HEAT AND HATE: THE ANTI-HISPANIC CROWD HAVE A RALLY IN ARIZONA

Ancient land … ancient tribes….ancient territories of rolling dusty hills …battles won…battles lost…who is allowed and who is not allowed to stay and go…our laws are full of those who decide…and very little voice for those with an even smaller voice…or maybe its not its not that small…cuz…”Dapper” Dan Smeriglio has been having a hard time since Americans for Legal Immigration head William Gheen’s “freak out”. As many know, Smeriglio is not so “dapper” in our book and we were able to show how close he was – and still is – to white supremacists as he cozies up to elected officials. And that’s a problem. An old proverb of the seventies was : “never look into a mirror while on acid, the mirror will show you things about yourself you don’t want to see. Gheen looked into Smeriglio’s mirror on the wall and didn’t like who looked back. And that is why a paltry number compared to what Smeriglio wanted turned out for his pro-Arizona rally last weekend. Being that we had a hand in screwing up his little rally, we trekked out to Phoenix, along with the folks at Lady Liberty’s Lamp, to take in the sight ourselves (LLL’s link provides photos). We were able to hook up with some good people out in Arizona that helped us out and we want to thank them. We also got a whole lot of ugly to show you. You can’t have an immigration rally without white supremacists and neo-Nazis coming out, and some blogs like the Phoenix New Times and Imagine2050 didn’t sleep on reporting about them, even as the rest of their local media did. We will help that along with our report, which includes photos courtesy of Lady Liberty’s Lamp and this video from award-winning videographer Dennis Gilman, who is out there closely following the Arizona debacle. And we do mean debacle. Arizona even has the Ron Paul folks against them. This BS will not be around long, and if people like Dan Smeriglio are heading up campaigns like this, the BS will be on the fast track to obscurity.

One People’s Project & Lady Liberty’s Lamp

PHOENIX, AZ-Attendees of the pro-Arizona rally called “Phoenix Rising” held last Saturday tried to make it abundantly clear through their placards, multiracial speakers and the words from the podium that their advocacy for the “Papers Please” SB 1070 law was not about hatred of one race over another, and that they were not neo-Nazis or white supremacists.

Just as abundant however, were several attendees, speakers and sponsors that suggested otherwise. The assortment of white supremacists and their associates was primarily the reason why this particular rally was controversial even before it began.

The rally taking place at Wesley Bolin Plaza, right across the street from the Arizona Statehouse, brought out anti-immigrant activists from around the Western part of the country. Most news reports have said that “hundreds” came out to Phoenix, the Orange County Register set the number at 700, and the AZCentral website set the number at a debatable 3,000. Regardless, the number of attendees fell far short of the 10,000-20,000 they had expected, and most certainly short of the tens of thousands that participated in pro-immigration rally in Phoenix the weekend prior.

Organizers attempted to blame the 110 degree heat on the poor attendance. Indeed, many attendees passed out from heat exhaustion, which was not helped by the fact that unlike other Arizona rallies, organizers charged for water instead of providing it for free. There was, however another factor making the attendance low. Preceding the rally, the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), a major anti-immigration group that was originally co-sponsoring the rally, pulled out after evidence surfaced confirming one of those organizers, Voice of the People USA’s Daniel Smeriglio of Hazelton, PA, was closely associated with neo-Nazi groups and individuals, most notably Keystone United in Pennsylvania. On the discussion board for the ALIPAC website, William Gheen has been defending his decision to not only pull out of the June 5th rally, but any rallies in the month of June because of those associations. “I’ve been closer to Dan Smeriglio than anyone in this movement and I see two very distinct patterns out of him,” he wrote in one post, “Lie after lie and extremists showing up at his events and now on his Facebook account and inside his account as well.”

This was not the first time Smeriglio’s associations with white supremacists decimated one of his rallies. In September 2007, Voice of the People held a rally on the steps of the Pennsylvania State House in Harrisburg, PA, and not only invited the anti-Semitic rock band Poker Face to perform, but also John Clark, a member of Americans for Immigration Control (AIC) to serve as an emcee. AIC’s founder John Vinson is a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens. When word got out about those connections, other more prominent speakers dropped out of the event, and the rally, which was supposed to turn out 6,000, had an attendance of less than 200, most of them members of Keystone United, the Nationalist Coalition and posters to the white supremacist website Stormfront. In an Phoenix New Times article, Smeriglio, who said he was part Jewish – and later says that his family came from Ireland and Italy, flatly denied any involvement with Keystone United, particularly Steve Smith, who has been a participant in several Voice of the People rallies, and even leading them via megaphones. “Steve Smith?” he told the New Times. “Don’t know the man personally. I don’t do background checks on people that come to the rallies. I don’t have connections to these people, because they threaten my life just as much as anyone else.”

