CultNEWS101 Articles: 3/18/2024 (Yahweh Ben Yahweh, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Community of Christ, Wealthiest Pastors, Forced Marriage, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Conspiracy Theories, Indian Guru's)

Yahweh Ben Yahweh, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Community of Christ, Wealthiest Pastors, Forced Marriage, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Conspiracy Theories, Indian Guru's

LMN: Escaping Evil: My Life in a Cult | Part 1

A man blindly follows god-like cult leader Yahweh Ben Yahweh even when Yahweh unleashes a bloody campaign of murders and beheadings.

ABC4: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints buys Kirtland Temple, artifacts for nearly $193 million

"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has acquired ownership of the historic Kirtland Temple in Ohio as well as several other significant buildings and artifacts in a deal that cost nearly $193 million.

The Utah-based Church announced Tuesday that it received several buildings and artifacts from the Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ("RLDS").

The purchase included the Kirtland Temple, which was the first temple built by Latter-day Saints. It was left behind in the 1830s during the saints' migration west to Utah. According to the press release, the Community of Christ has legally owned the title since 1901."

Wealth of Geeks: 18 of the Wealthiest Pastors in America

"Pastors are usually associated with humility and a simple life dedicated to serving others. While some pastors choose a modest lifestyle, others amass serious riches—some as high as $780 million! They tend to inherit fortunes, pen bestsellers, captivate audiences with speeches, or navigate intricate church investments. These top-earning pastors have experienced some fascinating journeys into wealth."

BBC: Forced marriage cases will stay 'underground' after law change

"Survivors of forced marriage fear cases will remain underground, despite a new minimum-age law designed to crack down on children being married.

It comes after the minimum legal marriage age in England and Wales was increased from 16 to 18, in 2023.

A government spokesperson said child marriage "destroys lives".

One woman who was held at gunpoint and forced into marriage to her cousin at 16, said the options she had were "death or marriage."

The government's forced marriage unit (FMU) provided support and advice to 302 cases in 2022, with almost one third affecting victims who were aged 17 or under.

After London, statistics show the West Midlands has the country's highest percentage of cases, with 17%.

The FMU, set up by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office, said it gave advice to 337 cases in 2021, compared to 759 in 2020, although it stresses the data was not directly comparable.

However, campaigners say the true number of cases in the UK has been "under-reported" as some people were reluctant to approach authorities.

Karma Nirvana reported its national honour-based abuse helpline was contacted 9,616 times in 2022-23."

" ... Fozia Rashid, 39, said some people sometimes get "tricked into going abroad" but "we can't forget that not everybody comes back".

"Forced marriage, it knows no religion, it knows no colour, it doesn't care about your background," she said."

Extra: Who shot JFK? Was Elizabeth I a man? Did aliens land at Roswell?

" ... [W]hile some conspiracy theories might never be disproven, others remain stubbornly persistent, despite being repeatedly shown to be false. A case in point is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First serialised in a St Petersburg newspaper in 1903, it purported to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders, revealing their plans to rule the world by duplicitous means.

In fact, the text was partially an adaptation of an 1864 French satirical novel, that originally had nothing to do with Jews. The Protocols were debunked by The Times in the 1920s, and in 1935 a Swiss judge ruled that they were a fake after the distributors in Switzerland had been sued by the Jewish community in the country. And yet the conspiracy theories have persisted.

"Even when they have proven to be an outright forgery, a fiction, the Protocols continue to circulate widely today," says Professor Pamela S Nadell of the American University in Washington, DC. "There is no evidence that the Jews do the things that they say in the Protocols but somehow that doesn't gain any traction."

This is a conspiracy theory that has had serious real-world consequences. "Hitler's writings were definitely drawn from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," says Nadell. "He's blaming the Jews. He's talking about international Jewish world finance. This is a conspiracy theory that helped to fuel the Holocaust." And in more recent times the Protocols have retained their invidious power, as Nadell explained to me."

Financial Express:  Beyond Jay Shetty: Osho to Asaram – Revisiting India's controversial self-styled 'gurus' and their murky past

"While the controversy around the life-coach has made headlines, India is no stranger to self-styled gurus and their not-so-ordinary lifestyles. Some of them have been jailed, facing charges of heinous crimes, while others have been M.I.A after disturbing issues surfaced."

" ... Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: The man who became an icon for being the so-called spiritual guide to The Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was at the centre of intense media frenzy back in 1960s. The band was so much in awe of the guru that they stayed at his Rishikesh-based Ashram. But later, the 'Fab Four' and the guru parted ways. Some media accounts said that Maharishi Mahesh had allegedly made sexual advances towards Mia Farrow. According to the New York Post report, Woody Allen's ex-partner had claimed that the godman had groped her in his cave. And final conclusion came when John Lennon famouly said – 'There's no guru.'"

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

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Who shot JFK? Was Elizabeth I a man? Did aliens land at Roswell?

Rob Attar investigates the enduring power of conspiracy theories.

Rob Attar
History Extra
February 29, 2024

In March 2020, just as Covid-19 was turning the world upside down, I found myself in Dallas, Texas, in the room where Lee Harvey Oswald had shot and killed President Kennedy almost 60 years earlier. The former Texas School Book Depository has been turned into a museum about Kennedy’s life and death, offering a sober, measured account of the events of November 1963.

On the quiet streets outside the museum, however, I encountered a few street stalls, whose occupants were peddling a very different view of the assassination. Here all manner of conspiracies were given full voice, ones that I’m sure you’ll all be familiar with: the FBI, or the CIA, or the mafia, or the Soviets, or the Cubans, or some combination of them had undoubtedly orchestrated the killing of the 35th president of the United States.

It might seem that the museum is offering the mainstream view, but according to opinion polls, more Americans believe in some form of conspiracy surrounding the killing of JFK than the official version (as stated by the 1964 Warren Commission) that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. For my new HistoryExtra podcast series Conspiracy, I’ve been exploring this and a number of other conspiracy theories about the past, to try to establish why they are so pervasive in our modern world and whether any of them might actually be true.

