Mankind has a lot of enemies. I'd say some of the fanatical Muslims qualify, but so do fanatical Jews. and Hindus, and Christians. Be afraid.
August 30, 2002
Hate, American Style
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
AST PEORIA, Ill. — My interview with the Rev. Matt Hale, America's scariest hatemonger, got off to a rocky
start.
As he picked at a fruit salad in a restaurant here in East Peoria, his headquarters, he recalled an incident in
childhood that first led him to regard nonwhites as vermin: At a dance, he saw white girls "betraying their race"
by kissing black boys.
"I felt nauseous," he said solemnly. "Interracial marriage is against nature. It's a form of bestiality."
A moment later, I disclosed that I had betrayed the white race and married a Chinese-American. It was, I felt,
an awkward moment.
But Mr. Hale, as charming and charismatic as he is hateful, was unfazed. He beamed, and for a moment I
thought he was going to ask to see photos of my kids.
I came to East Peoria to meet Mr. Hale because he has become the key figure in America's hate community,
revitalizing racism by recruiting women, children and convicts into a high-tech, energetic organization whose
followers show a pattern of random brutality toward blacks and other "enemies." It would be flattering Mr. Hale
too much to call his group America's Al Qaeda, but the scary thing is that I think the comparison would leave
him feeling flattered.
After 9/11 I interviewed Muslim hatemongers abroad, and I wanted to confront our own religious extremists.
They are not a threat to national stability, the way they are in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but they are every bit
as loony as Al Qaeda and they have been enmeshed in violence. That's particularly true of Mr. Hale's group,
the World Church of the Creator, whose followers have shot, knifed or beaten blacks, Jews and
Asian-Americans in several states.
Mr. Hale dismisses the attacks as understandable but anomalous. He says that while killing enemies
(presumably including race-betrayers like me) is morally justifiable, for now it is tactically inappropriate and
doesn't accomplish much, anyway.
"Suppose someone goes out and kills 10 blacks tonight," he shrugs impatiently. "Well, there are millions
more."
A law school graduate, Mr. Hale, 31, has built the World Church of the Creator into an international
organization with members in 49 states and 28 countries. It claims 70,000 to 80,000 adherents and boasts in
press releases that it is "the fastest-growing white racist and anti-Semitic church in America."
Yet it is not a religion in any traditional sense, and its sole theology is "RaHoWa" — racial holy war on behalf
of whites. It recruits very energetically, distributing 80,000 leaflets just this spring, and runs a sophisticated
Web site with information on, for example, how to make your own plastic explosives. The church even has a
Web page for kids.
There are plenty of other domestic counterparts to Islam's manic mullahs. Think of Christian
Reconstructionists, who want to re-establish Old Testament laws, even stoning to death adulterers and
heretics. (We tend to forget that stoning to death is never mentioned in the Koran but is frequently prescribed
in the Bible; a rigid interpretation of Deuteronomy would lead to the execution of most Americans.)
Mr. Hale's World Church is scariest of all, though, because of its vigor and highbrow racism. One of the
church's slogans, an ungrammatical twist on Cato the Elder's famous line about Carthage, is even in Latin:
"Delenda est Judaica," which could be translated as "Judaism must be destroyed."
The son of a policeman, Mr. Hale had his awakening when he was 12 years old and read both "The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich" and "Mein Kampf." ( So much for the benefits of early reading programs.) He marries
his intelligence with attitudes that make your skin crawl.
After the reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered, Mr. Hale wrote: "We couldn't care less about the death of this
Jew who along with the rest of his parasitic race are clearly a form of vermin far more dangerous in fact than
the kind that run on four legs."
Mr. Hale also boasted to me: "We have really revolutionized the whole racial community. People used to think
of a guy with a beer belly, spitting out tobacco and missing a few teeth. Now they think of people who are
determined, energetic leaders, educated and idealistic. We're the best."
As Al Qaeda has shown us, the only people more dangerous than dumb bigots are smart, educated ones.
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