In addition to Smith, Smeriglio has also associated with Erick Weigel a known associate of the Nationalist Coalition, and Ciaran Palmer who is seen regularly among white supremacists in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Smeriglio even spoke at a Tea Party event in Belvidere, NJ where Weigel lives, and both Weigel and Palmer have been seen among the neo-Nazis when they attended Voice of the People rallies. Both are also close associates of Keystone United. Much has been made about the fact that Smith and Weigel were listed as “friends” on Smeriglio’s personal Facebook account, but after the controversy they were removed. Palmer had never been referenced however, and she remains on his account.

There was a procession of bikers that made their way to the protest. The three on top were the most…interesting. In teh top photo, the guy in the yellow cap has a red Celtic Cross on his forearm with a shamrock in the center of it. The Celtic Cross is not a racist symbol, but when the shamrock comes into play, we might be talking Aryan Brotherhood. Now this will more than likely be explained away, but along comes the guy on the left, who’s shirt, seen in the bottom photo, has been seen on many a blog because it is hyping up a Blood and Honor-associated crew called the “White Boy Society”. That can’t be explained away.

At the rally, many of the hatemongers made no bones about what their affiliations were. One person wore had a celtic cross with a shamrock tattoo on his arm, the shamrock often associated with Aryan Brotherhood. Next to him was another person wore the colors of the “White Boy Society” a biker crew with ties to Combat 18 and Blood and Honor. Council of Conservative Citizens associate Glenn Spencer maintained a booth for his group American Border Patrol, the group best known for their promotion of the conspiracy theory that Mexicans are crossing the border in an attempt to take back the
Southwestern United States for Mexico. ABP and Numbers USA were two of the more questionable sponsors of this rally, which also featured equally questionable speakers like Barbara Coe from California Citizens for Immigration Reform and Kevin DeAnna from Youth for Western Civilization (YWC). The organization which fights against what they call “radical multiculturalism, socialism, and mass immigration” and boasts Former congressperson Tom Tancredo as an honorary chair, held a reception at the Phoenix Wyndam with Tancredo later that evening. At the rally, Tancredo introduced DeAnna to the assembled, and DeAnna called upon them to get involved in the kind of work they do long after the rallies are over. “The stakes could not be higher,” DeAnna told the crowd. “If they break us here in Arizona, they can break us anywhere, and we will lose our country. We cannot let this happen.”

Tancredo was not deterred from the rally’s controversy and had defended Smeriglio in a statement found on the rally’s official website when the controversy started, writing that the charges against him “are the worst kind of character assassination that no decent person in politics, left, right or center, should condone.” Curiously, when Tancredo spoke to a Colorado reporter for the alternative weekly Westword, regarding this rally he said that he never met Smeriglio, even though Smeriglio was with him at a rally in Newark, NJ in 2007. The rally’s controversy also did not deter other prominent figures from speaking, like Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio or Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce who wrote the controversial SB1070 law and has also been questioned for his own white supremacist ties. Also speaking was Pennsylvania State Senator Daryl Metcalfe, who weeks before this rally announced legislation for his state similar to Arizona’s SB1070 law, doing so at a press conference that included Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Dan Smeriglio standing with him.

Some anti-immigration activists of color also spoke to the crowd, but many of them are members of Choose Black America and the Hispanic organization You Don’t Speak For Me, organizations founded by FAIR in an effort to encourage Blacks and Hispanics to join them. Dan Stein was recently on the Rachel Maddow show however, and was excoriated for his groups’ work with white supremacists. That history has made Choose Black America and You Don’t Speak For Me seem less than sincere to critics.

Ted Hayes, an African American activist seemed to know his audience pretty well as he called Al Sharpton a “traitor” that he will make a citizen’s arrest on by summer’s end, and accepted blame as a black man for slavery. “We are just as responsible as anybody else, and I would say to you, that you my white brothers and sisters have come closer to us black people than we have come to you. And I apologize for that,” he said.

There was small opposition while this event took place from some local activists of color, as well as supporters of Ron Paul, who protested this event because of the laws’ apparent disregard for the fourth amendment. Christopher Broughton spoke with a mock German accent through a megaphone demanding to see the papers of the “Phoenix Rising” attendees. Broughton, a former employee of a Tempe plastic mold manufacturer, is no leftist protestor, however. Last summer, he made a local name for himself when he brought a loaded assault rifle to a demonstration outside where President Obama was speaking in downtown Phoenix. That caused a lot of concern about Broughton because he is also reportedly a member of the Faithful Word Baptist Church, whose pastor Steven Anderson caught fire just before Obama’s visit said publicly “I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell. When I go to bed tonight, that’s how I’m going to pray.”

According to the anti-immigration hate site VDARE, Smeriglio is planning for a second rally in August at the Alamo in San Antonio, TX