and the sus­pect had threat­ened to kill the girl and her fam­ily. Dav­en­port report­edly told police that he saw the girl hav­ing an argu­ment with another boy, then invited her into his apart­ment for a short time before telling her to leave. He denied kid­nap­ping or hav­ing sex with the victim. A sub­se­quent med­ical exam­i­na­tion found signs of sex­ual trauma on the vic­tim, while a search of Davenport’s apart­ment allegedly found items of the victim’s cloth­ing in a bag in Davenport’s bedroom.

Dav­en­port was charged with four counts of sex­ual assault on a vic­tim under 14, four counts of sex­ual assault with a deadly weapon, lewd­ness with a minor, kid­nap­ping, and bat­tery with intent to com­mit sex­ual assault. He has had a pre­vi­ous his­tory of vio­lence towards women.  In 2010, fol­low­ing an inci­dent with his then-girlfriend, he pleaded guilty to attempt to com­mit bat­tery con­sti­tut­ing domes­tic vio­lence by strangulation. He received a sus­pended 12-month sen­tence and two years of pro­ba­tion. As recently as July 16, Dav­en­port posted to his Face­book pro­file that “Half the time when i see a hot chick i wanna ask her out to din­ner.  And the other half time i just want to see what their heads would look like on a stick.”

Dav­en­port has been an active mem­ber of the neo-Nazi National Social­ist Move­ment since 2007.  He has been the group’s Nevada state leader since 2011. During this time, Dav­en­port orga­nized or par­tic­i­pated in numer­ous NSM events in Nevada, Ari­zona and Cal­i­for­nia, includ­ing a num­ber of anti-immigration events, such as a June 2011 NSM protest dubbed “Reclaim the South­west” held out­side a Las Vegas nurs­ery to protest day laborers.

Dav­en­port is heav­ily tat­tooed, with many tat­toos depict­ing occult sub­jects or hate sym­bols.  Among his tat­toos are sev­eral swastikas, the white suprema­cist ver­sion of the Celtic Cross, a Sturmabteilung sym­bol (the Sturmabteilung, or SA, were Hitler’s stormtroop­ers), a 14/88 (a white suprema­cist tat­too com­bin­ing the num­ber 14, which is code for a pop­u­lar white suprema­cist slo­gan, with the num­ber 88, which is code for “Heil Hitler”), SS bolts, the phrase “white power,” a Totenkopf skull, and the SS slo­gan “Meine Ehre Heisst Treue” (“My Honor Is Loy­alty”), among others.

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