Merchants Of Hate Try To Sell Us On Fear

One day last week, somebody with nothing better to do placed copies of a four-page newspaper called The New Order beneath the wiper blades on dozens of cars at the Audubon, N.J., shopping center.

A woman, who happened to be black, approached her car with slight annoyance on seeing a paper flapping on her windshield.

“Somebody selling something,” she said to herself. She reached for the paper and noticed a swastika at the top of it, along with a replica of the American flag, bearing 13 stars.

The woman shuddered, surveyed the darkness, then quickly got into her car. Once inside, she locked the doors, turned on the motor and began the drive home.

All the way home, the woman kept glancing at the newspaper on the seat next to her. She was feeling a bit queasy that somebody out there in the night had a need to push hatred.

“White Man, Fight Back!” urged the front-page headline. It was followed by a story charging that “the system is anti-white!”

Inside, stories such as “America Threatened by Non-White Invasion,” were written to cause alarm among those who are unaware that hatred has become an industry.

It is an industry based on fear and is bolstered by a minority of blacks and whites with anger in their hearts and almost nothing decent on their minds. They take the worst elements of each racial group and pawn them off as “typical” of the majority of the group.

The New Order is loaded with half-truths and untruths. It includes incendiary sentences such as: “Billions of diseased criminals and violent savages want to come to America. They want to take “your” home, “your” job, “your” money and especially “your” women!”

On the back cover, a drawing of an angelic white child sits atop a pathetic message. “I don’t want to be raped or murdered!” says the little child, with hands folded in front of her.

Mary, the woman who picked the paper off her windshield, took the newspaper into her home. She had considered taking it to the police station but decided against it.

“I wasn’t sure that would be a good thing to do,” she said, a lone black woman trying to fight back. “I didn’t think it would be smart for me to walk into a police station of mostly whites to complain. I wondered if I would be safe or would I become a target?”

Mary says she’s “not a highway driver.” She added, “That’s what attracted me to the shopping center. It’s not far from where I live. But I don’t think I’ll go back after dark anymore. I’m frightened by things like this.”

The newspaper was printed in Lincoln, Neb. Somebody scrawled a phone number on the publication for the New Jersey chapter of the Aryan Nation, a group dedicated to bringing about a war between whites and blacks.

I dialed the number and heard a man’s voice asking that I leave my name and number. He promised that either he, or “a member of my staff” would get back.

I decided the group’s leader wouldn’t appreciate my message, so I put the phone back in its cradle.

Next I called the Audubon Police Department to find out if anyone had complained about the distribution of a newspaper selling hatred.

“No,” the policewoman said. “This is the first I’ve heard about this. I’ll have someone check the area.”

We tolerate such behavior because we have laws that protect free speech.

The merchants of hate use our laws against us to stir up anger between races and ethnic groups. It begins with a tiny speech somewhere, a frightening newspaper tract or a secret organization that caters to fear.

The merchants of doom are destroying this country by using the weapon of fear to keep us at one another’s throats. They deliberately ignore our many similarities and concentrate on our differences.

Our responsibility is not to stifle their speech, but to discourage bigotry and bizarre behavior. There’s something terribly wrong when people are frightened by those who make their livings peddling fear.

That’s one reason why I found it so discouraging when the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission went out of business last year. Its demise suggested that it’s less fashionable than it used to be to counteract hatred.

Edmund Burke told us long ago and it remains true that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

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