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Get connected to a whole new kind of credit card. http://click.topica.com/aaaa5Ebz8SnrbAjwjxa/Juniper \=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=/ __________________________________________________________________________ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Tuesday, 19 December 2000 Vol. 4, Number 102 (#498) __________________________________________________________________________ Militant Anti-Fascist Action In Margate Anti-Nazi League, "NF rounds off year of failure," 16 Dec 00 Anti-Nazi League, "BNP campaign flops," 5 Dec 00 Anti-Nazi League, "NF forced to cancel march on pub," 5 Dec 00 Militant Anti-Klan Action In Chicago Reuters, "Ku Klux Klan rally in Illinois erupts in violence," 16 Dec 00 Annie Swenney (Sun-Times), "KKK rally in Skokie results in 20 arrests," 17 Dec 00 Susan Dodge (Sun-Times), "Klan answered with racial unity," 18 Dec 00 Heather Vogell (Chicago Tribune), "Demonstrations of Faith Used Against Klan In Skokie," 17 Dec 00 Michael J. Jordan (JTA), "Skokie again becomes a dirty word," 13 Dec 00 Obituary Ralph Bates: Writer who kept his devotion to republican Spain alive in his novels -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MILITANT ANTI-FASCIST ACTION IN MARGATE NF rounds off year of failure Anti-Nazi League 16 Dec 00 This year the Nazi National Front planned to increase their numbers by marching in towns across Britain. They have not succeeded. Last Saturday in Margate was the latest in a long line of National Front failures: it was their smallest demonstration yet. The Nazis wanted to attack the Warren Court Hotel because the Refugee Support Centre holds meetings there. Around fifty people from Margate ANL occupied the road outside the hotel. Kent police - who have wasted thousands of pounds enabling the NF to march this year - built a pen on a green behind the hotel to put the Nazis in. The handful of local Nazis who tried to approach the hotel were driven away from the hotel and into the pen by the ANL, where they were protected by the police. In spite of National Organiser Terry Blackham's desperate pleas for support on their website this week, he was still only able to muster a dozen thugs from London. In an act of bravado, they tried to march along the pavement opposite the hotel. They were confronted by Margate ANL and driven back up the street and into the pen with the local Nazis. Humiliated by this, they tried to hold a rally which was drowned out by Anti-Nazis. They stayed for only half an hour. In spite of their threats the National Front have failed to mobilize local people. However it is clear that the only thing that has stopped them from building a bigger National Front has been opposition on the streets, every time they try to organise. In 2001 the NF intend to stand candidates in the General Election. They hope that members of the BNP disillusioned by the splits in that organisation will join them to carry out their race hatred on the streets. To stop them, it is crucial that we mobilise locally every time they raise their ugly heads. We must never be complacent - join us in building a bigger Anti-Nazi League - in Margate and across Britain! - - - - - BNP campaign flops Anti-Nazi League 5 Dec 00 The BNP campaign to target low turnout seats fell flat yesterday when voters in Haying ensured that the BNP came last in the Three Rivers (Herts) council elections. The BNP only managed 37 votes! Earlier this week the Watford Observer revealed that the BNP had been running a fraudulent campaign. Of the BNP's eight nominators six were in their 80s or 90s and were duped into signing the forms. One nominee had been told she was signing a petition about cutting grass verges, another signed to make the BNP activists go away. Even using these tactics the BNP have failed. This has been a tactic repeatedly used by the BNP in local elections. If the BNP try to stand in your area make sure that you check out the list of nominees: they may have been lied to about the form they have signed. - - - - - NF forced to cancel march on pub Anti-Nazi League 5 Dec 00 The Nazi National Front was humiliated last night when they were forced to cancel their demonstration and retract their threat "to shut down The Cock Tavern for good". Over one hundred people turned out to support the ANL, while a paltry ten Nazis gathered in a nearby pub in preparation for their march. According to the police on duty, the NF asked them to escort them to The Cock Tavern, as "they were afraid of the greater numbers of the Anti-Nazi League" - perhaps following the outburst of local anger directed against them on the streets last week. As Anti-Nazis rallied outside the pub, the police announced that the march organiser (Terry Blackham) had decided to cancel the NF's demonstration, effectively giving up on their much-trumpeted campaign to close the pub down. The tiny group of Nazis was later seen fleeing the area by tube, with a police escort to protect them. The ANL was joined by Camden Black Workers Group, Camden Unison, two Camden borough councillors, the Socialist Party and Camden Playworkers Against the Nazis. Camden ANL will now build on this victory to ensure the Nazi NF never marches in Somers Town again! *The ANL would like to thank the Omagh Support Self Help Group for their statement last week. