Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

NEO-NAZIS • 485The fortunes of some neo-Nazi groups and leaders have suffereddeclines in recent years. In the United States in May 1996, a federaljury forced William L. Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliancein Hillsboro, West Virginia, and author of the Turner Diaries,to surrender $85,000 to the family of Harold Mansfield, an AfricanAmerican Gulf War veteran who had been murdered in 1991 byGeorge D. Loeb, a member of the white supremacist Church of theCreator, which had ceded title of some of its properties to Pierce toavoid paying civil damages to the Mansfield family. On 17 June 1997Eugene Terre-Blanche, the leader of South Africa’s neo-Nazi AfrikaanerResistance Movement (AWB), was sentenced to six years’imprisonment for beating one of his black workers in 1996. On 2April 1998 a French court in Versailles convicted Jean-Marie Le Pen,the leader of the French National Front Party, for having assaulted aFrench Socialist politician in 1997, for which he was stripped of hiscivil rights for two years, making him ineligible to run for the Europeanparliament in 1999. For making remarks denigrating the Holocaust,Le Pen was eventually prosecuted under the Gayssot Act of1990, which outlaws apologetics on behalf of war crimes, and wasconvicted on 11 July 2006 and forced to pay €183,200. In Belgiumon 12 September 2006, police arrested 17 members of the neo-NaziBlood and Honor group, of whom 11 were soldiers, on charges ofplotting terrorist attacks to destabilize the nation.Despite these reverses, there have also been some gains in thefortunes of neo-Nazis: the German Office for the Defense of theConstitution failed to ban the National Democratic Party (NDP) asa covert neo-Nazi group in a trial before the Federal ConstitutionalCourt of Germany due to the justices’ doubts about the motives andtruthfulness of the informants who testified against the NDP. Assumingthe NDP is perceived to be a surrogate for neo-Nazi sympathies,it is revealing that in 2004 the NDP won 9.1 percent of the parliamentaryvotes in Saxony, while in the 2006 state parliamentary electionsfor Meckleburg-Western Pomerania, the NPD won 7.3 percent ofthe vote and received six seats in the state parliament. The impressiveelectoral performance of France’s National Front presidentialcandidate Jean-Marie Le Pen winning 16.9 percent of the vote in thefirst round of the election, giving him second place, might have beenviewed as a fluke, due to the left wing having undermined the SocialistParty candidate by dividing its votes among so many splinter par-