One man who wanted to keep an open mind on the Kennedy assassination was the investigative journalist Gerald Posner, whose 1993 book Case Closed remains a definitive work in support of the argument that Lee Harvey Oswald did indeed act alone. When I spoke to him, he explained that this was far from his original intention. “Sometimes people will say to me that I must have wanted to just say it was Oswald alone to be a contrarian or whatever else and that I already had my mind made up. And I feel like saying, ‘You know nothing at all about journalism.’ The greatest story to return with is the story that proves, with credible evidence, that there was a conspiracy in the murder of the president. You want the biggest possible story if you’re the journalist. You don’t want to come back and say: ‘Oh by the way, I think the Warren Commission got some things wrong, but in the end they got the right conclusion.’”

Notorious knoll

As Posner admitted to me, his initial hunch had been that there was some kind of mafia involvement, but over the course of two years of research and hundreds of interviews, he found himself increasingly convinced that there was a single shooter and no conspiracy.

Case Closed lays out Posner’s argument in significant detail. But one aspect I was particularly keen to discuss with him was the so-called ‘magic bullet’ that is beloved of many conspiracy theorists. For Oswald to have been the sole shooter, then one of the three bullets he is known to have fired must have been responsible for two wounds on President Kennedy and one on Texas governor John Connally, who was travelling in the same car (and survived). If not, then there must have been a second shooter, perhaps on the notorious grassy knoll.

“Oliver Stone, in his film JFK, mocked this ‘magic bullet’ better than anyone,” said Posner. “You know, it goes through Kennedy and then hesitates for half a second, then does a couple of somersaults and then makes a left turn and a right turn and goes on to Connally and emerges in very good condition. “So the question I had when I went to ballistics people in 1992 was: ‘Can you do anything that the FBI couldn’t do?’ And it turns out they could do a lot. If they could disprove the single bullet, if they could prove at that point that it was impossible, then, fantastic, as a journalist, you’ve got the evidence that there was a conspiracy. You don’t know how it happened. You don’t know who shot him. You don’t know anything else, but if the single bullet didn’t happen, there had to be another shooter involved because there are four shots and Oswald didn’t have the time for that. So my starting point in essence was that bullet.

“And the ballistics people said to me: ‘We’ll tell you why the Warren Commission couldn’t figure it out. They had to guess at it and didn’t understand how the bullet slowed over a period of time.’ They now know the speed at which it was hitting Kennedy and how it tumbled into Connally. And it’s not just a theory because they take cadavers the size and weight of Kennedy and Connally and fire bullets at those speeds through them, creating the same wounds. And all day long, they produce equivalent results to the so-called magic bullet. So there is ballistic evidence that that bullet wasn’t so magical. It did in fact happen.”

As Posner was at pains to explain to me, the ballistics evidence does not discount the possibility of a conspiracy. It only means that there didn’t need to be a conspiracy to explain the wounds on the president. And ultimately, he accepts that despite the title of his book, this is one debate that’s unlikely to ever be settled.

Real-world consequences

But while some conspiracy theories might never be disproven, others remain stubbornly persistent, despite being repeatedly shown to be false. A case in point is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First serialised in a St Petersburg newspaper in 1903, it purported to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders, revealing their plans to rule the world by duplicitous means.

In fact, the text was partially an adaptation of an 1864 French satirical novel, that originally had nothing to do with Jews. The Protocols were debunked by The Times in the 1920s, and in 1935 a Swiss judge ruled that they were a fake after the distributors in Switzerland had been sued by the Jewish community in the country. And yet the conspiracy theories have persisted.

“Even when they have proven to be an outright forgery, a fiction, the Protocols continue to circulate widely today,” says Professor Pamela S Nadell of the American University in Washington, DC. “There is no evidence that the Jews do the things that they say in the Protocols but somehow that doesn’t gain any traction.”

This is a conspiracy theory that has had serious real-world consequences. “Hitler’s writings were definitely drawn from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” says Nadell. “He’s blaming the Jews. He’s talking about international Jewish world finance. This is a conspiracy theory that helped to fuel the Holocaust.” And in more recent times the Protocols have retained their invidious power, as Nadell explained to me.

“They have proliferated around the world so much,” she says. “They were published in Japan in 2004. They certainly made their way across the Arab world and in 2002 Egyptian satellite television developed a 41-part miniseries that was based on the Protocols. Then, in March 2021 an officer of the Capitol Police at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC was found with a copy of the Protocols near his security post. So the text remains. It’s potent today, widely available and still used.”

Even conspiracy theories that seem much less serious can have negative consequences today. One example is the bizarre case of the Bisley boy. According to this theory, in around 1542 the future Queen Elizabeth I was staying in the Cotswolds village of Bisley where she fell ill and died. Rather than reveal this tragedy, her panicked attendants searched for a local lookalike who could be substituted for the deceased princess. As it transpired the closest match was a young boy who then spent the rest of his life masquerading as Elizabeth, providing a handy explanation as to why the queen never married or had children.

It’s a deeply strange story that quickly fades under scrutiny – Henry VIII would surely have noticed if his daughter had returned from the Cotswolds as a small boy – but has had many adherents, notably Dracula author Bram Stoker who included it in his 1910 book Famous Impostors. And as Tudor historian Tracy Borman explained to me, it points to sexist attitudes that dogged Elizabeth’s age and more recent times.

“I think it takes to extremes the misogyny that Elizabeth herself had had to deal with. This idea that she was ‘just a woman’ and yet was mistress of a kingdom and of an empire. The theory provides a perfect explanation as to how there was a highly competent woman outfoxing her male contemporaries.

“Bram Stoker was writing at the crossover between the reigns of Edward VII and George V, so we’re talking about the early 20th century – and it’s still being spouted and repeated now. I still get asked about it. People are talking about it to this day.”

A black and white photo of a man inside a room (with chairs, a radiator and curtains in the background) holding metallic material

The remains of an object that crashed to earth near Roswell, 1947. Polls show that a large proportion of Americans believe their government is hiding evidence of alien activity from them. (Photo from Topfoto)

But are all conspiracy theories intrinsically harmful? Not according to Dr David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, who I interviewed about the infamous Roswell incident. Several opinion polls have shown that a large proportion of Americans believe their own government is hiding evidence of extra-terrestrial life from them, and by far the best-known ‘evidence’ for this is the craft (actually a military balloon) that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, fuelling stories of a downed UFO and even autopsies being carried out on alien life-forms.

