Mark Townsend

Saturday 15 October 2016 17.51 BST Last modified on Saturday 15 October 2016 18.04 BST

One of the most notorious Ku Klux Klan groups is stepping up attempts to ignite race war across the US with a call to arms against black people and violent support of the White Lives Matter campaign.

An inside account from within the Loyal White Knights of the KKK also reveals that the group is linked to stabbings of anti-fascists, Holocaust denial, threats to attack gay men and extreme anti-Black Lives Matter propaganda.

During a 15-month online infiltration of the Klan, British anti-racist group Hope Not Hate obtained the membership list of what is described as the largest KKK faction, a list of 270 individuals including police officers. (The group claims it has 3,000 members.) Most hailed from southern states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, although there was a considerable cohort from the Midwest, the east coast and California.

Among them is a 28-year-old British man from Suffolk who claims to be a member of the Knights Templar, an “interdenominational association of active Christians”. Another is a 44-year-old Frenchman based in Marseille who recently uploaded a series of anti-Muslim pictures to a secret Klan chatroom.

Investigators also obtained a list of members expelled from the Loyal White Knights for so-called violations, ranging from drug use to sleeping with “a Jew whore” or a Mexican, watching Asian porn or having a “mixed child”, which made them a “race traitor”.

Based in North Carolina, the Loyal White Knights was founded in 2012 by Chris Barker, a far-right supporter who last year was linked to a plot by a New York white supremacist convicted of conspiring to use a remote-controlled radiation device he called “Hiroshima on a light switch” to harm Muslims.

Barker is a contentious figure among Klansmen, partly because of his connections to neo-Nazis. He recently became part of the Aryan Nationalist Alliance, an extreme coalition of white nationalist groups, including notorious US organisations such as Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker Party.

Heimbach , who is dubbed the “face of a new generation of white nationalists” by critics, and has advocated racial segregation – was banned from entering the UK last year by Theresa May, who was then home secretary.

Hope Not Hate’s investigation found considerable evidence that Loyal White Knights retains its desire for extreme racist violence, seeking to exploit the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant climate fostered by Donald Trump.

“Once inside, we came across some of the worst racism we have ever encountered and learned about their dangerous racist ideology, witnessing a culture which encouraged extreme violence,” said one of the infiltrators.

It also found that the Klan is actively involved in “Knight Rides”, where members drive around communities at night and throw white supremacist leaflets on to the lawns of black people’s homes.

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read full article at source: http://archive.is/BtvOx