UPDATE: As reported last week, a new Neo-Nazi group called Victory Forever targeted a high school in San Francisco by running an ad for “Free Music Downloads” in its weekly newspaper. However, the only free music downloads available on the site are for white power music that is highly anti-Semitic and racially charged.
Apparently, there has been another victim of the group’s campaign, Indianapolis’ Carmel High School’s newspaper, the HiLite, published the ad in its Friday edition for the cost of $60. School administrators sent out a mass voice mail to parents after the discovery of the oversight, warning them about Victory Forever and calling the incident “an inadvertent mistake.”
The website has an online store selling music CDs, T-shirts, and Swastika Stickers. It also offers twenty-one free hate-filled e-books including, “Did 6 Million Really Die?”, “Mein Kampf”, and “The White Man’s Bible.” It also links to videos on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated story of Jewish conspiracy.
Finally, a spokesman for Victory Forever has made a comment on the incidents. Mike Shields told The Indianapolis Star that the group had chosen Carmel High School because its student population, at 4,200 students, is one of the largest in the state, providing them “a great opportunity to spread [their] message”.
Shields stated that he rejected labels such as white supremacist, claiming the group is motivated by a desire to survive, not hate. According to him, Victory Forever is in the middle of a campaign to recruit “white youth all across America to fight for the survival of the white race.”
This is a troubling development because it indicates that this group does not plan to stop anytime soon and as a result of high school newspapers’ relaxed security policies they will continue to be successful.
This campaign is reminiscent of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, which has been placing ads in U.S. college newspapers all this year, questioning the existence of the Holocaust. The impact of those ads was so strong that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Hillel recently put out a resource guide, called Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements, in order to help students combat anti-Semitism on college campuses.
