The patrols are to protect “white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety” in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. “We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it,” he says. “We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over.”
Because nothing diffuses racial tension like gun-toting racial separatists patrolling an already on-edge community.
UPDATE: The Sanford Police Department says it has no evidence of neo-Nazis in the area. “We have not seen any neo-Nazis on patrol nor have we had any reports of them,” Sgt. David Morgenstern says. He adds there have been no signs of the New Black Panther Party either.
Schoep, whose neo-Nazi group is based in Detroit, tells Riptide the patrols are a response to white residents’ fears of a race riot.
A group called the New Black Panther Party recently offered $10,000 for a citizen’s arrest of George Zimmerman, Martin’s shooter. Schoep says the bounty is a sign that “the possibility of further racial violence… is brimming over like a powder keg ready to explode into the streets.”
The patrols comprise ten to 20 locals and “volunteers” from across the state, including some from Miami, he adds. He couldn’t specify what kind of firepower the patrols had with them.
“In Arizona the guys can walk around with assault weapons, and that’s totally legal,” Schoep says, referring to the group’s patrols of the U.S.-Mexico border. “What I can tell you is that any patrols that we are doing now in Florida are totally within the law.”
Asked if the patrols wouldn’t just make things worse — spark a race riot, for instance — Schoep insists they are simply a “show of solidarity with the white community down there” and “wouldn’t intimidate anybody.”
“Whenever there is one of these racially charged events, Al Sharpton goes wherever blacks need him,” Schoep says. “We do similar things. We are a white civil rights organization.”
He goes to great lengths to contrast his organization with the New Black Panther Party, which he blames for scaring local whites and spurring the need for NSM patrols. MORE AT SOURCE
No comments:
Post a Comment