Editor

As the Jewish Defense Organization steps ups its efforts to force a Herndon hotel to cancel a February convention for an organization that has been described as a white supremacist hate group, the hotel manager says he has no intention of complying, noting that his facility is not associated with its customers' messages and he's "just trying to pay the rent."

The JDO earlier this month initiated a campaign urging individuals to contact the Crowne Plaza Dulles Airport Hotel in an effort to force the hotel to renege on its rental contract with American Renaissance, a Web site and magazine that describes itself as promoting "racial-realist" thought.

Last week, the JDO added the hotel's management company, Coakley & Williams in Greenbelt, to its contact list, along with a building contractor it claims owns the hotel. WJW could not confirm ownership, but hotel manager David Welliver said a number of investors are involved.

The JDO ‹ a self-described militant group ‹ also is calling for a boycott of the hotel if the meeting takes place.

American Renaissance is published by the New Century Foundation, directed by Jared Taylor and described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist hate group "dressed up in the prose and appearance of academia," according to Mark Potok, who directs the center's intelligence project.

The Anti-Defamation League describes American Renaissance as "promoting pseudoscientific and questionably researched and argued studies to validate the superiority of whites."

Taylor once wrote in his publication: "Blacks and white are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization ‹ any civilization ‹ disappears."

The JDO is an offshoot of the Jewish Defense League, which the Montgomery, Ala.-based SPLC had also characterized as a hate group.

The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington has provided Welliver with information about American Renaissance, according to Ron Halber, JCRC executive director, who said "we wanted to let him know the distasteful people who are going to use the facility."

He said any further JCRC action is under discussion, but the agency would not call for the hotel to breach its contract.

Welliver said he has received several calls urging him to cancel the February event as well as calls praising him for not doing so. In an interview last week, Welliver said that some of the opposition calls have been "violent" and do not help the protesters' cause. Taylor, meanwhile, "has been nothing but decent," he added.

"I care that there are so many people that are passionate and have angst and anxiety about this, but I'm not involved in this," Welliver said, maintaining that the hotel is "completely unconnected to our customers and their beliefs, or whatever they do for a living."

Instead, he added, the establishment evaluates its clientele "based on economics."

Asked if he could imagine an instance in which the hotel might turn away an already-booked guest for noneconomic reasons, Welliver said, "I can envision if you got the kind of people you really only see on the 11 o'clock news, dangerous or nasty people capable of violence."

Like Welliver, David Friedman, the ADL's Washington-area director, criticized the JDO's tactics. "This is an incident in which you have an extremist group attempting to have a boycott of a hotel to protest another extremist group," he said.

The JDO, he added, "is only raising the risk that people are going to act out in ways that are going to hurt innocent people or people involved in the hotel."

Halber ‹ along with Welliver and Friedman ‹ cited American Renaissance's right to freedom of expression.

"I don't think you defend the interest of the Jewish community by denying the rights of others to speak," Halber said. "In the end, that will backfire."

JDO spokesperson Dave Segal countered that "Freedom of speech is meant for sane people with different opinions, not insane people getting people killed. Freedom of speech stops when hate speech begins."

Segal also said: "When Nazis are allowed to talk, they get more and more recruits."

Potok said American Renaissance has never been associated with violence, although some of the leading "neo-Nazis and white supremacists regularly attend their meetings."

Both the ADL and SPLC say that although Taylor generally avoids anti-Semitism, American Renaissance is divided, according to Potok, "over whether it's only black people wrecking the world or whether Jews are behind it."

In 2006, Taylor said that Jews have a valuable role in the work of the American Renaissance, and he lamented that a participant at a previous conference had denounced "Jews as the historic enemy of the European people."

He also wrote: "Some people in the AR community believe Jewish influence was decisive in destroying the traditional American consensus on race. Others disagree."

Nevertheless, Friedman pointed out that there is little debate regarding the perceived threat posed by Jews among people "that are attracted to the American Renaissance."

Interviewed on Friday, Taylor said he was shocked that his name and home phone number appear on JDO's Web site, but has not received calls from protesters.

He compared his beliefs that the United States should be a white-majority country with Israel's desire to remain a Jewish nation with a Jewish majority.

When it was pointed out that the United States was not founded specifically as a white nation, he countered that the first citizenship law "specified that only free white people can be naturalized citizens" and that it is "revisionist history" to say anything else about the nation's founding.

As for Jews, Taylor said, "I think Jews have an important role in the United States and Jews are white as far as I'm concerned."

Zvi Schoenberg, head of Gesher Jewish Day School in Fairfax, said the meeting has been a topic of conversation in Northern Virginia's Jewish community. "People are not happy about it, even though they don't feel an immediate threat," he said. "I think it's pretty outrageous that this is happening in our community."

For his part, Alexandria's Paul Friedman, a member of JCRC's Northern Virginia commission, would like to see the conference canceled.

"I believe in free expression, but that doesn't require any particular company to provide a forum," said Friedman, a lawyer.