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MILITANT ANTI-KLAN ACTION IN CHICAGO Ku Klux Klan rally in Illinois erupts in violence Reuters 16 Dec 00 CHICAGO -- Anti-Klan demonstrators clashed with police and pelted white- hooded Ku Klux Klansmen with snowballs on Saturday during a planned march by some 20 members of the hate group in Skokie, a Chicago suburb that is home to many Holocaust survivors. Police arrested about 10 anti-Klan demonstrators, who witnesses said smashed the windows of at least three squad cars and fought with police. Witnesses said one squad car bolted when trapped by the crowd, causing demonstrators to scatter and then reassemble to rain kicks on the vehicle. Some of the anti-Klan demonstrators, who numbered in the hundreds, pounced on a few young men declaring their support for the hate group -- one wearing a T-shirt with the word "Jews" and a slash through it. One man with a shaved head was kicked to the ground and his face bloodied. Most of the arrests were for disorderly conduct. White-robed KKK members, who numbered about 20, were pelted by snowballs along their brief march following a rally held on the steps of a local courthouse. The crowd also threw snowballs at mounted police officers trying to keep the two sides separated, while other officers beat back demonstrators with their nightsticks. The KKK, a white supremacist group that reviles Jews, blacks and other ethnic and religious minorities, has won the right in the past to march in Skokie. An undetermined number of survivors of World War II Nazi death camps live there. Some religious groups urged those opposed to the hate group to ignore the Klan rally and instead show up for a unity demonstration on Sunday. - - - - - KKK rally in Skokie results in 20 arrests Annie Swenney (Sun-Times) 17 Dec 00 About 20 members of the KKK rallied Saturday in Skokie, facing down an angry throng of counterprotesters that police had to disperse forcibly. In all, about 400 protesters turned up at the Skokie courthouse where a Wisconsin chapter of the KKK had been given permission to rally for white power. Police kept the crowd about 500 yards away during the 45 minutes of anti- Jewish and anti-African American speeches, although some protesters were able to get close enough to pelt speakers with snowballs. Skirmishes broke out between police and protesters and between a group of skinheads and protesters at the end of the rally. Anti-Klan protesters broke windows, bent antennas on squad cars, and shouted at police. Police made all protesters walk through a metal detector. A handgun was recovered by Skokie police from a man seen loading it in the back seat of a car going into the rally, police said. In all, Skokie police made nine arrests. Charges included possession of a firearm, mob action, assault and assault on a police officer. Cook County sheriff's police arrested 11 people: 10 for disorderly conduct and one for criminal damage to property. Skokie police were also investigating a report that skinheads assaulted an African-American couple. The woman, whose identity was not available, was treated at Rush North Shore Medical Center, Sgt. Michael Ruth said. The trouble between police and protesters began after a small group of skinheads walked through the crowd and got into a skirmish with protesters. Police intervened, pulled protesters to the ground and apprehended them. Shortly after, a school bus carrying the KKK members out of Skokie pulled away from the courthouse. Police stopped or held protesters back from the bus, and the crowd's anger heightened. About 200 police officers, including Cook County sheriff, Skokie, forest preserve, and Illinois State, walked in formation with riot gear east on Old Orchard Road to push the protesters back. Much of the crowd's message was angry. One chant was "death, death to the Klan, power, power to the workers." But others came to the rally to counter the KKK with a message of respect for all races and people. "They have a right to express themselves, but so do