News Roundup for June 23, 2011
A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit over “blatantly racist and offensive” comments made by white Philadelphia officers on the popular police Internet forum Domelights.com. The settlement requires the city to hire an anti-discrimination consultant as well as enhance anti-discrimination training within the department.
Two New York men pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to blow up a Manhattan synagogue. The two men, both immigrants from North Africa, are accused of attempting to purchase weapons from undercover NYPD detectives and planned to carry out a bomb attack on an unnamed synagogue. The men are suspected of being lone wolves, with no connection to international terrorist groups.
A member of the white supremacist group Battalion 14 of North East White Pride was sentenced to 30 months in prison Wednesday for attempting to sell guns to an associate of the Ku Klux Klan. William Bolton is the third man to be charged in the conspiracy to obtain weapons for other racist groups in order to raise the standing of the Connecticut gang in the white nationalist community.
Two Orange County skinheads have pleaded guilty to a 2009 home invasion in which the two, and a third man, assaulted a female victim. The skinheads were sent to the house by another man who told them they would find $7,000 in cash as well as 50 pounds of marijuana.
The acquittal of Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders today on hate speech charges has drawn widespread praise across the radical-right world, including commentators such as Robert Spencer, who praised the ruling as a “decisive defeat for the Islamic supremacist forces,” and Pamela Gellar, who described Wilders as “our proxy” as “the West is on trial.”