“There have been various studies done of conspiracy theories and a recent one said that of all of the ones they looked at, Roswell is actually the most harmless,” Clarke told me. For him, the theory acts as a kind of modern folklore. “It’s a modern myth in the same way that the Greeks had their myths. This is a technological myth for the Cold War era. And I don’t think it’s a bad myth; it’s a good one, unlike some of the other, nasty, conspiracy theories. People are looking for salvation from somewhere and it’s a comforting thought that out there in the cold dead universe there is someone who is interested in us and that we’re not alone. So out of all the conspiracy theories and myths, this is probably the most positive one of all.”

One question I kept returning to was ‘Why?’ Despite all the evidence against them and the cohorts of historians lining up in opposition, why are these conspiracy theories so hard to dislodge? Popular culture seems to have a lot to answer for. Conspiracy theories are beloved of authors and filmmakers, from Oliver Stone’s JFK and The X-Files, to Bram Stoker’s Famous Impostors and the hundreds of books by less-illustrious writers dedicated to one theory or another.

Of course, in more recent times, the internet and social media have added enormous fuel to this fire, enabling conspiracy theories to be disseminated quickly and easily and like-minded people to form networks across the globe.

Medieval historian Steve Tibble believes that all this goes a long way to explain the popularity of the many conspiracy theories surrounding the Knights Templar, which range from them hiding the Holy Grail to discovering America.

“Templar conspiracies are fun and people love prurient stories,” he says. “The Templars and their conspiracy theories were the tabloid material of the Middle Ages and they gained a life of their own. More recently we had the growth of the internet and also low budget TV documentaries and podcasts so there’s a lot more scope to build up content about them. But this is not just a 21st-century phenomenon. Pretty much the same thing happened in the early 19th century with the invention of the cheap novel. Walter Scott has a lot to answer for because of the way he positioned the Templars as larger than life pantomime villains in his book [1819’s Ivanhoe].”

While some conspiracy theories have entertained the masses, others have helped people to make sense of seemingly unfathomable events. That’s the contention of Steve Twomey, an expert on the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, which is often alleged to have been deliberately engineered by President Roosevelt as a way to sneak the US into the war against Nazi Germany.

“The American people had been told again and again that their navy was the best in the world and that Pearl Harbor was an incredible fortress,” he told me. “Meanwhile, the Japanese had been repeatedly described to the American public as an inferior military power, and yet suddenly here were these supposedly inferior people surprising the best navy in the world at Pearl Harbor. How could that have happened? Well, it was a conspiracy – that’s how. The only explanation that made sense for what happened was some sort of plot.”


Climate of suspicion

Of course, as events such as Watergate show, conspiracies can happen, and the misbehaviour of governments and other organisations has undoubtedly added to the climate of suspicion in which conspiracy theories flourish. As Twomey says, scepticism is not a bad thing in itself, “it’s just unhealthy when it goes to an unreasonable level”.

This idea of explaining the unexplainable was also cited by Gerald Posner in the story of the JFK conspiracy theories. At the end of our interview, he highlighted a point made by the historian William Manchester in his book Death of a President, that helped him to understand the mindset of a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. “Manchester looked back at the Second World War and he said if you think about the Holocaust you’ve got 6 million Jewish victims as well as millions of political victims and those who were killed because they were gay or prisoners of war etc. At the other side of the equation you have the Nazis and they sort of balance each other out: worst crime, worst criminals.

“But in the Kennedy assassination you have this young charismatic president with so much potential for the future. We were literally living in Technicolor and it was cut down in Dallas by a bullet from a sniper – this 24-year-old sociopathic loser, Lee Harvey Oswald. It doesn’t balance out. You want to instinctively put something heavier on the Oswald side. Kennedy was killed because the CIA had to stop him from disbanding the agency, or the military had to stop him so he didn’t pull out of Vietnam, or the Cubans because he was going to kill Fidel Castro.

“It doesn’t make you feel better that he’s dead but it gives some meaning to his death. People want to believe that there has to be a more elaborate, complex and hidden truth behind the simpler explanation.”

Rob Attar
Editor, BBC History Magazine


Rob Attar is editor of BBC History Magazine and also works across the HistoryExtra podcast and website, as well as hosting several BBC History Magazine events.

https://www.historyextra.com/membership/who-shot-jfk-was-elizabeth-i-a-man-did-aliens-land-at-roswell/

CultNEWS101 Articles: 5/13/2021

Mother of God, Orthodox Women, Germany, Anti-vaccination, Anti-Semitism, Podcast

Washington Post: She told followers she was 'Mother God.' Her mummified body was found wrapped in Christmas lights.

"Amy Carlson's body was mummified in a sleeping bag and wrapped in a cloth adorned with Christmas lights when Colorado sheriff's deputies found her last week. Glittered makeup decorated her face and around her eyes, according to law enforcement.

"The mummified remains appeared to be set up in some type of shrine," police said in an affidavit.

That shrine was allegedly erected by Carlson's followers in her religious group "Love Has Won," which some officials and former members have described as a cult. Carlson, 45, claimed she was "Mother God," 19 billion years old, a reincarnation of Jesus and could heal people of cancer "with the power of love," she said on "Dr. Phil" last year."

Vogue: How Orthodox Women Are Using Social Media to Liberate Each Other From Dead Marriages

"Chava Herman Sharabani has been trying to obtain a get—or a divorce, according to Orthodox Jewish religious law—from her ex-husband, Naftali Sharabani, for 10 and a half years. The 30-year-old teacher lives in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn with her two children, and her marriage, as she describes it, was not a happy one. Herman Sharabani had been legally separated for a decade, but the get from the beth din, or the Jewish religious court, had been delayed.

According to tradition, it is the husband who initiates the process of issuing the get. Sharabani had left the family a decade earlier, according to Herman Sharabani and her lawyers, but she says he still refused to grant her a get. (Representatives for Naftali Sharabani did not respond to Vogue's request for comment.)

"Here I was for 10 and a half years, running after people, asking 'Can you help me? Is there anything to do?'" says Herman Sharbani. "And they're always like, 'I don't know. Call me in a week.'"

Chava Herman Sharabani has been waiting for her to get a religious divorce document, for 10 and a half years.

