Somewhat belatedly, I’ve become aware of reports on Hatewatch and at Searchlight about February’s “Preserving Western Civilization” conference in Baltimore. As I blogged in February, this event planned to bring together some of the usual characters from the racialist American Renaissance crowd, with a bit of input from the British National Party and from Serge Trifkovic, an anti-Muslim polemicist popular with the more mainstream conservative right. The organiser, Michael Hart, is Jewish, and he apparently held the event because he was fed up with tolerance for anti-Jewish racists at American Renaissance events.
It seems the event was the usual mixture of “scientific” racist ramblings about supposed black IQ levels and brain size, attacks on immigratation, and a bit of neo-confederatism. According to Hatewatch, there was also a bizarre fantasy about invading Saudi Arabia, and the claim that the USA is currently under an “occupation government”.
Searchlight, meanwhile, gives us Rushdon’s contribution:
Rushton, the soft-spoken psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario and a leading figure among academic racists, went even further, contending that Islam was not just a cultural, but a genetic problem. According to Rushton, the Muslim problem is not just a condition of their particular belief system. Instead, he argued that Muslims have an aggressive personality with relatively closed, simple minds, and are less impervious to reason than one might expect.
One wonders if this simply applies to Arabs (an echo of religious prejudice against “Ishmael” which I’ve blogged before) or to all Muslims. Also:
Governor Palin’s name surfaced several times during the conference. At lunch on Saturday, “Draft Sarah” flyers were placed on tables. At the banquet, Paul Streitz, chairman of the 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, assured the crowd that Palin was learning the appropriate anti-immigrant “cues” and that his committee was working to arrange a trip for her down to the Arizona border to meet with Glenn Spencer of the nativist group American Patrol. The announcement drew cheers from the banquet crowd.
And for light relief, there was comedy from conservative commedienne Julia Gorin.
(Hat tips: Harry’s Place and Islamophobia Watch)
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