Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Intelligence Report
New Intelligence Report Released Today
02 months ago
The Southern Poverty Law Center today released the latest issue of its quarterly investigative magazine on the radical right, Intelligence Report. Overall, the issue covers the extreme right’s increasingly heated rhetoric, laced with talk of war and weaponry, as it faces the possibility of four more years under a black president.
The issue’s cover story focuses [...]
New Intelligence Report Released Today
05 months ago
The latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today, focuses on the threat of homegrown Muslim terrorists, even as it warns in an editorial against demonizing Muslims in the U.S. and neglecting threats from white supremacists and others on the radical right. Entitled “Ten Years After,” a reference to the Islamist [...]
New Intelligence Report Finds Gays Most Targeted for Violent Hate Crimes
01 year ago
The FBI issued its 2009 Hate Crime Statistics report this morning. The report shows that the number of reported hate crime incidents fell from 7,783 to 6,604. But a pattern that has existed since the FBI started tallying these numbers remains: the LGBT community is, by far, the most victimized by violent hate crimes (attacks against people as opposed to property). The rate at which gays and lesbians suffer from such crimes greatly exceeds their presence in the population, a painful reality documented in the Winter 2010 issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, which was released today.
The 2009 FBI numbers show that the LGBT community suffers from violent hate crimes at levels that are more than eight times their percentage in the population. Analyzing the FBI data from 1995 to 2008, the Report found that gays are 2.6 times more likely to be attacked than blacks; 4.4 times more likely than Muslims; 13.8 times more likely than Latinos; and 41.5 times more likely than whites. The basic pattern holds true when looking at individual years.
The relative rates of hate crime victimization by population group are likely more revealing than the absolute numbers of hate crimes reported by the FBI. A 2005 DOJ study using survey data found that hate crimes are greatly underreported and that the real level of hate crime in America was about 191,000 incidents per year — in other words, about 20 to 30 times higher than the numbers annually reported by the FBI.
These findings come as a wave of anti-gay attacks have washed across the country. In New York, for example, 10 suspects were arrested for brutally torturing three gay victims. And in Covington, Ky., a neighborhood was hit by a series of violent anti-gay attacks. Most dramatically, four teenagers committed suicide in September after being bullied, taunted or outed as homosexuals.
The new issue of the Report also explores how the hard-core anti-gay movement in America is becoming more extreme in the face of gay rights advances. Even after the recent string of teen suicides, which brought national attention to the issue of anti-gay bullying, leaders of these groups blamed those seeking to protect students from bullying.
Eighteen anti-gay groups are profiled in the Winter 2010 issue, which also contains an article debunking 10 key claims spread by the anti-gay movement to demonize homosexuals. These claims – ranging from the myth that homosexuals don’t live nearly as long as heterosexuals to the utterly bizarre claim that gays helped orchestrate the Holocaust – are examined in detail.
Anti-gay “murder music,” a style of music that features lyrics advocating the murder of homosexuals and is growing in popularity far beyond its native Jamaica, is also described. The music has sparked an effort by gay and lesbian activists in Jamaica and throughout the Western world to stop its growth.
New Intelligence Report Spotlights ‘Sovereign Citizens’
01 year ago
Today, we’re releasing a major report on “sovereign citizens,” a radical-right movement that has grown to include as many as 300,000 adherents who believe that the government has no right to tax or impose laws on most Americans. Adherents can be incredibly dangerous, especially to police officers, and our new report is pegged to the murders of two West Memphis, Ark., officers who were murdered by a father-son team during a May traffic stop. Like most sovereign citizens, Jerry and Joe Kane did not believe police have any authority to regulate travel on the roads, in particular by requiring driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations.
Our package includes profiles of a dozen key sovereign leaders and ideologues; a sidebar offering tips to law enforcement officials, who are commonly targeted by sovereigns; a lexicon of the bizarre terms and phrases favored by sovereigns; an interview with one of the leading scholars of American conspiracy culture; and my editorial on the link between conspiracy theories and political violence.
These stories all appear in the latest edition of the Intelligence Report, which we’re calling “the conspiracy issue.” We also offer stories on the top 10 conspiracy theories of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement (of which the sovereigns are a part); a story on a Russian English-language TV station that specializes in plugging U.S. conspiracy theories; an article on a conspiracy-minded Harlem pastor who recently put President Obama on “trial” for not being a U.S.-born citizen; and a number of other pieces (for the table of contents, click here).