The process rendered Herman Sharabani an agunah, a woman who is trapped in a dead marriage, according to orthodox Jewish custom. (In Hebrew, the word is literally defined as "anchored" or "chained.") Without a get, an agunah woman cannot remarry or even date. "It was just a constant banging my head on the wall," says Herman Sharbani.

On Instagram, Herman Sharabani happened to see a DM conversation between the popular Jewish singer Dalia Oziel and a woman named Rifka Meyer, who runs a prominent sheitel (wig) salon in London. Meyer described how she had fought for a get for almost 10 years and only spoke out about her struggle recently. (Meyer received her get in September of 2020.) Seeing this conversation out in the open inspired Herman Sharabani."

The Atlantic: Germany's Anti-vaccination History Is Riddled With Anti-Semitism

"Last year, I felt lucky to be an American in Germany. The government carried out a comprehensive public-health response, and for the most part, people wore masks in public. More recently, COVID-19 cases have surged here, with new infections reaching a single-day zenith in late March. Germany has lagged behind the United States and the United Kingdom in vaccination efforts, and German public-health regulators have restricted use of the AstraZeneca vaccine to people over 60, after seven cases of rare cerebral blood clots. Key public-health measures, particularly lockdowns and vaccination, have been divisive. Among some people, even the magnitude of the virus's infectious threat has been in question.

Over the past year, Germany's sprawling anti-lockdown movement has brought together a disquieting alliance of ordinary citizens, both left- and right-leaning, and extremists who see the pandemic response as part of a wider conspiracy. In August, nearly 40,000 protesters gathered in my neighborhood to oppose the government's public-health measures, including the closure of stores and mask mandates. It was unnerving to hear German chants of "Fascism in the guise of health" from my window, and all the more given that the same day, a subgroup of those protesters charged Parliament. In a moment presaging the U.S. Capitol insurrection, 400 German protesters, including a group carrying the Reichsflagge, emblematic of the Nazi regime, rushed past police and reached the building's stairs. Germany is riddled with QAnon adherents, some of whom are anti-vaccination, and some people are using this pandemic to articulate their anti-Semitic beliefs. They might deny COVID-19 exists, then play it down, and eventually blame 5G and Jewish people for the pandemic. In Bavaria, vaccine skeptics now use messages such as "Vaccination makes you free," an allusion to "Work makes you free," a horrific maxim of Nazi concentration camps.

Like the United States, Germany has a thriving anti-vaccination movement, and here it has encompassed conspiracy theorists, left-leaning spiritualists, and the far right. These last ties are the most troubling. In German-speaking lands, anti-science sentiment, right-wing politics, and racism have been entwined since even before Jews were accused of spreading the bubonic plague in the 14th century. These movements illustrate a grim truth: In both the past and the present, anti-science sentiments are inextricably tangled with racial prejudice.

Anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines, the scholar Jonathan M. Berman notes in his book, Anti-vaxxers, and what is striking, according to the author, is that early opponents at the turn of the 18th century believed that vaccination was "a foreign assault on traditional order." But beliefs linking anti-science sentiment and anti-Semitism were already deeply set. During the plague outbreak of 1712 and 1713, for instance, the city of Hamburg initiated public-health measures including forbidding Jews from entering or leaving the city, Philipp Osten, the director of Hamburg's Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine, told me. By the time cholera emerged in the 19th century, sickening thousands of people in the city within a matter of months, these antiquated ideas had taken on a new form.

Because this new disease was poorly understood, doctors, scientists, and laypeople promulgated competing theories about its spread. Some physicians blamed cholera on alcohol consumption, others on sadness or fear. Self-published pamphlets circulated misinformation much as social-media posts do today, and the public's understanding of the disease was capacious, in many cases reflecting people's anxieties. These ideas might have been innocuous enough on their own, but consummated through social movements and disinformation, they often posed a threat to people's lives. As the historian Richard J. Evans has noted in Death in Hamburg, some Germans blamed the spread of cholera on Jews. These sentiments then extended to other epidemics, and to the vaccination movement. By the middle of the 19th century, anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets were being written against smallpox vaccination.

When cholera reemerged with full force in Hamburg in the late 19th century, local officials—following the advice of the scientists Robert Koch and Max von Pettenkofer—proposed a bill of public-health regulations such as school closures, disinfection of waterways, and quarantine. This led to a national uproar among constituents who saw state-enforced health measures as a threat to the German economy—and this time an ad hoc coalition joined together to oppose such measures. The German National Economic Association argued that the bill interfered with economic trade and personal freedom. But the opposition was as much about ethnicity as economics.

Denying the need for public-health measures, including vaccination, slipped into tacitly implying that the disease would carry off the Jewish and the poor. Sometimes the calculation was explicit. A monthly magazine distributed by the German physician Gustav Jäger argued that the cholera epidemic would remove "weaklings" from the "better classes" of society. These words were code for the poor and for ethnic minorities, and not only do they link contagion to ableism, but they deny members of ethnic minority groups their humanity."

The Nature of Nurture: From Insider to Expert: Cult Psychology with Dr. Janja Lalich

"When discussing the difference between nature and nurture (and the connection between the two), we have to acknowledge the ways in which human beings are hyper-wired for social relationships. This idea really comes to life when we discuss the subject of cults. In this episode your host Leslie sits down with cult expert and survivor Dr. Janja Lalich to talk about who gets into cults, and how."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

CultEducationEvents.com

CultMediation.com   

Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.

Facebook

Flipboard

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Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

Extremist activity is growing in the pandemic. How worried should Jews be?

Ari Feldman

The Forward

June 27, 2020

  

On the last day of Passover last year, a young nursing student went into the Chabad of Poway synagogue and shot four people, killing 60-year-old Lori Gilbert-Kaye.

The accused murderer’s manifesto was filled with anti-Semitic sentiments, but it also contained another element: The shooter’s wish that his actions would lead the government to start confiscating guns, and thus provoke a “civil war” between white nationalists and everyone else.

“If this revolution doesn’t happen soon, we won’t have the numbers to win it,” the alleged murderer wrote. “Stop the slow boil of the frog. Make the Jew play all of his cards to make it apparent to more people how their rights are being taken away right before their eyes.”

This idea is called accelerationism — and over the past two years, its popularity has jumped dramatically in online extremist communities, tied to their excitement over anti-Semitic attacks. In the last month, accelerationist extremists have grown increasingly active, in response both to the pandemic and the anti-racist protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd.

