Jesse James Nazi picture: A sieg heil, Hitler style
Jesse James Nazi picture: A sieg heil, Hitler style
James, Sandra Bullock’s husband (the guy who allegedly messed around with several mistresses, foremost tattoo model Michelle “Bombshell” McGee), is in a photo wearing a Nazi officer’s hat. US Weekly got the picture, as Inside Edition reported last night. Of course the photo is similar to one of McGee decked out like a Nazi, making it seem all the more salacious, particularly given Bullock’s recent tearful Oscar acceptance speech in which she singled out her hubby as the sort of guy who stood by her. The couple has since reportedly split and it can’t help that James is doin’ the ol’ “sieg heil” while holding his fingers under his nose as if to impersonate Hitler.
The image was taken in 2004, according to IE, apparently a time when James and Bullock were dating. James told sources told IE he’s “not a neo-Nazi” and from the photo, one could conclude he was just mocking Nazis.
Meanwhile, People magazine reports that James entered a treatment facility in the wake of the mistress scandal that has brought forth four women. People didn’t say much about the treatment, but according to an unnamed source it was “100 percent James’s own idea” that he enter the facility, where he has been since March 26.
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Dog Attacks Police Car, Chews Bumper Off
Dog Attacks Police Car, Chews Bumper Off
CHATTANOOGA (CNN) — They say a dog is man’s best friend. But that obviously doesn’t always extend to a human’s car.
A Tennessee dog is headed to obedience school, as punishment for attacking two city police cruisers.
Dashboard camera video shows Winston, a mixed-breed pooch from Chattanooga, ripping the front bumper off one car, and chewing two tires.
Winston’s owners said the pup had never caused any trouble before, and that something in particular must have set him off.
But police gave them a citation for having a “potentially-dangerous dog.”
On Thursday, a Hamilton County judge released Winston back into the care of his owners, and ordered them to take Winston to obedience and “good canine citizen” classes.
Winston will also have to wear a tag declaring that he is “potentially dangerous.”
Share on FacebookTeen arrested in racist Wal-Mart announcement
Teen arrested in racist Wal-Mart announcement
NEW YORK, New York (NBC) — A 16-year-old boy patronizing a Wal-Mart store in southern New Jersey took over the public-address system and ordered black people to leave, angering customers and prompting company leaders to apologize, police said today.
The unidentified teenager, who is from Atlantic County, N.J., was collared Friday evening on charges of harassment and bias intimidation, police said today. Authorities released the suspect to the custody of his parents.
Several shoppers have been boycotting the retailer since last Sunday when someone accessed the Washington Township, N.J. store’s public address system and announced: “Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now.”
The store immediately admonished the remarks and issued an apology to shoppers in the store and then through the media several days later.
Officials are staying tight-lipped on the arrest, but more details are expected to be released at a press conference Saturday. They won’t release the boy’s name because he’s a juvenile, and they don’t know whether he has an attorney.
“This was an extremely disturbing event on many levels,” Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean Dalton said at a news conference. “Any statements like these that can cause harm or grave concern must be addressed as quickly we possibly can.”
Authorities wouldn’t say whether the announcement was planned or made impulsively. Police said they were also investigating a teenage boy who accompanied the suspect to the store, but had not charged the other boy.
In the wake of the incident, angry and offended customers lambasted the store for the ease at which someone could make a storewide page through several phones inside the store.
Wal-Mart said Friday that an internal investigation uncovered new evidence suggesting that a shopper may have made the page. The company said it has already updated the store’s intercom system to prevent a similar incident from happening again.
Washington Township Police and the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office have been investigating the case as a possible hate crime.
It was the latest in a series of problems the retailer has had in its dealings with minorities and women.
There have been several past instances of black customers claiming they were treated unfairly at Walmart stores, and the company faced lawsuits alleging that women were passed over in favor of men for pay raises and promotions.
In February 2009, the retailer paid $17.5 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in its hiring of truck drivers.
And the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the company in May 2009, claiming some Hispanic employees at a Sam’s Club subsidiary in California were subjected to a hostile work environment. That suit alleges managers failed to stop repeated verbal harassment, including the use of derogatory words, against employees of Mexican descent.
However, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has said the company has worked hard in recent years to show it cares about diversity.
Share on FacebookPolice make arrest in connection with Walmart racist comment announced over PA system
Police make arrest in connection with Walmart racist comment announced over PA system
Friday, the police arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with a racist comment made over the Walmart PA system last Sunday night. The racist comment was: “All blacks need to leave the store.”
The boy’s name has not been released, but New Jersey police said that he was charged with bias and intimidation and harassment. The boy faces up to one year in a juvenile detention center.
The local police said that the suspect, and an adult woman and man were seen near the phone and seen rushing out of the store after the incident.
People in the community were enraged after the comment was made at the Walmart store. After the racist comment was made at the New Jersey Walmart store, store managers contacted the police department, and an investigation was opened.
“The incident is being investigated by both law enforcement agencies as a suspected bias intimidation crime,” local authorities said.
A spokesman for Walmart, Lorenzo Lopez said that Walmart is “just as appalled by this as anyone.” “Whoever did this is wrong and acted in an inappropriate manner,” Lopez said. “Clearly this is unacceptable,” CNN reported.
“We don’t think it was an associate, but we are working with police to make that proper determination,” said Lopez. “The 24-hour superstore has some 700 employees, many of them part-time,” Lopez said.
Utah has 34 Walmart Super Centers, 2 discount stores, 5 neighborhood markets, 8 Sam’s Clubs and 3 distribution centers, and as of September 2009 Walmart employed over 17,000 people in Utah.
Share on FacebookDresden neo-Nazi march runs into human chain
BERLIN — Some 5,000 members of neo-Nazi and skinhead groups marched in the eastern German city of Dresden on Saturday, countered by a human chain of 10,000 demonstrators who opposed them.
For more than a decade, right-wing groups have used the anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 to advance their agenda.
The bombing, which took place for three days from Feb. 13, 1945, created a firestorm that left the city in ruins.
The National Democratic Party, skinheads and other right-wing groups have used the bombing of the Saxon city to present Germany as a victim in World War II.
The NDP successfully retained its presence in the Saxon state assembly after it won more than 5 percent of the vote in state elections last August.
While such groups have claimed that hundreds of thousands died in the 1945 firebombing, a group of historians commissioned by the city two years ago estimated the true number of deaths at about 25,000.
The counterdemonstration, across the Elbe River, was organized by the city government, according to a statement on the city’s Web site.
“When we take each other by the hands now, we put a strong protective chain around our city,” Mayor Helma Orosz said in the statement. “We confront old and new Nazis, who try to misuse our day of mourning.”
There were some minor skirmishes, with a car flipped over and some barricades set ablaze but quickly extinguished.
Share on FacebookChanging Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap
WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.
Pawel in the Warsaw synagogue. A former truck driver and neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, 33, has since become an Orthodox Jew, covering his shaved head with a yarmulke and shedding his fascist ideology for the Torah.
“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”
Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.
Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.
Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.
Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.
Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.
“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”
The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.
In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.
Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.
Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.
“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”
One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.
Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.
“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”
Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.
When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.
“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”
Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.
“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”
At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.
Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”
And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.
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