10 years after terror, radical right still a threat

World continued after 2000
Some of the survivalist-oriented right-wing groups also suffered when the millennium came and went with no attendant catastrophe. "Virtually every group in the Patriot Movement made a big deal about the millennium," said Potok. "They said we'd have Armageddon, computers would collapse. Welfare checks won't go out and blacks in the inner cities will rise up and come into the countryside to steal your crops and rape your wives. But then on Jan. 1, 2000, the sun rose bright in a blue sky and absolutely nothing happened, not a computer crashed."

Patriot publications were filled with angry letters from disillusioned supporters, many of whom had spent lots of money buying a stockpile of food, water and survival gear, Potok said. "I think it clearly took the winds out of the Patriot Movement. There are no militias really operating -- we just don't see these guys running around in the woods any more."

More division over Sept. 11 attacks
As with Oklahoma City, the Sept. 11 terror attacks divided the extreme right. "Sept. 11 brought this wave of patriotism," said former FBI profiler van Zandt. "Some folks began to think maybe the real enemy is not the FBI and the ATF [the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] -- maybe the real enemy is without."

But from the hard-core neo-Nazi groups, Sept. 11 brought applause -- for al-Qaida. "This was an attack on Jew York City," Potok said. "The head of one of the neo-Nazi movements wrote an e-mail saying, in essence, 'We may not want them marrying our daughters, but anyone willing to fly an airplane into a building to kill Jews is all right with me.'"

Still, there has been no proof of any link between neo-Nazi or other U.S. extremists and al-Qaida. "A few of the hate groups have nominally given a tip of the hat to al-Qaida, praised holy jihad," Potok said. "But there's nothing to show any cooperation going on. To American neo-Nazis, al Qaida is staffed by mud people [the extreme right's name for non-whites]. It's hard for them to make anything like this work for real."

At least on the surface, most of the right-wing groups are careful to avoid outright calls for violence. For example, the head of the Creativity movement, Matt Hale, was convicted of trying to hire someone to kill U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow of Chicago in retaliation for her ruling against him in a trademark dispute over the group's name. But on the Creativity Web site, a Frequently Asked Questions page denies that the group favors violence. "Nowhere in our book do we ever suggest killing anyone," the page states.

But the group doesn't deny that its actions could destroy other races. "Perhaps it would, but that is not our responsibility, nor is it our doing," the group says. "In no ... species in Nature, does the stronger and superior species voluntarily hold itself back and help subsidize a weaker and inferior species so that inferior species might crowd it from the face of the earth."

Neo-Nazis' decline could unleash more violence
Ironically, the decline of Creativity and two other large neo-Nazi groups could increase the threat of domestic terror attacks, Potok believes. Because the leaders of all three groups have died or are in trouble, their followers have been left to their own devices.

Creativity head Hale was sentenced to 40 years in jail April 6 for plotting against Judge Lefkow. William Pierce, head of the National Alliance and author of the militant bible, The Turner Diaries, died in 2002, leaving his group leaderless. And Richard Butler, head of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations, lost his sprawling Idaho compound after he was sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2000 and forced into bankruptcy.

"We're at a point right now where the most serious and scary groups have been decapitated," Potok said. But that can be dangerous since the leaders of most extreme groups typically prevent the group from committing acts of violence. "They say, 'Yes, we want to kill the Jews -- but that's for next week,'" said Potok. "These guys [the leadership] don't want to go to prison."

While organized militant groups are a threat in that they tend to gather people who have criminal tendencies, in general, "terror attacks are not planned by hate groups in smoky rooms," said Potok. "In virtually every case, it is a few people who break away from the group and decide the time is now."

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