we," said Ellen Holland Rosenblatt, 53, of Skokie. "I feel that, just like children, you have to sometimes show your authority. And they are like children." - - - - - Klan answered with racial unity Susan Dodge (Sun-Times) 18 Dec 00 One day after a Ku Klux Klan group from Wisconsin rallied in Skokie, more than 1,200 North Shore residents denounced hate and celebrated diversity at their own rally at Niles West High School. "There is no place in America, and especially not here in Skokie, Ill., where the message of racial superiority and hate is welcome," said Sherialyn Byrdsong, the widow of former Northwestern University basketball coach Rickey Byrdsong, who was gunned down in Skokie on July 2, 1999, by white supremacist Benjamin Smith. Skokie police, who had snowballs and rocks thrown at them Saturday by protesters, said the KKK rally brought out the worst in people, and the Sunday rally brought out the best. Protesters were upset that police kept them away from KKK members. "We saw the worst of humanity on Saturday," said Sgt. Michael Ruth. "I think all of our officers felt better after they saw the other extreme today." Rabbis, priests and political officials shared the stage at Niles West, denouncing violence and urging celebration of differences, not just tolerance. Rabbi Neil Brief recalled how Skokie residents stood up to neo-Nazis in the late 1970s, preventing them from marching in Skokie. "I see today--and I feel this from the bottom of my heart--as an affirmation," Brief said. Sunday's rally attracted a crowd as diverse as Skokie itself, home to more than 65 nationalities. The audience included kids and senior citizens, and was dubbed the "Peace & Harmony Rally." "When one of us is attacked as a group or as an individual, we consider it an attack on all of us," said Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen. The crowd gave Byrdsong a standing ovation. She told them she considered moving to Atlanta after her husband was murdered, but she felt "compelled to stay," because Skokie is a place where neighbors respect each other. * * * * * Tenn. grand dragon among 20 arrested Skokie police believe one of the men they arrested Saturday at a raucous Ku Klux Klan rally is the grand dragon of the Tennessee KKK. William Moore, 29, of Woodlawn, Tenn., was in custody at the Skokie police station Sunday night, charged with unlawful possession of a weapon, a felony, said Skokie Sgt. Michael Ruth. Moore's young son came with him to the rally and told police, "My daddy is a soldier." Moore was seen loading a gun in the back seat of a car going to the rally, Ruth said. Another man in the car, Johnny Dean Simpson, 27, of Downstate Centralia, was arrested and released, Ruth said. Skokie police were given information before the rally about Moore and his background as a KKK leader in Tennessee, Ruth said. Moore is scheduled to appear in bond court at 9 a.m. today at the Skokie Courthouse, which was the scene of Saturday's rally. Skokie police arrested nine people, and the Cook County sheriff's police arrested 11. Police were also searching for a group of young men who allegedly hit an African-American woman in the face after Saturday's rally. The 30-year-old victim, from Chicago, was treated Saturday at Rush North Shore Medical Center. She was attacked at Lawler and Old Orchard as she and her husband were attempting to leave the rally. One of the men arrested at the rally had a 13-page document that described how protesters needed to prevent the police from making arrests, Ruth said. - - - - - Demonstrations of Faith Used Against Klan In Skokie Heather Vogell (Chicago Tribune) 17 Dec 00 Although a Ku Klux Klan rally was under way just a few miles from his Skokie synagogue, Rabbi Michael Weinberg's Saturday was no different from most. "Today was the Sabbath so we observed the Sabbath," said Weinberg of Temple Beth Israel. He did not participate in the counterdemonstration sparked by the rally because he believes it is best to deprive hate groups of the attention they crave. About 20 Klansmen, some dressed in white robes and carrying Confederate flags, rallied on the steps of the Cook County Courthouse, 5600 Old Orchard Rd., Skokie, on Saturday afternoon. Klan ralliers delivered an anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-homosexual and white supremacist message, but their words were mostly drowned out by the shouts of hundreds of counterdemonstrators. Dozens of police officers in riot gear sought to keep demonstrators and counter-demonstrators separate. "We don't feel the Klan could [ever] be welcome here," said Nina Genn of Skokie, who demonstrated against the group. "It's a shame to humanity that we still have people