MEL BROOKS WEPT:

LETTER FROM HERNDON, VA.: White Nationalist Conference Ponders Whether Jews and Nazis Can Get Along (JONATHAN TILOVE, March 3, 2006, The Forward)

For the small, hardy band of right-wing Jews who attended this past weekend's American Renaissance Conference, the biennial gathering of white nationalists ended on a sour note.

The events Saturday, February 25, passed without major incident. But then, late Sunday morning, none other than former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke approached the microphone on the floor during the question-and-answer session for French writer Guillaume Faye. After congratulating Faye for stirring remarks that "touched my genes," Duke asked if there weren't an even more insidious threat to the West than Islam.

"There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit," Duke said.

"Tell us, tell us," came a call from the back of the room.

"I'm not going to say it," Duke said to rising laughter.

But Michael Hart, a squat, balding Jewish astrophysicist from Maryland, was not amused. He rose from his seat, strode toward Duke (who loomed over him like an Aryan giant), spit out a curse — "You f...ing Nazi, you've disgraced this meeting" — and exited.

As it happens, only a few minutes earlier Hart, a mainstay of American Renaissance conferences, had been trying to reassure Herschel Elias, a first-time attendee from suburban Philadelphia, that he should not let his observation that the meeting was "infiltrated by Nazis and Holocaust deniers" ruin his impression of American Renaissance.

Gosh, Jews have had such success with nationalism in the past....

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2006 4:50 PM