White supremacist groups gathering
Three white supremacy groups, tied to a religion called Christian Identity, will host gatherings this weekend at two locations in North Idaho and a third site near St. Regis, Mont.
The most visible group, the Aryan Nations, will hold its annual Aryan World Congress at a private campground near Cataldo, Idaho, beginning today and lasting through Sunday.
As part of that gathering, the Aryan Nations’ 86-year-old founder, Richard G. Butler, is scheduled to lead a group of supporters through downtown Coeur d’Alene Saturday morning.
Similar Aryan parades in summers past have attracted neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members and an assortment of anti-government, anti-Semitic activists.
Butler says he is merely exercising his constitutional rights and showing the region his religiously-based racist movement is still alive and well.
Saturday’s scheduled Aryan parade, like those before it, will temporarily bring business and tourist traffic to a halt through the heart of the Lake City.
The Aryans are scheduled to march down Sherman Avenue, in front of The Coeur d’Alene Resort, where the National Negro Golf Association will be holding its annual golfing convention that started Thursday. The number of attendees couldn’t be immediately learned.
A short distance away, near the Idaho-Montana border, members of a newer white supremacy group, The Church of True Israel, say they will hold “The Gathering” somewhere near St. Regis.
In Sandpoint, another lower-profile Christian Identity group, America’s Promise Ministries, will host its annual gathering of followers who believe white people are the true children of God, the true Hebrews of the Bible. A Christian Identity minister from North Carolina is one of the featured speakers at that gathering.
“The Pacific Northwest is still one of the hot spots for white supremacists in the United States,” said Mark Pitcavage, national fact-finding director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Since January, several Aryan Nations members who have lived with Butler or had direct contact with his organization have been arrested. Sean Gillespie, formerly of Spokane, is in jail, accused of firebombing a synagogue in Oklahoma City. Zachary L. Beck, who unsuccessfully ran for public office in Hayden, Idaho, was arrested in May, accused of shooting at police in Longview, Wash.
A month earlier, Karl Gharst, former “staff leader” for the Aryan Nations, was arrested on Montana charges of threatening to kill a Child Protective Services caseworker.
Citing those and other recent arrests of Aryan Nations members, Pitcavage disagreed with some civic and human rights leaders who say hate groups left the region in 2000 when the Aryan Nations lost its compound and declared bankruptcy after being hit with a $6 million lawsuit judgment.
“All three of these Christian Identity events this weekend will be drawing people, so this is a big deal,” Pitcavage said.
The ADL extremist expert said he couldn’t predict how many people will attend each of the gatherings or which will be the largest.
While Butler parades down Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene, it’s the private racist meeting in the Montana woods that’s attracting a lot of interest from domestic terrorism and law enforcement experts.
Many members of the Church of True Israel have past ties to the Aryan Nations, including leaders Charles W. Mangels, of Polson, Mont.; James A. Dillavou, of Missoula; and John R. Burke, of Coeur d’Alene.
Burke and Mangels left the Aryan Nations in 1995 and became founders of Church of True Israel – CTI – the following year. The group has a Web site and a post office box, and it has held small, informal gatherings but never hosted a large summer gathering.
The weekend’s CTI event was planned in direct competition with Butler’s annual Aryan World Congress, according to various experts who track extremist groups.
“This is probably the most significant Christian Identity gathering in the United States in the last four or five years,” said Joe Roy, director of Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. It was a lawsuit brought by that civil rights organization that bankrupted Butler’s Aryan Nations with a $6 million civil judgment in 2000.
After the judgment, the Aryan Nations lost its 20-acre compound, and Butler retreated to a suburban Hayden home bought for him by a millionaire racist who is now a fugitive.
“The Aryan Nations is struggling to make a comeback,” Roy said. “The group has gone from an old man in a house with a few people to 22 chapters in 21 states. That’s a significant recovery for them.”
“They don’t have any assets, but they have the ‘Aryan Nations’ name and reputation, and that still carries a lot of weight in the world of white supremacists,” Roy said.
FBI Special Agent Norm Brown, a spokesman for the Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force, said its agents and officers are monitoring the Aryan Nations and Church of True Israel gatherings.
“It’s quite apparent these two groups are being somewhat competitive in attempting to gain new members,” Brown said. “They intentionally scheduled their conferences for the same weekend.”
Coeur d’Alene Police and Kootenai County sheriff’s officials have been planning for the events for weeks. The Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force, based in Spokane, also is involved.
The Aryans gathered last summer at Farragut State Park, but they did not obtain a permit for a parade in Coeur d’Alene. The group’s last parade in downtown Coeur d’Alene in 2002 was uneventful, but there have been disturbances with protesters in past parades.
The main street in downtown Coeur d’Alene, Sherman Avenue, will be closed at 8 a.m. Saturday by police, who will restrict sidewalk and side-street access. That restrictive tactic in past years has successfully kept counter-demonstrators away from the white supremacists parading down the street.