who think and feel that way." Others sought ways to show disapproval for the Klan's message without drawing attention to its rally. Instead of demonstrating, they attended religious services and forums. At Temple Judea Mizpah, about 30 people joined a discussion about prejudice that was followed by prayers, said Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen. The temple was one of about 15 Skokie houses of worship open during the rally for prayers, meditation and reflection. "I think what you're doing, you're taking something that, by its nature, could be an ugly negative thing, and turning it into something positive," he said. "In the larger sense, a threat such as the Ku Klux Klan has the potential to bring ... Skokie closer together." The village, schools and local organizations are sponsoring a Peace and Harmony rally celebrating the village's diversity at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Niles West High School auditorium, 5701 Oakton St. On Saturday, 20 people were arrested on charges such as disorderly conduct and criminal damage to property. Skokie Police Sgt. Michael Ruth said police confiscated a loaded handgun, baseball bats, knives, picks and a tire iron from the crowd, which scuffled with police and a few Klan supporters. A small group of skinheads attacked a black couple leaving the rally, punching the woman and knocking her down, Ruth said. She was treated and released from Rush North Shore Medical Center. - - - - - Skokie again becomes a dirty word Michael J. Jordan (JTA) 13 Dec 00 NEW YORK CITY -- For many American Jews, the word "Skokie" stirs up memories of the 1978 First Amendment case that upheld a neo-Nazi group's right to hold a rally in that Illinois community, home to numerous Holocaust survivors. The episode even spawned a movie, starring Danny Kaye. So it may be precisely to capitalize on Skokie's symbolism that the Ku Klux Klan plans to demonstrate December 16, on Shabbat, in the Chicago suburb that some of them describe as "Jewtown." The KKK event, announced by the Mercer, Wisconsin chapter, will be held on the steps of the Cook County Courthouse. As the courthouse is county property, a local Skokie permit is not necessary. Thirty to 40 Klansmen and other white supremacists from the region are expected to attend. Outraged, Chicago Jewry is reacting. "History has shown us that evil and hateful words, if unchecked, all too often lead to evil deeds and hate crimes," said Richard Hirschhaut, Midwest regional director for the Anti-Defamation League. "We have to raise our voices against those who would divide our community and attempt to sow fear," Hirschhaut said. "Even the most pathetic sociopath who spews a message of bigotry and hate ought not be dismissed as unimportant, lest their message reach and potentially influence others." The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and local Skokie Jews have thrown their support behind a "Peace and Harmony" rally that the Skokie Commission on Human Relations has scheduled for the following day. HIRSCHHAUT SAID he succeeded in dissuading the Evanston Ecumenical Action Council, comprised mostly of Christian denominations, from confronting the Klan. Instead, the council agreed to join the Sunday rally. The ADL also is endorsing another reprise of "Operation Lemonade," a four- year-old project that, like a walk-a-thon, cleverly raises money based on each minute a hate group demonstrates, and donates it to organizations that work toward neutralizing such groups. There are only 2,000 to 2,500 card-carrying KKK members in the entire US, said Hirschhaut, who has a one-inch-thick file on the Mercer, Wisconsin chapter leader, Michael McQueeney. Skokie - now home to large communities of Asians, Latinos, and blacks - is still scarred by a shooting spree in the region 17 months ago. A follower of the white-supremacist World Church of the Creator gunned down the African American basketball coach of Northwestern University and a South Korean college student, and injured six Orthodox Jews on their way to synagogue. The coach, Ricky Byrdsong, and two of the Jewish victims were Skokie residents. Holding a post-KKK counter-rally is an "approach that makes a lot of sense to us," said Michael Kotzin, executive director of the Jewish federation. "The circulation of hate, no matter how small and marginal, is a legitimate concern and there's going to be a reaction from the Jewish community - and from the friends of the Jewish community." But not all Jews are satisfied with peaceful responses. The Jewish Defense League, founded by the late militant Rabbi Meir Kahane, says it intends to block the rally, "peacefully if possible, but forcibly if we must," the