Word: haling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Before last week, it was hard to imagine Matthew Hale ever amounting to much. Hale, 27, runs a racist hate group he grandly named the World Church of the Creator. But even as one of the largest such organizations in the nation, WCOTC has at most a few thousand dues-paying $35-a-year members, many of whom were recruited on the Internet and have never so much as gathered in a beer hall. The group's headquarters is Hale's bedroom in his dad's house in East Peoria, Ill. It measures members' success by the number of racist...
Unfortunately, last week the answer seemed to be yes. Benjamin Smith, a 21-year-old WCOTC sympathizer who had been so close to Hale he moved to Peoria to be near him, recently became convinced that the group's goal of white victory in the coming racial holy war couldn't be achieved through propaganda alone. Setting off July 2 from the Chicago suburbs where he was raised, Smith shot 11 Asian Americans, blacks and Jews, killing two, before committing suicide July 4 in southern Illinois...
...blow-dried Hale doesn't like to discuss these violence-prone members. He insisted last week that Smith didn't represent WCOTC. "We don't condone these actions," he told TIME. But neither would he condemn the murders. Instead, WCOTC staged a live Internet chat to keep up last week's publicity...
Lawyers for antihate groups are considering lawsuits against WCOTC on behalf of Smith's victims, one of whom filed his own suit on Friday. The broader suits would probably charge that Hale and his group's rhetoric were responsible for Smith's shooting spree. Proving anything will be difficult, but antihate lawyers hope such a lawsuit might bankrupt the group. In 1994 the Southern Poverty Law Center won a $1 million fine against the WCOTC's previous incarnation--called simply the Church of the Creator, a group founded by a former Florida legislator--because of its ties to violence...
Dershowitz said it was unlikely that he would have represented Hale in any event. He had originally agreed to represent him on the condition that all fees from the case go to anti-hate groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. And he had said he would drop out of the case if Hale and his organization did not commit themselves fully to non-violence...