White Supremacists Disrupt Arkansas Holocaust Remembrance Event

White Supremacists Disrupt Arkansas Holocaust Remembrance Event

White Supremacists Disrupt Arkansas Holocaust Remembrance Event
Video screenshot
The white supremacist group was protesting ADL

Residents of the town of Russellville in Arkansas are used to seeing Holocaust Remembrance Day every year. The event used to be a peaceful one, with surviving Holocaust concentration camp victims and Second World War veterans giving speeches and warning the audience about the dangers of Nazism. Sir Beryl Wolfson is one of them. The now 96-year-old witnessed the liberation of the Holocaust concentration camps. He traveled across the state to remind Americans about Nazism and what it can do. The Holocaust Remembrance Day was happening for many years now without any incident. In 2019, however, the event got interrupted by belligerent protestors waving anti-Semitic signs. One sign even suggested the idea of the non-existence of the Holocaust, before adding that it should have happened. The Protester carried a cross and a big Jesus portrait. There were also Nazi and Christian flags. The anti-Semitic sign was beyond the borderline of civility, reading “YHWH has the oven preheated.”

White Supremacists Disrupt Arkansas Holocaust Remembrance Event[/tweetthis]

The organizer of the Holocaust Remembrance Day event, Joyce Griffis, told the media that she was shocked to find that demonstrators talked to them like they were objects suited down to talk to. The demonstrators at the event were linked with a white supremacist group going by the name Shieldwall. The local group, according to Billy Roper, its spokesperson, was protesting the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Roper is well known in the right wing and right-wing watch circles, being the latest progeny from a family which has produced KKK members. He describes himself as a kind of non-sectarian hater. As per the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), He is linked with multiple white nationalist groups.

The ADL criticized Arkansas Tech University in April when the learning institution named a scholarship to honor Dr. Michael Link. According to ADL, Dr. Link repeatedly denied the occurrence of the Holocaust and taught anti-Semitism to students. His toxic anti-Semitism also surfaced regularly in his writings. The university has flatly denied such claims, saying that it has never found any academic material or peer proof to this effect. Wolfson expressed fear that the horrors he witnessed in World War II may happen again, and he is trying his best to ensure that it does not.

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