Among the commemorations around the world of the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany was a memorial service at Boston's Faneuil Hall marking the liberation of the death camps. Around 20 members of a neo-Nazi group from Arkansas called White Revolution [1] travelled all the way to Massachusetts to protest the May 8 memorial. They marched through Boston's streets without a permit, and waved Jew-hating placards and slabs of ham outside the hall. While the memorial organizers, including Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Mayor Thomas M. Menino, urged attendees to ignore the Nazi rabble, hundreds of anti-racist counter-protesters took to the streets. (Boston Herald [2], May 9) There were some scuffles, and two arrests--a Black counter-protester and a white Nazi-symp, who apparently traded blows. There were a few minor injuries, including a Jewish high school student from Brookline who received a gash above his eye from a police baton. (Boston Herald [3] again)
Even the notoriously staid Boston Globe [4] cheered on the anti-Nazi protesters in a fine May 10 editorial. Unfortunately, as the editorial makes all too clear, the credit for the counter-protest was hogged by the creepy International Action Center (IAC). The Globe, like many left activists, is too naive to understand that the IAC has its own enthusiasm for neo-fascism and genocide, being the chief stateside cheerleader for Slobodan Milosevic. See WW4 REPORT #s 53 [5] & 96 [6].
Neo-Nazi exploitation of the recent spate of WWII commemorations seems to be a global phenomenon [7].