Experts worry that, as these groups become more brazen, they will carry out physical, violent attacks against minority communities — especially Jewish ones.

Civil unrest and economic decline “may induce individuals to plan and undertake targeted attacks as our facilities reopen,” said Michael Masters, the CEO of the Secure Community Network, the Jewish community’s largest provider of security training and policy. “That is a reality.”

The Boogaloo

The most prominent accelerationist group to come out of the pandemic so far is called the Boogaloo Boys, a complex, anti-establishment movement that researchers say is not strictly tied to anti-Semitic sentiment — but whose propensity for violence may have cascading effects for all minority communities, including Jews.

“Boogaloo” is internet extremist slang for a second civil war. Though the term and its meaning have existed for years, the group has exploded onto the national scene over the past six months. Their members have been seen at protests and political rallies over the past several weeks, in their trademark Hawaiian floral shirts under bulletproof vests, often armed with assault rifles. Various Boogaloo groups have different political philosophies, but all of them seek the armed overthrow of the government.

Members of the movement use the Boogaloo as “a meme that fantasizes about a violent uprising against the state, and violence waged towards the law enforcement community and government officials that they perceive as an enemy,” said Alex Goldenberg, a lead intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, a Princeton-based group that studies online extremism.

While the movement is not inherently anti-Semitic, there are white supremacists and neo-Nazis on its fringes, Goldenberg said. Paul Nehlen, a white supremacist in Wisconsin who mounted two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress, has posted a picture of himself wearing a shirt emblazoned with the face of the Poway shooter over the word “BOOGALOO.” The Anti-Defamation League reported last year that a white supremacist group shared lyrics to a song called “Do the Boogaloo” on an encrypted group chat, with lines like “Kill the kikes and save the whites” and “Plug a pig and then a Yid.”

Paul Nehlen, a white supremacist and far-right figure, wearing a shirt with a picture of the Poway shooter over the word “BOOGALOO.”

The past few months has seen two alleged Boogaloo Boys face charges for murder and attempted murder of federal agents, and three other men arrested for allegedlying trying to firebomb a Black Lives Matter protest. On Thursday, a chat platform shut down a Boogaloo server over extensive threats of violence.

“They have shown that they’re willing to cross a line and use firearms for their beliefs,” said Thomas Holt, director of the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Holt said he was concerned that other groups who admire the Boogaloo Boys’ efforts might try to replicate their success (and current media attention) by targeting Jews.

Rising anti-Semitism

The Jewish community is already plenty on edge after four deadly attacks in two years, which have caused the deaths of 17 people: the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, in Pittsburgh; the Poway shooting; the Jersey City, N.J. shooting; and the machete attack in Monsey, N.Y.

Other incidents, less deadly but no less dangerous or traumatizing, are also on the upswing. FBI data found that violent assaults against Jews grew from 2017 to 2018. In its audit of anti-Semitic incidents of 2019, the Anti-Defamation League counted 61 total anti-Semitic assaults that year, a more than 50% increase from 2018 — even though only 13% of all anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by people with ties to extremist groups.

Online anti-Semitic activity was already trending upward before the pandemic, but since it began, it has spiked even further, researchers say. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London think tank, found that online communities that shared both COVID-19 disinformation and “race war” propaganda also shared media and messages linking Jews and Muslims to the creation of the coronavirus.

A growing number of Internet users are also sharing more conspiracy theories about the Jewish financier George Soros, blaming him for allegedly creating the coronavirus and accusing him of “staging” Floyd’s killing.

The current situation, with millions of people unemployed or otherwise stuck at home with nothing to do but surf the web, “has created a funnel” to extremist organizations, said Jason Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

People radicalized by exposure to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, as well as angered or scared by the unprecedented state of the country, may grow to support the accelerationist theory, supported both by violent white nationalist groups and the Boogaloo Boys, that only armed violence (against the government, or against Jews) will make things better.

Some veteran white nationalist leaders have long expressed concern that the “optics” of violent uprising ultimately hurt their movement — consider how many racists were arrested or lost their jobs as a result of the 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist march. But all it takes is one exception: Before killing 11 Jews, the Tree of Life shooter posted online, “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

“We’re seeing the growth of the accelerationist wing, which openly embraces terroristic violence as a political tool, because the question of optics now holds far less weight,” a Southern Poverty Law Center researcher wrote on Tuesday.

Security experts worry that some of the newer recruits may feel they have something to prove — and that they’ll go after the people considered the most ambitious target: Jewish communities who they think control global events.

“The Jewish community is the primary target of all the hate and all the anger and all the conspiratorial thinking that goes along with this,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor of religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who studies terrorism and radicalization. “If any of these guys tip over into violence in a real sense, the Jewish community is always top of mind as a potential target for a lot of these people.”

How concerned should the Jewish community be?

Law enforcement appears to be deeply attuned to these groups’ activities. FBI probes have already this year resulted in the dismantling of The Base, and the Atomwaffen Division, two violent white supremacist groups. Law enforcement agencies now list “white supremaicst extremists” under “High” in their threat assessment reports, while jihadists threats are marked “Low.”

And while there have been several right-wing terrorist plots mounted against Jewish communities over the past year — an attempted bombing of a synagogue in Pueblo, Colo.; a plot to bomb a Jewish nursing home; a plan to spread coronavirus to Jews — they have failed or been foiled by law enforcement.

The Jewish community also has a strong security apparatus in place, one which has seen an injection of funding over the past year. The Secure Community Network has increased its revenue from $1 million to $8 million since 2017, and added 25 employees. The Community Security Service, a group that trains Jewish volunteers to guard synagogues and Jewish institutions, said its annual budget for this year is double last year’s, at $1 million.

Jewish communities have “invested better than other communities in the security, because they already have the infrastructure,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent and the head of the Soufan Group, an international security firm.

Soufan said that another critical step to protecting Jewish institutions — and efforts the Jewish groups should join in — is to force social media companies to stop hosting extremist groups, as well as dramatically increase the size of federal security grants for religious nonprofits. The Boogaloo movement has incubated on Facebook, where researchers recently found over two-dozen affiliated groups. The ADL is encouraging companies to stop buying ads on Facebook, and several major firms have joined the growing boycott movement, including Verizon, The North Face and Ben & Jerry’s.

