There was a time when I would have just brushed off the news that a neo-Nazi group would be holding a “National Day of Hate” this coming Saturday, Shabbes, 25 February, to announce to the world “loud and clear that the one true enemy of the American people is the Jew.” A coupe of decades ago, when I was reporting on the neo-Nazi Internet in Wired News, The Montreal Gazette, and The National Post, working with the Nizkor Project and as a consultant to Jewish community organizations, and making conference presentations as some kind of expert on white extremism, I might even have rolled my eyes.
Indeed, did just that in 1998, when the Canadian government proposed hate propaganda legislation specially-designed for the Internet. “The danger here is not that jackbooted legions are going to march along the Internet, out your computer monitor and into your living-room or study,” I scoffed on the op-ed page of The Gazette. “It is that, when we give away a little more of our rights and freedoms to fight unpleasant or unpopular ideas, we will never get them back.”
I don’t know today whether that was the right line – and tone – to take although, given the circumstances and conditions at that time, and the danger that the infant Internet would be stifled in its crib, I suspect I was right to rail against the “do-gooders want [who] to save us from the Net.” By that point, I had spent a considerable amount of time researching and reporting on right-wing, white nationalist extremism. I had met and interviewed the Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, “Net Nazi Number One” Milton John Kleim, the National Alliance’s William Pierce (the author of The Turner Diaries), the Institute for Historical Review’s Greg Raven, David Irving, and many more skinheads, brownshirts, deniers and Nazis of all stripes.
I came away from these encounters with one unshakeable conclusion: They were a bunch of clowns. Zundel, marching into the courtroom wearing a blue hardhat to defend his right to publish Did Six Million Really Die? and The Hitler We Loved and Why, Gary Lauck, the “farmbelt Fuhrer” in his brownshirt cosplay costume, and any number of skinheads who told me that they had become Nazis because they couldn’t get dates with “white girls” while Jews, African Americans and, gasp!, women did, were merely pathetic and not dangerous. (We didn’t have the term “incel” back then, though I wish we had.)
Make no mistake however; these losers could be dangerous. A white nationalist terrorist group calling itself The Order gunned down the talk show host Alan Berg in front of his Denver home in 1984; Ken McVeigh, inspired by Pierce’s turgid prose, murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995; and I read a cache of documents from the white nationalist commune at Elohim City in Oklahoma which tied McVeigh to the Aryan Revolutionary Army and an apocalyptic Christian Identity terrorist group called the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (“CSA,” evoking the Confederacy) and drug trafficking.
The Nazis were indeed there, and they were scary as Hell, but they were outliers. While there were some horrific incidents of white-extremist violence throughout the last years of the last century, there were not many. More importantly, they came from the absolute fringes of society, and both the acts and the ideas that motivated them were roundly condemned across the political spectrum. Even if it was only for the cameras and polite society, every political and community leader and every prominent person in popular culture and society would have denounced the idea that one must “expose the international clique of parasitic vermin that infest our nation today” as both absurd and obscene.
That is not the case today. Twenty-five years after I rolled my eyes at online Nazis these ideas are now current and public in our politics, social media, and popular culture, though sometimes only expressed politely and in tones pitched to be heard only by the true believers. The right talks about international conspiracies, Jewish space lasers, and Q-Anon blood libels and appropriates the memory and images of the Shoah to score cheap political points in a way that not only demonstrates their contempt for Jews but denies the enormity of Six Million deaths. The left rants on about the “Davos clique,” “international finance,” and the Rothschilds, and darkly whispers about how the Jewish president of Ukraine is a puppet of NATO and western banking interests.
And it is not merely talk. As many Jews have been murdered by antisemitic terrorists in the last seven years than in the previous twenty. It can be hard to remember a time when something like the murder of Berg or the firebombing of the Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga were such isolated events that we could shake our heads and then go back to blissful complacency. Today, there are police cars stationed outside synagogues and metal detectors at temple doors, and not only on the major holidays. A quarter century ago, I had reason to feel safe; today, I have to mentally prepare myself to go to shul, and I always leave a message for my spouse in case I never return.
We are not safe, but perhaps we never truly were.
The New York and Chicago police departments sent warnings to synagogues and Jewish community organizations this week warning of the “National Day of Hate,” and to Mosques and Masjids, too, just for good measure. The unidentified neo-Nazi group that has invited “groups that are interested in participating” to “please reach out” is probably a tiny fringe rabble. And they have promised nothing more than to “shock the masses with banner drops, stickers, flyers, and graffiti.”
Yet it is worth remembering that no one had heard of The Order before Berg lay in a pool of his own blood, dying in his own driveway in 1984, and the Proud Boys were little more than a risible publicity stunt before the beating, street battles, and insurrection. Violence is how neo-Nazis make their name. Nor should we forget that the neo-Nazis who organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 promises a “peaceful demonstration” but murdered Heather Heyer.
We are not safe; we know this. And there is a gnawing fear that comes along with that realization that people want to harm us and kill us, just as they always have. We have died in our millions, and yet we have also learned to live with the fear of death and genocide, by deflecting it, joking about it, and using it, at the best of times, to motivate ourselves to be better, kinder, and more receptive to the suffering of others. But it wears on us, and all of us a tired
We must take the threat of the “National Day of Hate” seriously this weekend, rather than brushing it off as just more right-wing silliness, as did in simpler times. No doubt the neo-Nazis who have called for it are probably just a bunch of pumped-up, self-important incels trying to frighten “the Jews,” and I’m sure they’re having a good laugh. But we know from experience that incels can kill and, after all, fear is the ultimate and defining goal of terrorism. Still, it would be wrong to turn and hide, to decide to forego Shabbes at shul, or to stay inside and wait for it all to blow over. It isn’t going to blow over, and we can’t defeat our fear by being afraid.
We are not safe, and the police warnings only confirm that. But that is why we need to stand up and face down this latest group of pathetic antisemites, to do the most Jewish thing possible and make an Amidah along with our non-Jewish friends, family, and allies that sanctifies who we are and all life. This hate is not going away, and I despair that it ever will, which is why we should refuse to be cowed by the fear – as we always have.
We are not safe; but we are strong.
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Photo courtesy of the Southern Policy Law Center