Letter to the editor: It’s important to be careful in deciding support of groups

The election is over but it seems that we are fed with a contentious “soup” of fiscal cliff competition from the news media and Washington as well. Sometimes I feel that news reporting wishes to keep up a sense of tense expectation for the purpose of selling news articles. Perhaps I am wrong, but it does not seem as if the election rhetoric has been allowed to mellow out.

Of course, there are some organizations that wish to “keep the pot boiling,” so to speak. Some of those are harmless enough, but some are possibly dangerous and it is not easy to identify which ones could be hiding behind innocent sounding names and titles. Very few of the dangerous organizations use titles like “Neo-Nazi” or “Aryan” today, although some do. The Aryan Brotherhood in the prison network keeps the name and the Ku Klux Klan keeps its name in some areas. There are others who use the words “National” or “Patriot” or “American” in their title to draw more people and donations. As you know, some of these are The National Alliance, Christian Identity, Kingdom Identity, National Organization for Marriage, World Net Daily and Behara or Brethern. These organizations are known to be racist and anti-Semitic, some are anti-Catholic as well as some being unlawful and even very violent. Some are homophobic, others are nativist. Some are paranoid and some are even recruiting the psychotic because they want crazies who are willing to kill or even die for a cause. Not all terrorists abide in the Middle East.

The one seeming common denominator appears to be that almost all of these use the Internet to spread their philosophies.

So I guess those of us truly wish to have liberty and justice for everyone — because we are all Americans regardless of skin color, choice of worship or economic class — need to be very careful in discerning the kind of organizations that we would want

Tags: opinion, letters, politics