Shermon Burgess : Pillar of the Community
Neil Erikson. Shermon Burgess. Ban Islam Party (2017).
Crikey!
Australian anti-Islamic activist Shermon Burgess becomes the latest far-right figure to convert to Islam, Scobie McKay, Crikey, March 3, 2023.
Apparently, ‘The Great Aussie Patriot’ (AKA the man who once sang the smash-hit ‘Shit On A Mosque’ by Eureka Brigade) ‘confirmed to Crikey that he and another former anti-Islamic activist had taken their Shahada, an Arabic term for an Islamic oath, had converted to the religion and had been welcomed by his local mosque’.
When I first encountered Burgess in 2014 he was an ‘atheist’ struggling valiantly with fellow right-wing loon Ralph Cerminara to establish an ‘Australian Defence League’. The ADL experienced limited success but Burgess rose to fame in 2015 as the face of ‘Reclaim Australia’ (2015–2016) and then the ‘United Patriots Front’ (2015–2017), a coalition of neo-Nazis and Christian fundamentalists. Then identifying as both a ‘patriot’ and a ‘Christian’, after Reclaim and the UPF imploded, Burgess became an ‘Odinist’, a ‘Viking’ and a ‘National Socialist’. Now, however, he’s a ‘Muslim’. As I remarked elsewhere, given his rapid transition from one personality and identity to the next, there’s really no guarantee that he won’t be a ‘Buddhist’ by this time next year; his various performances are mostly aimed at gaining attention (which he interprets as validation, ie: Actually Being Some Body Who Matters) and would be better read as symptomatic of a chronic, underlying personal instability. That’s also why everything he claims should be taken with a grain truck of salt.
Along with noting that ‘Weird Mike’ Cernovich has been making positive noises, Scobie identifies Andrew Tate, live-streamer and anti-LGBTQIA+ influencer “Sneako”, ‘Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ former right-hand man Joram van Klaveren’, ‘Arthur Wagner, a leading party official for the far-right German party Alternative for Germany’ and ‘Maxene Buttey, a local councillor for the far-right party Front National’ as recent high-profile right-wing converts to Islam. He notes that other ‘members of the far-right, such as self-proclaimed “theocratic-fascist” Matt Walsh and commentators Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson, have been capitalising on their new-found popularity amongst the Muslim community’.
Shermon Burgess.
(I called it on June 23, 2015.)
A convert unmentioned in the article is Devon Arthurs, the Atomwaffen Division member who, after discovering a new perspective on life, murdered his neo-Nazi housemates. At the time:
He told police he shot dead two of his roommates inside the apartment because they disrespected his new faith.
And the story kept growing stranger.
As the police and Arthurs reached the apartment, a man in military camouflage sat outside — in tears. He was the fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, 21. He’d just returned from his job as a private in the National Guard and had discovered his two dead roommates inside.
Poor Brandon.
Exposure to Radiation is Bad for Your Health
In any case, Russell was also a member of Atomwaffen (indeed its founder) and, after Arthurs was arrested and sent to prison/hospital for his crimes, Russell did five years for the unlawful storage of explosive materials, got out, and immediately set about getting the band back together (in order to help other things fall apart). That is, ‘Leaked chats, documents and online materials have revealed that Atomwaffen Division (AWD) founder Brandon Clint Russell was secretly but tirelessly active as a white-power propagandist and organizer between his release from prison in 2021 and his arrest on charges of plotting terror attacks’ (Leaked Chats, Documents Show Atomwaffen Founder’s Path to Terror Plot, Hannah Gais and Jason Wilson, Hatewatch, February 23, 2023).
See/hear also : 180: The Brief Return of Brandon Russell – Atomwaffen’s Latest Fail, The Empire Never Ended, February 23, 2023.
More recently, another neo-Nazi terror fangrrl has been Exposed: Dallas Humber, Narrator Of Neo-Nazi ‘Terrorgram,’ Promoter Of Mass Shootings (Christopher Mathias, Huffington Post, March 2, 2023):
The Terrorgram Collective is at the heart of the international neo-Nazi accelerationist movement, the most extreme and explicit iteration of white supremacism, which advocates deadly violence and other acts of destruction to hasten the collapse of society so that a whites-only world can be built in its place. The collective produces propaganda — audiobooks, videos and memes — that travels across the web in hopes of inspiring the next Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 Muslims in two mosques; the next El Paso shooter, who killed 22 Hispanic people in a Walmart; the next Pittsburgh shooter, who killed 11 Jews in a synagogue; and the next Buffalo shooter, who killed 10 Black Americans in a grocery store …
Despite the extreme nature of this propaganda, and its direct influence on the Bratislava shooter, the identities of the people behind the Terrorgram Collective, who use pseudonyms to post their bile, have remained unknown — until now.
