Aryan Nation Wants Al-Qaeda Alliance

From CNN yesterday:

August Kreis, the new head of the white supremacist group Aryan Nation is calling upon the leaders of Al-Qaeda to join his group in an alliance to attack jews and the American government. He says ""You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah."

Aryan Nation, like its cousin organisations Posse Comitatus and the Klu Klux Klan, are still actively seeking violence. Members of Aryan Nation have been implicated in racially motivated killings, in bank robberies and shootouts with authorities. White supremacist groups may well have been behind the Oklahoma bombing and were certainly party to the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics.

Before you write off Aryan Nations calls for an alliance with Al Qaeda as delusional, Henry Schuster who wrote the CNN report recalls -

Three years ago, I met a Swiss Islamic convert named Ahmed Huber, who began his life as a devotee of Adolf Hitler and moved on to praising former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who led that nation's Islamic revolution and vigorously opposed U.S. policies.

Huber wanted to forge a fresh alliance between Islamic radicals and neo-Nazis in Europe and the United States. And he cannot be simply dismissed as a crackpot: Huber served on the board of directors of a Swiss bank and holding company that President Bush accused of helping fund al Qaeda.

Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that while some U.S. extremists applauded the September 11 attacks, there is no indication of such an alliance -- at least not yet, and not on a large scale. If it exists anywhere, he said, it is in the mind (and the Internet postings) of August Kreis.

For its part, the FBI says it hasn't seen any links between American white supremacists and groups like al Qaeda.

"The notion of radical Islamists from abroad actually getting together with American neo-Nazis I think is an absolutely frightening one," said Potok. "It's just that so far we really have no evidence at all to suggest this is any kind of real collaboration."

So while there is no danger of such an unholy alliance as yet, it isn't beyond the bounds of possibility and it certainly isn't for want of trying on the part of Aryan Nation.

This is what happens when extreme rightwing nutcases go bad.