group's local leader told the Chicago Sun-Times. On its Web site, the JDL vows to "uphold the dignity and honor of our silent and undefended six million dead," and calls on "all Jews, regardless of there [sic] personal politics, to put aside all of their differences, which are dwarfed by this outrage, and act together to prevent this event from occurring." "We will not respect any law that would allow such a flagrant and boorish abuse of our cherished freedoms," the group declares. Such a declaration concerns Hirschhaut, Kotzin, and Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen, who say it will surely attract even more media, generating exactly the sort of publicity the KKK is seeking. "We are asking Skokians and our friends to stay away from the courthouse and show the Klan our hatred for their ideas by ignoring them and instead joining us at the 'Peace and Harmony' rally on Sunday," Van Dusen was quoted as saying in the Sun-Times. WEB SITES OF INTEREST: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- OBITUARY Ralph Bates: Writer who kept his devotion to republican Spain alive in his novels Valentine Cunningham (Guardian) 12 Dec 00 Ralph Bates, who has died in New York, aged 101, was the oldest survivor of that legendary group of British writers who gave their energies, their writings, and - in some cases - their lives to the cause of the Spanish republic in its doomed fight against fascism in the 1930s. At some point in the 15 years before the Spanish civil war broke out in 1937, he was a communist trade union agitator and organiser in the docks and fishing industries of Catalonia, where he became a fluent speaker of Spanish and Catalan. His knowledge of Spanish working-class and peasant life would turn him into one of the Comintern's best experts on Spain; it also gave his Spanish stories and novels their extraordinarily intimate power in realistic description. Bates resigned from the Communist party when the cynical Stalin-Hitler pact was signed in 1939. In 1941, he settled in New York and wrote to urge the US's entry into the second world war. From 1948 to 1968, he taught creative writing and other literary topics at New York University. Like so many Spanish war returnees, he came to the baleful attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to testify. Bates was born into a family of railway engineers in Swindon, Wiltshire. Family stories about a seafaring great-grandfather, who captained his own trampsteamer around the Mediterranean and was buried in Cadiz, fuelled his boyhood dreams of adventure and Spain. A musical child, he played the organ in local churches. He left school at a then normal early age, was apprenticed in the railway workshops, and served his time as a fitter, turner and erector. Aged 17, he volunteered for first world war service, and, after failing to get into the Royal Flying Corps (seemingly on medical grounds), served as an infantryman in the 16th Queen's Royal West Surreys, achieving the rank of lance corporal. Demobilised, he returned to the Swindon railway works, where he started to be drawn into Labour politics. By 1923 he had joined the Communist party. But the childhood lure of further places was strong, and he was soon off to Paris, where he had a job as a street-cleaner. Then he worked his passage on a ship to Spain, where he bummed around, surviving on odd jobs. He also got to see his great-grandfather's grave. Bates was a man of fabled energy - organising unions, swimming and climbing. The Spaniards dubbed him El fantastico . But he needed money, and that, he said later, was what drove him to take up writing. He was in touch with literary comrades and friends in London - indeed, he seems to have travelled back and forth quite a bit between Spain and London - and it was London publishers who took him up. His first novel, Sierra (1933), went straight to the scenes and doings he knew at first-hand - the anxieties of a Spain oppressed in the agitated period before the civil war broke out in July 1937, by brutal policing, a bloodthirsty Roman church, and the utter harshness of the Spanish earth itself. The novel ends, characteristically, with civil guards gunning down a demonstration of republicans. This was apprentice stuff, certainly, but Bates was speedily batting himself in as a fine, revolutionary realist. Quickly, he went on to produce two undoubted classics of uprising Spain: Lean Men (1934), about an English communist agitator evidently based upon himself - up against an overwhelmingly cruel and powerful state, and The Olive Field (1936), a strong story of yet more unsuccessful revolutionary struggles, but with the emphasis much more on mere work, in this case