Evidence compiled by a coalition of anonymous antifascist researchers — including from SoCal Research Club, @WizardAFA, @SunlightAFA and @FashFreeNW — and published this week on Left Coast Right Watch, an investigative news outlet, reveals that one of the Terrorgram Collective’s main propagandists is Dallas Erin Humber, a 33-year-old woman living in Sacramento, California.
Another aspiring mass murderer belonging to a closely-related group was yesterday ‘sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in plotting to kill fellow service members at a US military base in Turkey. Part of a neo-Nazi, pro-jihadist group known as the Order of the Nine Angles (O9A), Ethan Melzer, now 24, provided sensitive details about his unit, including locations, security and troop movements, to the extremist group in connection with its plot to attack the base and kill his fellow soldiers, according to the Justice Department.’ For more on 09A, see : Yeah Nah Pasaran! #058 w H.E. Upchurch on Iron March & 09A : March 4, 2021 | Order of Nine Angles: What is this obscure Nazi Satanist group?, Daniel De Simone, BBC, June 23, 2020 | Order of Nine Angles, Nick Lowles, Hope Not Hate, February 16, 2019.
Kangaroo Reich
Locally, several members of Tom Sewell’s European Australian Movement/National Socialist Network — currently being hosted by Tim Lutze’s Legacy Boxing Gym @ Industrial Drive, West Sunshine — have been in the news after being in trouble with the law. In Adelaide, Cameron Brodie-Hall (AKA IronMarch user ‘Arthur Calwell’), who has been charged with ‘possessing both a document or record containing information likely to be used in a terrorism act, and extremist material’, has had another application for bail rejected and seems destined to remain behind bars until his trial (currently scheduled for January 2024). Curiously, ‘A bedroom filled with fascist propaganda is no more indicative of criminal intent than would be “reading up on” smoking cannabis’ Brodie-Hall told the court, and his lawyer has argued that:
it would be “impermissible” under law to take those matters into account when determining his client’s suitability for bail. “Simply because you have an interest in something – it might be cars, the Catholic faith or mysteries of the past – doesn’t mean you’re in possession of illegal items,” he said. “A person may have an interest in cannabis and have read up on all of that, but that doesn’t mean that the cannabis located in the common room is his cannabis.”
Previously (February 21), another Adelaide neo-Nazi, Patrick Patmore, escaped a prison sentence after being ‘found in possession of a small explosive, weapons and extremist material’ and ‘will serve at least 19 months on home detention’ instead. Further, ‘The court heard he remained a member of the National Socialist Network, but had engaged in programs designed to deradicalise extremists’.
So … yeah.
See also : Accused supporter of Adelaide neo-Nazi movement Cameron Brodie-Hall applies for home detention bail, Meaghan Dillon, ABC, August 30, 2022 | Mark joined a men’s fitness club. Now it’s become an armed neo-Nazi cell, Henry Zwartz, SBS, October 8, 2021.
Meanwhile, in sunny Queensland, ‘James Lachlan Morrison (Warrior Path Active Club), Zachary Mark Makkinga (National Socialist Network) and Christian Boyle (National Socialist Movement) were all in court last this week on charges including wilful damage and public nuisance. Morrison and Boyle are both ex-NSN.’ See also : Police seize neo-Nazi paraphernalia in series of raids across south-east Queensland, Eden Gillespie, The Guardian, January 19, 2023.
Let’s hope it all ends well eh?
Finally:
• Spencer Sunshine has reviewed Peter Staudenmeier’s Ecology Contested: Environmental Politics between Left and Right for It’s Going Down, describing it as a ‘timely reminder that ecofascism is not just not a new problem, but also one that provides a bridge between the far-Right and the Left and anarchists. His book is a call, in the best radical environmental style, to blockade that bridge and stop fascists from entering radical circles.’
• SunlightAFA have published ‘Fash Pack 2023: Over 1000 PDFs of Nazi Unmaskings and the Far-Right’ which is pretty much what it says on the tin and contains a great deal of infos on nazis, fascists and others on the far-right in the United States.
