Terrorist jailed for 32 years

Kevin Harpham

A US terrorist who admitted to planting a bomb alongside a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade route was sentenced to 32 years in prison on Tuesday.

Kevin Harpham, a white supremacist who had numerous links to far right organisations planted the radio-controlled pipe bomb in close proximity to the march in Spokane, Washington in January at the beginning of this year.

According to the FBI, the device was viable and was packed full of shrapnel. It also contained rat poison to prevent bleeding wounds from coagulating to cause maximum casualties.

Fortunately, the bomb was discovered and safely diffused; Harpham was arrested two months later by the FBI.

It soon emerged that Harpham was a card carrying member of the National Alliance a white separatist political organization founded by university lecturer Dr. William Luther Pierce in 1974.

Pierce using the pen name Andrew MacDonald was the author of the notorious fictional book “The Turner Diaries” which depicts revolution in the United States leading on ultimately to a race war which brings about the extermination of all Jews and non-whites.

The book went on to inspire another US Nazi terrorist Timothy McVeigh who detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people and injuring over 800.

Photocopies taken from The Turner Diaries were found alongside Timothy McVeigh when he was arrested for the bombing.

Following his conviction McVeigh received the death penalty in 2001.

William Pierce and the National Alliance are also closely linked to the BNP.

David Copeland a BNP member and later a member of the National Socialist Movement who killed three people in a bombing campaign in 1999, quoted from The Turner Diaries while being interviewed by police.

Pierce was the guest of honour at the BNP’s annual rally held in London in 1995. Pierce also spoke at an American Friends of the British National Party meeting in Arlington, Virginia in 1999.

When William Pierce died in 2002 the BNP website carried an official obituary, describing him as “Inspirational” and “Unique” claiming they retained their admiration for his “razor-sharp mind, his dedication, his capacity for hard work and his honesty”.

A year after Pierce’s death in 2003 Shaun Walker of the National Alliance attended the BNP’s “Red White and Blue” rally as one of the BNP’s overseas guests.

He would become chairman of the National Alliance in 2005 but his leadership was short lived after he was jailed in 2007 following attacks on a Mexican-American man in 2002 and a Native American man in 2003.

In 2005 BNP chairman Nick Griffin spoke alongside Kevin Alfred Strom, one time editor of the National Alliance’s magazine “National Vanguard” at an event in America hosted by former KKK man David Duke. Strom was later jailed for possession of child pornography in 2008.

William Pierce