Militant response needed to racist Midwest terror
spree
By Louis
Paulsen
Chicago
By now, everyone has heard the horrid details of Benjamin
Smith's three-day racist campaign of terror against Blacks,
Asians and orthodox Jews on the weekend of July 4. In 14
separate shootings in Chicago, Springfield and Decatur, Ill.,
and Blooming ton, Ind., this white-supremacist murderer left
nine people wounded and two dead.
Funerals were held this week for Ricky Byrdsong and Won-Joon
Yoon. Smith gunned down Byrdsong while the much-loved former
basketball coach at Northwestern University was walking with
his children. Yoon, a Korean doctoral student in economics at
Indiana University, died when Smith sprayed a group of Asian
students with bullets.
Smith had made no secret of his intentions. He had
distributed hate literature on people's lawns in his hometown
of Wilmette, Ill., and had been expelled from the University of
Illinois for posting racist material in residence halls, as
well as for peeping in the windows of women students and for
sexist violence. As a student in Bloomington, he distributed
thousands of such leaflets, sent a bust of Hitler to a Jewish
center on Holocaust Remembrance Day and spewed such bigotry on
the radio that 1,000 people marched to condemn his
activities.
Smith was only the latest murderer trained by the "World
Church of the Creator" which, according to Mark Potok of the
Southern Poverty Law Center, has "led a trail of blood across
the United States for 26 years."
The group calls for a "racial holy war" to exterminate all
nonwhites and Jews. Since 1991, other members of the church
have been convicted in four other incidents of racist terror,
and two men who are now charged with the murder of a gay couple
in California had WCC literature in their possession. Potok
says the WCC has "several hundred" members in 46 chapters.
For years, activists who have protested and confronted Nazis
and the Klan have been criticized for "calling attention" to
them. "Ignore them and they'll go away," is this line of
reasoning. The Smith case shows how misguided this is. Racist
terror groups like the WCC pose a real and immediate danger to
the lives of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians,
bisexual and transgender people, and anyone who rejects their
message of hate. They are a public health crisis.
How does the government respond to this danger to the public
safety?
Tougher on beetles
than on racist murderers
By contrast, when it was discovered last year that some
"Asian longhorn beetles" were breeding on the northwest side of
Chicago, posing a danger to the area's hardwood trees, vigorous
steps were taken. City, state and federal agencies turned the
Ravens wood neighborhood into a combat zone. Property rights
must take second place, homeowners were told; infested trees
were cut down and shredded. Pictures of the beetle were
published everywhere, and people were urged to call a "hot
line" if they saw one.
But an infestation of organized racist murderers is treated
more gently. Clinton urged Americans to "rid our hearts of
hatred." Attorney General Janet Reno sent the right wing a
signal when she said, "The FBI doesn't go out and investigate
somebody because they say something that is protected by free
speech."
This will be news to everyone on the left--for example, to
Professor Jose Solis Jordan, who was framed, convicted and
sentenced by the FBI in Chicago for his support of Puerto Rican
independence.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, in a July 11 Chicago Tribune
article headed "Cracking down on violence and hate," was quoted
as expressing his "outrage" and then boasted of deploying a
"special task force" to solve murders of women in the
African-American community of Englewood. There is no task force
to track down white supremacists, however. Daley also calls for
more gun control legislation. But there is no way such laws are
going to stop racist terror groups, which often have police and
military ties, from getting weapons.
Can the police be counted on to stop racist murderers, when
they so often think and act like Benjamin Smith himself?
When police in Salem, Ill., tried to arrest Smith for his
murders, Smith pulled a gun and shot himself twice. Police did
not shoot him--they tried to wrestle the gun away from him. By
contrast, Chicago police have shot unarmed Black motorists
during routine traffic stops.
Working and oppressed people feel the need to organize
against this epidemic of organized racist, anti-Semitic,
anti-gay and anti-woman terror. Community hearings and
teach-ins can be used to obtain and share information on
questions like: Who are the Benjamin Smiths in our own cities
and neighborhoods? Where do they meet? Who prints for them? How
much money is in their bank accounts and where does it come
from? Who provides their Internet service? What do the police
agencies know about them?
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME :: U.S. NEWS :: WORLD NEWS :: EDITORIALS :: SUBSCRIBE :: DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page