Hate groups try to capitalize on Sept. 11

Many such groups focus on the growing number of newcomers to the US as a threat to the "Aryan race," particularly in the weeks following the recent terrorist attacks.

"They're blaming immigration for the events of Sept. 11," says Devin Burghart, author of the Center for New Community's report. "They're out there trying to mobilize on that very issue."

Even before the recent attacks, such groups were seen as a danger to domestic security.

"On the national level, formal right-wing hate groups, such as the World Church of the Creator and the Aryan Nations, represent a continuing terrorist threat," former FBI Director Louis Freeh told the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last May.

But in a new and somewhat ironic development, some right-wing radicals find themselves supporting terrorists they might otherwise lump together with what they consider to be subhuman "mud people."

The Aryan Nations proclaims the Middle Eastern attackers in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania to have been "Islamic freedom fighters."

There may even be ties between US hatemongers and terrorists abroad. Intelligence officials know of such connections dating back to at least 1987, when a meeting of US white supremacists and Arab radicals - united in their opposition to Israel - took place in Libya. More recently, a meeting between US and European Holocaust deniers was to have taken place in Beirut. But under pressure from American Jewish groups, the Lebanese government refused permission for the meeting.

Still, the messages of Pierce of the National Alliance, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and other right-wing extremists have been broadcast from Iran and Iraq.

"We are also concerned with some people in the Middle East who have begun reproducing the propaganda of American right-wing extremists - alleging Israeli complicity in the 9/11 attacks, for example," says Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League, a historian specializing in antigovernment radicals.

Some observers see the possibility that US extremists may have been in cahoots with foreign sources to plan and carry out the recent anthrax attacks.

"US government experts do not seem to have seriously considered the possibility that Middle Eastern terrorists might have slipped some weapons-lab anthrax to a right-wing ally in the US," says Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass., a leading authority on such groups.

There is also concern that European right-wingers - philosophical soulmates of the National Alliance, Aryan Nations, and other US white supremacist organizations - may have helped Osama bin Laden. Ahmen Huber, a Swiss national reportedly connected to both Islamic fundamentalism and the neo-Nazi movement there, was questioned last week about his financial support for Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist organization.

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