(NOTE: click on “Keep Reading” below, to see Monday a.m. updates to this post…)
Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has now issued a definitive statement:
This is so hopelessly wrong that it is hard to believe it is a genuine government document.
No one by the name of Loughner has ever been a subscriber to American Renaissance or has ever registered for an American Renaissance conference. We have no evidence that he has even visited the AR website.
American Renaissance condemns violence in the strongest possible terms, and nothing that has ever appeared in it pages could be interpreted as countenancing it.
AR is not anti-government, anti-Semitic, or anti-ZOG, as is clear from the 20 years of back issues that are posted on our website. The expression “ZOG” has never appeared in the pages of AR, and we have has always welcomed Jewish participation in our work.
Many of the speakers at American Renaissance conferences have been Jewish.
Although the name Gabrielle Giffords has appeared in news articles we have excerpted on our website, AR itself has never mentioned her and has certainly never criticized her policies.
Finally, Gabrielle Giffords is not the “first Jewish female elected to such a high position in the US government.” Barbara Boxer has represented California in the Senate from 1993, and Diane Feinstein has done so since 1992. There are at least six Jewish congresswomen listed by Wikipedia as currently serving in the House.
If this memo is typical of the research done by the Department of Homeland Security, our country is in serious danger.
I telephoned DHS today to try to get the bottom of this nonsense, but apparently there is no homeland security on Sundays. The person who answered the phone said no one is there and that I should call back on Monday morning.
Please read the whole thing, and remember: your extorted tax dollars fund the salaries of DHS staffers.
Do they sound competent? Their memo doesn’t even spell Giffords’ name correctly.
Look to see if any MSM reports finally get around to mentioning that American Renaissance was not able to hold its conference last year because of left-wing threats, which not one MSM outlet reported at the time.
Expect more of this tedium, obviously:
A newspaper in Australia says that the attack may be linked to “anti-Semitic race hate group American Renaissance.”
That sentence is almost perfectly wrong, since American Renaissance is not anti-Semitic, disapproves of “race hate,” is not a hate group, and is not, in fact a “group,” like the Ku Klux Klan, La Raza, or the NAACP, but a newsletter and website that holds conferences every two years.
The only certain fact about the motivation of Arizona killer Jared Loughner is that, like the lunatic who opened fire on the Pentagon last March, he is a pothead.
[American Renaissance] is on the right side of the political spectrum and is politically incorrect because of its criticism of racial preference and “diversity” programs and immigration policies that weaken the strength of a country. It has scheduled a Feb. 4–Feb. 6, 2011, conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A subsequent story by Griffin claimed that American Renaissance was mentioned “in some of his [Loughner’s] internet postings and federal law enforcement officials are investigating Loughner’s possible links to the organization.”
But no evidence of such postings or links was cited or has surfaced.
While American Renaissance is critical of government affirmative action programs and unrestricted immigration, there is no evidence of anti-Semitism, and there is no evidence that American Renaissance by any objective standard is a racist organization. It does deal with racial issues. But so does the Congressional Black Caucus.
Monday UPDATE: “DHS denies evidence of Tucson shooter to fringe group“