Soutan and Rep. Max Rose of New York are also pushing the White House to label white nationalist organizations as foreign terrorist groups, since many of the most violent members have received training overseas. Despite the FBI and the State Department pushing for the same, the White House has yet to respond.

“Our tools are in place, we know what to do,” Rose said. “It’s just a question of whether we are going to treat all forms of terrorism as terrorism.”

Rose, who is Jewish, said that without a significant response from the government and tech companies, right-wing extremist groups are not going away.

“This movement right now looks very similar to what Al-Qaeda looked like in the early- to mid-nineties,” he said. “If that doesn’t scare somebody, I don’t know what does.”

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at feldman@forward.com. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.

https://forward.com/news/national/449660/white-supremacist-extremist-pandemic-jewish-soros/

Is There A Cure For Hate?

Taly Kogon and her son Leo, 10, listen to speakers
during an interfaith vigil against anti-Semitism
and hate at the Holocaust Memorial late last month in Miami Beach, Fla.

ERIC WESTERVELT
NPR
November 6, 2018

For months prior to the recent shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, suspect Robert Bowers spewed venomous bigotry, hatred and conspiracies online, especially against Jews and immigrants. During the Oct. 27 attack, according to a federal indictment, he said he wanted "to kill Jews."

He is charged with 44 counts — including hate crimes — for the murder of 11 people and wounding of six others at the Tree of Life Congregation synagogue.

The attack follows a spike in anti-Semitic incidents, concerns about the rise in domestic extremism and calls for politicians to rethink their anti-immigrant rhetoric.

We wanted to know what programs, if any, are effective in getting violent and violence-prone far-right extremists in America to cast aside their racist beliefs and abandon their hate-filled ways.

Here are five key takeaways:

1) Neglected, minimized and underfunded

Creating and expanding effective programs to get homegrown far-right racists to find the off-ramp from hate is, overall, an under-studied, underfunded and neglected area.

White supremacy is really a problem throughout the United States. It doesn't know any geographic boundaries. It's not isolated to either urban or rural or suburban — it cuts across all. - Pete Simi, Chapman University

"We haven't wanted to acknowledge that we have a problem with violent right-wing extremism in this kind of domestic terrorism," says sociologist Pete Simi of Chapman University, who has researched and consulted on violent white nationalists and other hate groups for more than two decades.

"White supremacy is really a problem throughout the United States," he says. "It doesn't know any geographic boundaries. It's not isolated to either urban or rural or suburban — it cuts across all."

But it's a problem and topic that America has "tended to hide or minimize," he adds.

That willful denial, Simi says, has left many nonprofits, social workers and police and other interventionists largely flying blind.

"There really haven't been much resources, attention, time, energy devoted to developing efforts to counter that form of violent extremism."

In fact, the Trump administration in 2017 rescinded funding that targeted domestic extremism.

The administration, instead, has focused almost exclusively on threats from Islamist extremists and what it sees as the security and social menace of undocumented immigrants including, again, whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the midterm elections.

2) There's no consensus on what really works

The research done so far shows that adherence to white supremacist beliefs can be addictive. Some who try to leave can "relapse" and return to the hate fold.

But Simi says, "We're really very much in the early days."

And there is no consensus yet on what works best over the long haul.

Academically, there has been more attention and research on interventions with American gang members or would-be Jihadis.

And while there is some crossover, far-right hate comes with ideological baggage often absent in gangs and is different from the religion-infused Jihadi belief system.

3) Best practices are costly and labor-intensive

Can racist radicals and homegrown right-wing violent extremists successfully be rehabilitated and re-enter civil society?

"The answer to that question is absolutely 'yes,' " Simi says.

The groups with the best approach, he says, seem to be those that partner with a broad section of civil society — educators, social workers, those in health care and police — to tackle the full range of problems someone swept up into an extremist world might face.

They may need additional schooling or employment training, he says or "maybe they have some housing needs, maybe they have some unmet mental health needs," such as past trauma or substance use problems.

It's a more holistic approach that he says, in the end, is far more effective and less costly than prison and packing more people into the already overcrowded U.S. criminal justice system.

But that "wraparound services" model is also labor-intensive, expensive and hard to coordinate.

It's also severely hampered, Simi says, by America's woefully inadequate drug treatment and mental health care systems.

"A big, big problem that we face as a society is abdicating our responsibility in terms of providing this kind of social support and social safety net for individuals that suffer from mental health," as well as drug problems, he says.

4) Life after hate

Tony McAleer knows the mindset of the suspect in the synagogue shooting.

A former member of the White Aryan Resistance and other hate groups, he once echoed the type of racist invective Bowers spewed online; the kind that sees a cabal of malevolent Jews running the world by proxy through banks, Hollywood, corporations and the media.

I think of them as lost...And I can tell you being in that place is not a fun place to be. When you surround yourself with angry and negative people I guarantee you your life is not firing on all cylinders. - Tony McAleer, Life After Hate

And McAleer knows how savvy racist recruiters can be. He was one of them.

"I was a Holocaust denier. I ran a computer-operated voicemail system that was primarily anti-Semitic," he says.

He eventually renounced his bigotry and helped co-found the nonprofit Life After Hate, one of just a handful of groups working to help right-wing extremists find an off-ramp. It also was among those that lost funding — a $400,000 Obama-era federal grant — when the Trump administration changed focus.

In McAleer's experience, adherence to racist beliefs — whether as part of a group or as a lone wolf like the synagogue suspect — is more often sparked by a flawed search for identity and purpose than by a deeply held belief.

The group doesn't attack people's ideology verbally. He calls that approach "the wrong strategy. Because it's about identity."

The best method, he believes, is simply listening and trying to reconnect to the person's buried humanity.

McAleer says he tries to get at what's motivating the hate, to find out why people are really so angry and upset to begin with, and to start the dialogue from there.

You condemn the ideology and the actions, he says, but not the human being.

"I think of them as lost. Somewhere along the line, they find themselves in this place," says McAleer, "and I can tell you being in that place is not a fun place to be. When you surround yourself with angry and negative people, I guarantee you your life is not firing on all cylinders."

He says that's the way he felt. "I was just so disconnected from my heart."

The birth of his children and compassion from a Jewish man, he says, helped him to leave that life and to reconnect with his own humanity and that of others.

