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Pelican

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simoom2/03/2010 10:22:29 am PST

re: #540 RadicalModerate

The hit just keep on coming for James O’Keefe -

From Salon:

A photo of the righty stuntman at a white-nationalist confab illustrates a career marked by racial resentment

From the article:

According to One Peoples Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget … who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “ni**ers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

I’m currently wait-and-see on this story because of how the supporting photographic evidence is presented. For whatever reason both Salon and the source website aren’t including most of the image. Salon includes a bizarre composite with the only real parts being O’Keefe’s head and neck (with his clothing drawn on, and a pasted in American Renaissance website as the background) while the website that claims to be the source of the photo has everything but O’Keefe cropped out.

That online diary part sounds pretty damning though — I’m going to go see if I can find it on Kos.