life among the cultivators of olive trees. The Olive Field will last. It stands out among the "proletarian" fiction of the 1930s as a revelatory and sympathetic inside story of people making a living at the jagged edges of survival. Rainbow Fish: Four Short Novels (1937), set widely across Europe, is far more ordinary; the shock mixture of Spanish violence, cruelty and utopian aspiration is clearly what Bates's imagination needed to thrive on. When the civil war erupted, he was straightaway thrown into the heat of things. Well acquainted with the Pyrenees, he guided incoming volunteers across the passes and took part in fighting with the militias. He was quickly made a commissar in the International Brigades, edited their English-language paper, Volunteer For Liberty, and wrote propaganda pieces about the war for London journals, such as Left Review. Winifred, his first wife, worked as a nurse. In 1937, Bates was sent by the Communist party to the United States to drum up financial support and attract more volunteers. There were huge rallies in venues such as Madison Square Gardens, and he became a darling of the American left. At one such meeting he met Eve Haxman, whom he married in 1942, following his divorce from Winifred. When the Spanish republic collapsed at the beginning of 1939, Bates retreated to Mexico. His novel, The Fields Of Paradise (1941), is set there; but even though this story of civil conflict reads like a transposition of Spanish events to the New World, it lacks the Spanish force that energises Bates's fiction at its best. In The Miraculous Horde, the collection issued in the autumn of 1939, the Spanish stories - about early-1930s trades union struggles, and famous battles involving the International Brigades, on the Jarama, at Brunete, in Aragon - are so much better than the Mexican ones. No one surpassed Bates for nice ironies about the mixed human material in the republican militias, or for movingly melancholic reflections on a struggle about which its participants felt increasingly pessimistic. In one of his best Spanish pieces, Compañero Sagasta Burns A Church, published in Left Review in October 1936, Bates pays understanding tribute to the Spanish anarchist's need to calmly burn out the signs and symbols of religious oppression; he was very ready to go along with what WH Auden called "the necessary murder" in a revolutionary cause. But he also dwells compellingly on the fatalism of anarchists - the belief that, at bottom, anarchism, "noble, just and beautiful", is "unrealizable" and therefore doomed. When he wrote this, Bates's line was that, by contrast, communism was not only noble but also realisable. Soon though, he was, like so many Spain veterans, thinking otherwise. It sounds as if he was helped to his disillusionment with politics by the dawning realisation that it was perverse, communist-led infighting, of the kind he was closely involved in, that had helped lose the war. (In Homage To Catalonia, George Orwell singles out Bates for mongering untruths about the "Trotskyite cowardice and collaborationism" of men Orwell knew had died fighting the fascists.) After his experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bates continued for a while to write. There were no successors in the biography line to his rather successful Life Of Schubert (1934), but he did try again with novels. His last published one, The Dolphin In The Wood (1950), manifestly a version of his own early years, ends with its hero travelling to the Spain he had always dreamed of living in. This sounds as if it may have had a projected sequel, but no successor came. For the last 30 or so years, Bates and his wife divided their time between Manhattan and the Greek island of Naxos, which became the sort of pastoral dreamplace that neither Spain, nor communism, had succeeded in supplying him with in any permanent fashion. He leaves an unpublished book about the island, as well as a recently completed collection of poems written there. He is survived by Eve and their son. Ralph Bates, writer, born November 3 1899; died November 26 2000. * * * * * In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. __________________________________________________________________________ FASCISM: We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget. (No permission required for noncommercial reproduction) - - - - - back issues archived via: <ftp://ftp.nyct.net/pub/users/tallpaul/publish/tinaf/> --- Support our Sponsor------------------------------------- Make eTour.com your Web start page, and you’ll see a different site matched to your interests every time you log onto the Web! 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