People often have never met the people that they purport to hate, he says.

"And there's nothing more powerful — I know because it happened to me in my own life — than receiving compassion from someone who you don't feel you deserve it from, someone from a community that you had dehumanized."

5) How do you scale compassion?

But there are only a few programs like Life After Hate.

And they're often small. Since the summer of 2017, for example, the Chicago-based group has taken on only 41 new people who want to leave their racist hate behind.

"Keep in mind, de-radicalization is a lifelong process," says Life After Hate's Dimitrios Kalantzis. "We consider it a major success when formers remain active in our network, even if that means checking in within our online support group. That means they are engaged and unlikely to relapse."

But is inspiring compassion really scalable, and how can groups more effectively structure and organize similar efforts?

How can researchers and others scale it to reach as large a number of people as possible?

"That's the answer I can't provide because at this point, we really don't know," sociologist Pete Simi says.


https://www.npr.org/2018/11/06/663773514/is-there-a-cure-for-hate

Anti-fascists plan to protest black metal concert in Montreal on Saturday

CATHERINE SOLYOM

MONTREAL GAZETTENovember 23, 2016

A black metal concert in Montreal this Saturday could draw as many protesters as fans, with anti-fascist militants vowing to disrupt the show by what they call one of the most openly racist bands on the scene.

Graveland, from Poland, is one of several bands expected to take the stage as part of the annual Messe des Morts (Mass of the Dead) festival, which starts Thursday at Théâtre Plaza on Plaza St. Hubert.

The festival organizers are heralding the sold-out concert as Graveland’s first ever live show in North America. But on Tuesday, the Montreal Gazette received an “anti-fascist alert” on behalf of militants who have denounced organizers for knowingly welcoming what the militants call an anti-Semitic group. 

In 1999, Graveland was identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in the United States. In 2008, Germany outlawed the sale of four of Graveland’s albums as “unsafe for youth.”

The alert said Martin Marcotte, the head of Sepulchral Productions, has organized several concerts of extreme-right groups, and “doesn’t seem to want to change his habits.” 

“A band with racist and anti-Semitic ideas has no place in Montreal,” wrote Karine Fortier in the alert. The militants do not belong to any particular group, but Fortier expects between 150 and 200 people will join the protest. 

“Montreal must remain a safe place for everyone and where racist people who think they have an opening to express their discriminatory ideas must meet with resistance,” she wrote.

In a statement issued late Tuesday, Marcotte denied that either his festival or Graveland are neo-Nazi or white supremacist. 

“There has never been, and there will never be, a political aspect to Messe des Morts, and absolutely everyone, regardless of their origins, is welcome at the festival,” the statement said. One of the bands invited in the past has featured an Asian musician, another included a black musician, it added. 

It is true that the founder of Graveland has held some “distressing” views, the statement continued, but that was in the past, and the band has formally dissociated itself from any political affiliations. 

Rob (Darken) Fudali, the founder and frontman of Graveland, in an email to the Montreal Gazette said “It is not easy to clean (the) past.” But he insisted that neither he nor the band is political.

Critics are always “trying to put an NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal) mark on the band.” Fudali called the band’s music Pagan Black Metal.

He also sent a copy of a post he wrote on the band’s website in October.

“When Graveland started playing live, some photos of me and Honor members emerged,” Fudali wrote, referring to a now-defunct Polish skinhead band widely associated with the neo-Nazi movement. “They were taken in 2001, and supposed to be some sort of memorabilia only. They have nothing to do with politics, and they are not reflecting my political view, either. Graveland is not an NSBM band and never was!”

Fortier said while the concert would certainly attract people wanting just to hear the music, it would certainly also attract extreme right militants who want to encourage a white supremacist band.  

Calling for people to protest the concert in great numbers, the anti-fascists also denounced the concert theatre as the only remaining venue in Montreal still hosting this kind of band, despite the numerous complaints the theatre has received. 

“It’s important that this concert not be held,” Fortier said. “Whether it’s the Théâtre Plaza, that refuses to provide a place for racist bands, or the city of Montreal, that doesn’t want to welcome these bands. We can’t legitimize such ideas and above all we can’t give them a place to legitimize their ideas.”

The Théâtre Plaza did not respond to a request for comment.  

csolyom@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/csolyom

http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/anti-fascists-plan-to-protest-black-metal-concert-on-saturday

Producers cancel concert by black metal band Graveland

Montreal Gazette
PRESSE CANADIENNENovember 28, 2016

The concert scheduled for Saturday evening by the extreme right-wing metal band Graveland at the Théâtre Plaza on Plaza St-Hubert, was cancelled about one hour before the show, the producers announced on their Facebook page.

The organizers of the sixth Messe des Morts (Mass of the Dead) festival said they have made the decision “for security reasons.” They added the theatre administration and producers had “done everything in their power to come up with a solution.”

They invited the fans of the group to “go home peacefully and to make a good impression as (they) have demonstrated since the beginning of the festival.”

The concert by this group, whose members have expressed racist and anti-Semitic remarks in interviews, had sowed controversy. Several groups had demanded the cancellation of the concert organized as part of a rock metal music festival.

A few hours before the show, about 30 people had assembled in front of the Beaubien métro station, located near the theatre, to protest against the arrival of the group.



http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/concert-by-black-metal-band-graveland-cancelled

Willis Carto, Far-Right Figure and Holocaust Denier, Dies at 89

DOUGLAS MARTIN
New York Times
November 1, 2015

Willis Carto, a reclusive behind-the-scenes wizard of the far-right fringe of American politics who used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust, died last Monday at his home in Virginia. He was 89.

His death was announced by The American Free Press, a newspaper he helped found.

Mr. Carto raised funds to finance a right-wing military dictatorship in the United States, campaigned to persuade blacks to voluntarily return to Africa and, most influentially, started newsletters, a journal and conferences of academics and others to deny the scale, and even the existence, of the Holocaust.

The Anti-Defamation League called him “one of the most influential American anti-Semitic propagandists” and “the mastermind of the hate network.”

His associates included neo-Nazis, Christian vigilantes, John Birch Society members and Ku Klux Klansmen, and his extreme views alienated mainstream conservatives. After William F. Buckley sued Mr. Carto for libel and won in 1985, Mr. Buckley said Mr. Carto epitomized “the fever swamps of the crazed right.’’

