A man who subscribes to 120 extremist publications and constantly searches
the Web for more says white supremacist groups tried hard to capitalize on
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in their campaign to promote hatred for Jews,
but had few, if any, successes.

Mark Pitcavage, who serves as the Anti-Defamation League's national director
of fact-finding, said Matt Hale, leader of the racist World Church of the
Creator, "basically urged his callers to Ochannel the hate' against Jews,
and this was generally what David Duke, the National Alliance, what the
Aryan Nations and a number of other groups thought they could do to take the
anger, the fear, the paranoia, the suspicion and direct it at targets they
wanted to direct it at."

Interviewed during a recent visit to San Diego, Pitcavage said the extremist
groups followed two occasionally contradictory tactics in trying to promote
Jew-hatred. One was "the Big Lie, and that was to suggest that Jews were
directly responsible for the World Trade Center attack." The second was to
argue that Jews, because of our advocacy for Israel, were indirectly
responsible for the attack.

The most common Big Lie argument, Pitcavage said, was the white supremacist
assertions that "really the Mossad (Israel's intelligence agency) was
responsible for the attack because Arab terrorist groups are not logically
sophisticated enough, not organized enough; they could never pull off
something like this. Only a really professional organization could do this
and only Mossad could do it."

A variation on this theory, Pitcavage said, was that "the CIA and the Mossad
worked together. And they said that Israel had a motive. Israel is
floundering in the second intifada, desperately afraid that the United
States was going to side more with the Palestinian cause than with Israel,
so they wanted to do something to turn America against the Arab world and so
they staged this. This is the conspiracy theory."

Another fantastic theory spun by the Arab press -- and which was later
gleefully picked up by the white supremacists -- was the allegation that
4,000 Jews who worked in the World Trade Center did not report to work on
Sept. 11 because they were tipped off to the attack.

"The 4,000 Jews thing, this originated -- so far as we can track it -- to
someone interviewing someone in the Israeli consulate in New York, and they
asked how many Jews were there in New York City, and the consulate said
there were about 4,000 Israelis in the area, and that they were trying to
track them down," Pitcavage said. "Somehow this got garbled to 4,000
Israelis not in the New York area, but at the World Trade Center, and then
this is where someone started changing it, it got to be 4,000 Israelis who
didn¹t show up to work."

White supremacists dislike Arabs almost as much as they hate Jews, but in
this case "there was a convergence of goals," Pitcavage said. "A number of
white supremacists said, OI don't like them any more than anyone else, but
look what they were able to do. Why can't we do it?'"

Tom Metzger, head of White Aryan Resistance, messaged his followers that
whereas white supremacists don't like Arabs, "we really don't like the Jews
and the enemy of my enemy is my ally."

Although white supremacists claim to be super-patriots, some of them
actually applauded the attack on the World Trade Center, Pitcavage said.
"For example, August Kreis, who is a prominent white supremacist and one of
the new leaders of Aryan Nations, posted on his Web site a OHalleluyahweh' --
they call God OYahweh' -- and he basically praised God that this had
happened. He wanted God to burn the enemies to the ground, quoted
Revelations 18, and intimated that this was the start of a holy war and that
God had inspired this action."

Revelations 18:16-19, as rendered in the King James Bible, reads: "...Alas,
alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and
scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one
hour so great riches is come to naught. And every shipmaster, and all the
company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning saying, what city is like
unto this great city!"

After being severely criticized by some of his followers, Kreis added
language to his Web site expressing sorrow for the police and firemen who
died in the attack.

More common than the Big Lie was the allegation that Jews were indirectly
responsible for the attack. This approach "suggests that the reason why the
terrorist attacks occurred was because the United States supports Israel and
that the Palestinians -- they are vague about saying OPalestinians,' OArabs'
or Muslims' -- struck back in the only way they could, that since the United
States had funded all the Israeli oppression, they struck back at the United
States."

Pitcavage said this argument continues by suggesting that the "reason why
the United States always backs Israel is essentially because Jews control
the government, so they make the government always back Israel and Jews
control the media, so you only get one side out of that as well."

One example of this type of propaganda was a flyer distributed not long
after Sept 11 "which shows the World Trade Center towers burning and says
Israeli genocide (is) paid for with our blood and money -- the money being
the money that goes to Israel, the blood being the victims of the Sept. 11
attack."

This charge by David Duke and other racists "got reprinted in the Arab
press, the Muslim press ... in many cases by people who had no idea who they
were or what they stand for, but they think, OOh, it is against Israel, so
they take it and print it.'"

Although the anti-Semitic propaganda was plentiful on the Internet, "I
haven't seen any evidence that it really has had any real effect," Pitcavage
said. "I haven't seen any evidence that they have been able to grow."
Besides the white supremacists, another collection of extremist groups -- the
citizen militias, the Freemen and other anti-government organizations -- spun
various theories about Sept. 11.

Pitcavage said these groups "responded at first a lot more like the general
American public did, but with their own little twists. There were Omilitia'
leaders who volunteered their groups to the governors of the states, which
were politely declined; there were other groups which organized blood drives
or tried to raise money for the victims, which, of course, was accepted.
They were very angry about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and very
pro-American. And some people who were extremely anti-government said,
OWell, now I am supporting the government in this.'

"As time went by, their natural tendencies reasserted themselves," Pitcavage
said. "The anti-government forces are incredibly conspiracy-oriented and
anti-government-oriented. So over time ... people were saying that the U.S.
government had been involved with the World Trade Center attack, and the
general theory was that it was a pretext to declare martial law.

"Right-wing extremists generally believe that the federal government
actually did the Oklahoma City bombing as a pretext to enforce authoritarian
rule. They (government agents) weren't quite successful and they hoped Y2K
would solve the problem, that there would be so much chaos (with computers
breaking down) that the government would have to step in and declare martial
law to enforce order.

"Of course, the computers did not collapse on Y2K. So now the government had
to do something so big that people would never be concerned about civil
liberties; all they would want is security. So they orchestrated the World
Trade Center attack."

Pitcavage said a variation on this theme is that "Bush and Cheney and George
Bush Sr. orchestrated all this because of their connections with oil
interests." This conspiracy theory continues: "There is lots of oil in
Afghanistan and they had to get rid of the Taliban to get at it, and so they
orchestrated this to give them a justification to wage war against the
Taliban, so they could make all this money off the oil. And actually this is
a theory that a lot of left-wing extremist groups also are touting."

Yet another anti-government conspiracy goes something like this, according
to Pitcavage: Anti-terrorist measures adopted in the wake of Sept. 11 "are
not actually directed against foreign terrorists; that is a pretext. They
atually are directed against dissidents in the United States. So, for
instance, the measure that was passed allowing the government to freeze the
assets of terrorist groups ... what some of them are saying is that if your
group is against abortion, the United States is going to declare your group
a terrorist group and freeze your assets, so anybody who dares to disagree
with the government, or anybody who is not politically correct, will be
labeled a terrorist."