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From: suno333@aol.com (SUNO333)
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Subject: Matt Hale Vows To Make World JEW Free
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Date: 07 Jul 1999 09:10:05 GMT
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Hatewatch:  http://www.hatewatch.org/

NEWSWIRE: Tuesday, July 6, 1999 Leader of Hate's Church Mourns 'One White Man' 

A terrible loss, Matthew Hale said. A sad and terrible loss. 

He was talking about the white man. 

The white man, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, shot himself to death Sunday after
going on a shooting rampage. He had killed an African American man. And a
Korean man too. Among his other victims, he had wounded six Orthodox Jews. 

But when Hale totaled up the victims, he saw only one: the white man. The
others, he explained, didn't count. He sounded exasperated at having to go over
this all again. It was, to him, so obvious. Still, he patiently spelled it out:
The others were irrelevant because they were subhuman. 

"As far as we're concerned," he said, "the loss is one white man." 

Hale calls himself a reverend. 

Hate is his religion. 

As leader of the World Church of the Creator, Hale preaches white supremacy. He
says he's not out to conquer the world; he insists he's not into violence. The
way he looks at it, in fact, killing blacks and Jews and gays and Asians is
really a waste of time. They'll die off anyway, sooner or later, because
they're so inferior. "They can't even feed themselves when left to their own
devices," he sniffs. 

His reasoning is, apparently, persuasive. 

Movement Is Spreading Rapidly 

The World Church of the Creator, with several hundred members, is one of the
fastest-growing hate groups in the nation, according to those who monitor white
supremacist organizations. 

It boasts at least 46 chapters across the country, up from just eight in 1995.
It aggressively recruits on college campuses. And it reaches out to children
with a "kiddie Web page," full of crossword puzzles, coloring books--and simple
explanations of the group's hateful ideology. 

That ideology, Hale says, boils down to one chief doctrine: "White people are
the most gifted creations on Earth." Everyone else--especially Jews, but also
Christians, homosexuals and people of any color--will eventually have to go. 

Hale insists he doesn't condone violence. But he concedes that he's not too
upset when "subhumans" get killed. "Our church doesn't make any bones about the
fact that we don't interest ourselves in that." 

Hate-group monitors find that reasoning disingenuous. 

In their view, Smith, who was named the group's "1998 creator of the year" for
his skill in wooing converts, was only following church doctrine to its logical
end when he launched a mini-racial war of his own over the Fourth of July
weekend, killing two people and wounding nine others before shooting himself
Sunday as police closed in on him. 

"While [church leaders] are not building the bombs, they are certainly building
the bombers," said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report on the radical
right, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. "This is a religion for
and by sociopaths, and the killings in Illinois and Indiana are merely the
latest reflection of it." 

As they are riled up by church doctrine and the constant calls for a racial
holy war, Potok added, followers such as Smith "feel they can murder anyone who
doesn't look like them." 

In fact, Potok and others have linked World Church of the Creator members to
half a dozen hate crimes over the last few years, including the bombing of a
National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People office in Washington, the
beating of a black veteran in Florida, a planned attack on synagogues in
Portland, Ore., and a plot to bomb the First African Methodist Episcopal Church
in Los Angeles. 

Violence a 'Logical Outcome' of Doctrine 

Law enforcement authorities in Sacramento have also said that the World Church
of the Creator, known to be active in the area, is among the groups whose
followers are being looked at in connection with three synagogue arsons in the
city last month that injured no one but caused more than $1 million in damage. 

"We have not ruled out that the Church of the Creator may be involved here,"
Paul Seave, U.S. attorney in Sacramento, said Monday. But federal authorities
and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles said Monday that there is no
known link between Smith and synagogue bombings. 

In any case, Hale rejects all attempts to link his group to violence as a
"desperate attack to stop the onward rush of our movement." 

Though he talks about a holy war, he says: "This is no more a war with guns
than the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty." Instead, he explains, it's a war
of propaganda. His troops are simply out there spreading their message, trying
to convince other white folks to stand up for their race and leave the
"subhumans" to wither. 

If a few of his members happen to turn violent, Hale said, that's not his
fault. Blaming the church for a few loose cannons, he said, "is similar to
saying the pope in Rome is guilty every time someone blows up an abortion
clinic. It just doesn't add up." 