Mr. Carto did not speak in public, refused interviews, wrote under pseudonyms, did not include his name on his publications’ mastheads and conducted business from pay phones. But at his peak in the 1980s, he headed an organization, Liberty Lobby, with a mailing list of 400,000; and published a newspaper, The Spotlight, with a circulation said to exceed 300,000.

His Liberty Lobby broadcast on 470 radio stations daily in 1981. His publishing house, Noontide Press, churned out works like Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and “For Fear of the Jews.” He started the Populist Party that ran the Klan leader David Duke for president in 1988. His dozens of corporations and publications shuffled money, staff and mailing lists.

He called himself a Jeffersonian populist and said he was merely the low-paid treasurer of his empire, subservient to a board that had real influence. But court testimony in case after case proved that he steered his organizations.

It was by midwifing the movement to portray the Holocaust as a hoax or greatly exaggerated that Mr. Carto made his biggest mark.

In 1978, he started the Institute for Historical Review to spread what it termed a “revisionist” view of the Holocaust through its glossy, heavily footnoted Journal of Historical Review and conferences of historians from the United States and Europe.

Although the journal sometimes offered revised views of other historical events like World War I from mainstream historians, it usually pondered questions like whether the concentration camps’ gas chambers had the capacity to execute six million Jews — if, in fact, the gas chambers existed.

Calling evidence that the Holocaust actually happened “atrocity propaganda,” the institute in 1979 offered to give $50,000 to anyone who could prove that Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz.

It explicitly dismissed statements by Rudolf Höss, one of the commanders at Auschwitz, that a cyanide gas, Zyklon B, had been used to commit mass murder. It said those confessions were made “under duress.” Most historians estimate that 1.1 million died at the camp.

Mel Mermelstein, a businessman from Long Beach, Calif., who survived Auschwitz, provided documents, eyewitness testimonies, histories, photographs and even a can that had contained Zyklon B to the institute. He told of seeing his mother and sister driven into the gas chambers in 1944.

Upon hearing nothing in response, he sued. In July 1985, Mr. Mermelstein and the institute agreed to settle the case. The settlement mandated that the institute pay the $50,000, plus an additional $40,000; apologize; and accept earlier court rulings that the Holocaust was an indisputable fact.

Early on, Mr. Carto sometimes presented himself as a conventional conservative activist. In 1956, he operated what he called “a nerve center” at the Republican convention that distributed 100,000 pieces of literature. He said he was ready to offer an immediate right-wing alternative if President Dwight D. Eisenhower chose not to seek re-election.

In the 1960s, he contributed money to congressmen to try to stymie civil rights legislation, and several times was invited to testify before congressional committees. He later helped bolster what became fairly conventional rightist causes: drastically slashing the income tax and blocking a constitutional amendment to guarantee women equal rights. His positions on immigration, globalization and multiculturalism — all of which he loathed — were influential.

In the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, Representative Ron Paul accepted the support of Mr. Carto’s newspaper The American Free Press, but later stipulated he did not endorse its racial views. Some of Mr. Paul’s writing had appeared in the paper, possibly without his knowledge.

“Willis has talked to me about playing the role of a respectable conservative when his true feelings are those of a racial nationalist,” Louis T. Byers, a right-wing activist and theoretician, told The Washington Post in 1971. “I was as close to being a friend as anyone Carto has known.”

Willis Allison Carto was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., on July 17, 1926, and joined the Army after high school. He was wounded twice in fighting in the Philippines during World War II and earned the Purple Heart. After the war, he lived with his parents in Mansfield, Ohio, and, according to a court deposition, attended courses at the University of Cincinnati Law School.

He worked for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, then moved to San Francisco where he was a bill collector for the Household Finance Corporation. He became involved in right-wing causes, and started a monthly bulletin called Right.

On June 10, 1960, Mr. Carto had a profound experience. He went to the San Francisco jail to interview Francis Parker Yockey, who was being held for passport fraud, for Right. Mr. Yockey was an embittered American lawyer who quit his job as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials because of dissatisfaction with the Allied prosecution.

More significant, he was an avid disciple of Hitler who had, under the pseudonym Ulick Varange, written a 600-page philosophical tome titled “Imperium” that savaged Jews. He had been roaming the world promoting his racist philosophy.

Mr. Carto was convinced that Mr. Yockey was a genius. A week after their meeting, Mr. Yockey was found dead in his cell. He had swallowed cyanide.

Mr. Carto dedicated himself to preserving and propagating his hero’s thoughts. He published a new edition of “Imperium” and wrote a 35-page introduction in which he said Europeans living under monarchies were freer than present-day Americans, and derided the notion of racial equality.

In those early days, he joined the far-right John Birch Society, but left because the society’s founder, Robert Welch, deemed his anti-Semitism a pointless diversion. Contributors to Right included the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who declared: “And dangerous we ARE. To Jew traitors we are deadly and we openly inform them we will stuff them into gas chambers in 1972 when we are elected to power.”

In 1958, Mr. Carto formed Liberty Lobby as a “pressure group for patriotism.” His influence grew, as he added and subtracted organizations, publications and initiatives. In 1966, he acquired control of The American Mercury, a magazine H. L. Mencken helped found, and made it a mouthpiece for his ideas. He produced hundreds of thousands of pamphlets for George Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1968.

Mr. Carto’s offices were firebombed and burned to the ground in 1984. Only his own office — with its four bronze busts of Hitler — escaped the destruction.

Amid allegations of financial fraud, he was forced out of the Institute of Historical Review in the mid-1990s, but soon started another publication to deny the Holocaust, The Barnes Review. A bankruptcy in 2001 did not slow him down. He lost The Spotlight, but replaced it with The American Free Press.

He kept up with current events, blaming the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on Israel.

Mr. Carto is survived by his wife, the former Elisabeth Waltraud, who worked closely with him. They had no children.

Correction: November 2, 2015
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the estimated number of people killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. It is 1.1 million, not three million.

A version of this article appears in print on November 2, 2015, on page D9 of the New York edition with the headline: Willis Carto, 89, Activist for Far Right Who Said the Holocaust Was a Hoax.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/us/willis-carto-far-right-figure-and-holocaust-denier-dies-at-89.html