Task Force Wants To Create Climate Intolerant Of Hate

(From For the Record, November 11, 1998:) Human rights meeting time: A meeting of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force, set for 7 p.m. Thursday at the Sandpoint Community Hall, is open to the public. Recent mailings and community reaction will be discussed.

Recent mass mailings of a racist poster and a video promoting the Aryan Nations will be discussed at a meeting this week of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force.

The meeting will focus on community response to such mailings, task force chairwoman Gretchen AlbrechtHellar said Monday. It is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday in the Sandpoint Community Hall.

The task force also will discuss last summer’s Aryan Nations parade in Coeur d’Alene.

“The last six months have been disturbing ones for people committed to human rights locally,” Albrecht-Hellar said.

“Human rights issues and the negative image that North Idaho is a haven for extremists is not just the concern of the task force, but it is a concern for the vast majority of citizens of our area,” she said.

“The best way to combat this image is not just to react to actions undertaken by extremist groups, but to actively create an environment in which they know that their actions will not be accepted or tolerated.

“We are interested in what activities the community can do to create a positive environment for human rights concerns and the appropriate role of the task force in those activities,” she said.

In August, thousands of households in Kootenai and Bonner counties received large envelopes in the mail containing an anti-Semitic booklet and a full-color poster.

The same packet recently has been placed on car windshields outside various Sandpoint churches.

The poster claims to document the superiority of the white race in a religious doctrine known as Christian Identity.

That mailing was followed in October by the distribution of the same booklet, “The Hidden Tyranny,” along with a videotape interview of Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.

Butler’s organization, based near Hayden Lake, also preaches Christian Identity religious doctrine, commingled with neo-Nazism.

The booklet, poster and video were distributed by a group calling itself “The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger.”

Carl E. Story and R. Vincent Bert, both of Sandpoint, are listed as representatives of the organization. They have past ties with America’s Promise Ministries, another Christian Identity church, in Sandpoint.

This sidebar appeared with the story: WHAT’S NEXT The task force meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday in the Sandpoint Community Hall.