Hate Groups

IN the broad freedoms granted by the wisdom and goodwill of America's founders, everyone has the right to hate. We can hate government, politics, the media, religion, cops, Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, rich, poor, other countries and each other generally. There is no limit to hatred. The wind, the rain, the ocean, the very air we breathe and the land we occupy have all heard our displeasure, if not our curses. Hatred exists with both laughter and tears.

The parents of white supremacist Matthew Hale said Tuesday that their jailhouse visits and phone calls had been suspended indefinitely as the investigation continued into the killing of a federal judge's husband and mother. Hale was convicted last year of plotting to murder Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow after he lost a trademark infringement case. He is awaiting sentencing.

The war of words against U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow lasted two years, a baffling, ominous campaign. It ended in the conviction of Matthew Hale, a white supremacist who had fixated on Lefkow for having thwarted the movement he called his "church." Now investigators are trying to learn whether Hale's intimidating words led to murder. A federal jury last year found Hale, 33, guilty of trying to arrange Lefkow's murder.

Bearing down with grand jury subpoenas and teams of interrogators, federal agents and Chicago police sought two men for questioning Thursday in connection with the execution-style slayings of a federal judge's husband and mother, pressing for information from followers of a white supremacist who insisted from jail that he had no involvement in the killings.

White supremacist groups around the country are moving aggressively to recruit new members by promoting their violent, racist ideologies on billboards, in radio commercials and in leaflets tossed on suburban driveways. Watching with mounting alarm, civil rights monitors say these tactics stake out a much bolder, more public role for many hate groups, which are trying to shed their image as shadowy extremists and claim more mainstream support.

The parent of a high school football player who invited teammates over to his house for weightlifting sessions allegedly tried to recruit the teens into a heavily armed white-supremacist group, Riverside County authorities announced Tuesday.

Eighteen people believed to be members or associates of white supremacist groups have been arrested in Riverside County in the alleged theft, sale and distribution of drugs and firearms, officials said on Friday. Most of those arrested have felony records, according to Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle. He added that more than 75 firearms and 15,000 rounds of ammunition were seized, along with methamphetamine, hallucinogenic mushrooms and marijuana.

A white supremacist organization's booth at the Mississippi State Fair this fall will feature a figure from the archives of the state's bloody civil rights struggle: Edgar Ray Killen, a preacher who was accused of planning the murders of three civil rights workers in the summer of 1964. Mississippians have heard little from Killen since 1967, when witnesses at a federal trial testified that he had recruited men to kill Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.

Two dozen white supremacists held a rally near the site of the Topeka school that was the subject of the historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision, but they cut the demonstration short after protesters moved within about 25 feet of them. For several minutes the two sides shouted insults and taunts at each other.

In the first case of its kind in Germany, a right-wing rock band was deemed a criminal organization and its lead singer was sentenced Monday to more than three years in prison for lyrics that venerate Nazism and incite racial hatred. A Berlin criminal court sentenced 38-year-old Michael Regener to 40 months in prison after a six-month trial that tested the boundaries of free expression in a nation with strict laws against hate speech.