By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Levitas, on tour to promote his book The Terrorist Next Door (Thomas Dunne Books, 2002, 416 pages) spoke at a joint meeting of the Jewish Federation and at Congregation Beth Shalom on Nov. 26 as a part of Jewish book month.
Levitas says another attack will occur on U.S. soil. What is not inevitable, he believes, is that the attack will come from al-Qaida or another Muslim extremist group.
The radical-right hate groups “have become gradually harder and harder core, and more committed to extreme acts of violence,” he says. “The movement is committed to lone-wolf attacks. Unorganized, anarchic, spontaneous but deadly violence. Clearly there is more of that to come.”
His research and book extensively cover the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
“Within five minutes of the blast in Oklahoma City, it was obvious to those of us that watch the militia groups who was involved,” he says. That event galvanized the groups to become more violent, even as they shrunk.
After last year’s Sept. 11 attacks, and with passage of the USA PATRIOT Act and other anti-terrorist legislation, they faded further into the background. Levitas believes, however, that once they figure out how to get around those laws, they’ll be back to business as usual.
Levitas has made a career out of studying hate groups that operate within our borders, but he didn’t start out that way. A native New Yorker, he earned his degree from the University of Michigan in the early 1980s and worked as a political organizer during the farming crisis of the early ‘80s. There he came upon an emerging phenomenon: the recruiting of farmers into radical hate groups. He is quick to point out that most farmers — but not all — were turned off by these views, and chose not to associate with those who joined. In response, Levitas decided to do something about the hate groups.
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“We couldn’t ignore the right-wing groups making anti-Semitic overtures to farmers,” he said.
He eventually moved to Atlanta, where he worked for an organization called the Center for Democratic Renewal. A Seattle office was opened in 1989 to counter anti-Semitic activity in the Northwest, but closed in 1992.
Since 1993, Levitas has been self-employed as a writer and researcher on hate groups.
He has worked with several local and national governments, and testified in multiple court cases, about “everything from cross-burning to murder,” he says.
He began the book in 1995, because he wanted to have a more comprehensive study of the Oklahoma City bombing than the rushed tomes released at the time.
“I wanted to dig deeper and find the roots,” he says.
With 1,500 footnotes, 34 pages of chronology, several appendices and a thorough index, Levitas intended The Terrorist Next Door to be a definitive sourcebook on the rural radical right in the United States.
The book is not a dissection of extremist philosophies so much as it is a history. Levitas starts in the middle of the 19th century and works his way up to the 1970s and ‘80s, when the focus of paramilitary groups turned from “upholding” the law to resisting the government.
“Once the federal government and state governments and the courts outlawed segregation,” he says, “then right-wing hate groups began to adopted this notion of ZOG — Zionist Occupied Government — and then they began to develop this whole intellectual and military campaign the goal of which, in their mind, was to incite a race war.”
One subject of his book, William Potter Gale, was the founder of the ultra-right wing Posse Comitatus. His Jewish father had escaped Russian pogroms.
“There is tremendous irony and contradiction,” muses Levitas, of Gale’s “launching an organization whose mission was to promote anti-Semitisim and the murder of Jews.”
Since Sept. 11, there has been a spate of rising anti-Semitism, and anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments. The radical right in some cases, as Levitas wrote in the epilogue, endorsed the attacks.
Levitas says Sept. 11 is one of the reasons anti-Semitism has gone up. “What we’re seeing is really kind of a negative attitude across the board,” he says. “Hate the Jews, hate the Arabs. That’s a negative trend that does not bode well for Jews.”
But Levitas also notes that the radical right is not the only segment of the population that takes issue with Jews.
“Anti-semitism on the left is a very real problem,” he says. “We do hear from the left a whole range of anti-Semitic statements which are couched as criticisms of Israel.”
He points out, however, the criticism of Israel that comes from all sides is, in some cases, legitimate.
He still reads and subscribes to neo-Nazi literature, went to several rallies, and has been in contact with many groups since 1983. Some of their members would refuse to talk to him, or anybody in the media, they perceived as Jewish. Others, he says, wouldn’t care. They wanted to make themselves heard and thought they could put one over on a Jew if he broadcast their message of hate. His days of dressing up and going to group meetings, however, are over.
“Not since the book has come out,” he says about keeping a low profile. “I think my undercover days are probably through.”