Devin Burghart, who monitors hate groups in the Midwest, responds to that
argument this way: "It's a baldfaced lie." Shootings and bombings and arson, he
says, are "the logical outcome of [Hale's] hateful rhetoric." 

That rhetoric reflects a militant "us-against-the-world" view that holds the
white race (except Jews, Christians, homosexuals and others perceived as
deviant) responsible for "all that which we call progress on this Earth," as
the church Web site puts it. 

Minority groups, or "mud people," are destroying civilization, according to
church doctrine. So it's up to those who believe in white superiority to save
the day. And, according to Hale, the day needs saving fast. The church's
rallying cry, RAHOWA! stands for Racial Holy War. Warning that the white race
is sinking quickly, Hale constantly urges his followers to "strive harder" to
get their message across. 

Otherwise, he wrote in a recent newsletter, "we will condemn our children to a
world of inferiority and savagery at the hands of our racial enemies. . . .
Take action now and save this planet! RAHOWA!" 

Clean-cut and well-spoken, the 27-year-old Hale, who supports himself as a
violinist when he's not serving as the church's "pontifex maximus," has raised
the group's profile dramatically since taking over four years ago. The church,
in fact, had been on the verge of collapse after founder Ben Klassen, a former
Florida state legislator, committed suicide. 

By all accounts, Hale has had remarkable success re-energizing the group. From
his base in East Peoria, Ill.--where he lives with his father, a retired police
officer--Hale has set up chapters all over the country, building special
strength in California and Florida. 

"He's articulate, he's got a bit of charisma and he's a veteran hater. He's
been doing this for well over a decade," said Burghart, who has tracked Hale
since he began distributing neo-Nazi literature as a teenage political science
major at Bradley University in Illinois. 

"He's also very media savvy," Burghart said. "He knows controversy sells, and
he looks for it at every opportunity. When he finds it, he jumps into the fray
with great gusto." 

Hale made his biggest splash in defeat, when the Illinois State Bar refused to
let him practice as an attorney, though he had passed the bar exam, because of
"gross deficiency in moral character." Hale parlayed that rejection into
nationwide exposure for the church, announcing his Web site and address every
time he was interviewed. 

Though unmistakably neo-Nazi, Hale's World Church of the Creator differs from
other supremacist groups in philosophy. Those differences, analysts say, have
helped fuel the group's rapid expansion. (Hale claims the church has 7,000
members, but outsiders peg membership at just several hundred.) 

Most notably, the church is virulently anti-Christian as well as anti-Jewish.
Other neo-Nazi organizations, including Aryan Nations, promote their ideology
as a Bible-based Christian identity. But Hale's group shuns Christianity as
part of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy. "That makes them more revolutionary,"
Burghart said. "It also makes them more attractive to young people who would
rather sit around talking about a racial holy war than studying the Bible." 

Also, although the church opposes feminism--that too is viewed as a Jewish
conspiracy--it works hard to recruit women and promote them to leadership
roles, unlike other neo-Nazi groups. 

World Church of the Creator members have sought innovative ways to attract
younger followers as well, "not only college and high school students but even
middle-school students," Potok said. Two former church members, for example,
founded Resistance Records, which became the nation's leading distributor of
white-power music. 

Church Lost a Skilled Propagandist 

The church's most effective recruiting tool, however, has always been its
literature. 

In his hotline message, updated last week, Hale boasted that his group has
handed out 100,000 leaflets in the last two years--and urged his followers to
disseminate the next 100,000 in half that time. 

But he lost one of his best propagandists when Smith killed himself. 

Hailed in the church's newsletter for handing out more than 5,000 copies of
"Facts the Government and Media Don't Want You to Know" in a single month,
Smith was apparently skilled at slipping pamphlets under doors at night or
inserting them into newspapers so they would reach even those people who turned
him away when he tried to shove fliers in their hands on the street. 

"He had been a rising star in the group for some time," Burghart said. "He was
clearly one of Hale's most effective [operatives]." 

His prowess in spreading hateful views without opposition might have emboldened
Smith to embark on his shooting outburst, suggested Leonard Zeskind, who tracks
hate groups for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights in
Kansas City, Kan. 

"This guy felt fairly powerful because he was relatively unchallenged," Zeskind
said. 

"People always say, 'We can't stop [racists] because of their free speech
rights.' " he said. "Well, there is free speech, but that doesn't mean we can't
do anything about [hate groups]. We need to stand up. We need to organize
people away from this stuff. We need to speak out against it." 

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