"CHIMPANZEES" IN THE WHITE HOUSE?

Lyndon LaRouche's latest racial slur on Web TV - and it's by no means his worst.

LaRouche chortles over the chimp joke.
New York, NY (BlackNews.com) -- Lyndon LaRouche, the ultra-right cult leader and convicted felon who poses as a "Democrat," has shown his bigotry once again--this time on the June 8th LPAC Weekly Report, a webcast sponsored by the LaRouche Political Action Committee. The show was a panel discussion moderated by John Hoefle, senior economist of LaRouche's weekly newsmagazine, Executive Intelligence Review, and included LaRouche himself speaking from a studio in Germany.
At the end of the program, LaRouche suddenly asked, "Where does a chimpanzee go to vote in the U.S. elections?" Hoefle, apparently already knowing the answer, replied "I think it's the White House." LaRouche was then shown beaming and chortling. The video clip is available, along with commentary from LaRouche critics, at www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-chimpanzees-white-house.htm
President Obama, obviously a target of the slur along with African-American voters who support him, has frequently been the object of far worse comments by LaRouche. For instance, in April 2008, LaRouche told his followers: "You'll find Obama's ancestry, if you chase the family tree, everybody's climbing and swinging from the branches there....Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him."
LaRouche's rhetoric was at its most sinister in early 2010, when right-wing anger and hysteria regarding the President had reached a high point and some Tea Partiers were threatening violence against Democrats. On January 30, 2010, LaRouche gave a webcast speech claiming that Americans were thinking about lynching Obama. LaRouche suggested that they were moving in the right direction--that it was time to "take out Obama." LaRouche also stated that the President was good only for "kindling"--a comment that, in the context of the lynching remark, appeared to refer to how racist mobs burned black men at the stake, or burned their lynched corpses, during the Jim Crow era. www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama-2010.pdf
Six weeks later, LaRouche gave an address entitled the "Ides of March 2010" (a reference to the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC) in which he again urged the extra-constitutional removal of Obama from office. This speech, laced with sadistic language, was posted at several video-sharing websites under the heading "Obama is Going Down." And just in case the viewer or reader didn't "get" it, the transcript of the speech, as posted on LaRouche's own Schiller Institute website, included an illustration of Caesar being stabbed in the Roman Senate by his assassins. The caption predicted that "as with Caesar, time is running out for Barack Obama..." (www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama-2010E.pdf)
Such rhetoric calls into question the claims of the LaRouche cult, and especially of its LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), to be an idealistic multiracial group that works for the good of the entire human race.
The LYM is best known for its card tables--for instance, on college campuses and at post offices--festooned with pictures of President Obama wearing a Hitler moustache. The young people at these tables call for Obama's impeachment on grounds that his policies are worse than those of Nazi Germany; they also offer pamphlets and other literature promoting LaRouche's peculiar ideas about the British royal family and an impending New Dark Age.
Experts estimate that there are upwards of 500 full-time LYM members in the United States alone, with at least that many in other countries. The grueling hours and fanatical devotion of the LYMers and of older LaRouche followers have given the group a visibility--and in at least one instance (the health care hearings in the summer of 2009, where LaRouche followers served as the cutting edge of right-wing anger against Obama's plan), an impact--far out of proportion to its actual numbers.
The ambiguous position of young blacks within this anti-Obama shock brigade was revealed by the video of LaRouche's June 8th racial slur. Sky Shields, an African-American member of the LYM, had just finished summing up the panel discussion, when LaRouche asked out of the blue the question about chimpanzees. Shields' body language and facial expressions thereafter during the show's final moments are open to multiple interpretations, but former associates of the cult suggest that LaRouche may have consciously set up Shields to be humiliated. They say that LaRouche has a long history of placing his followers in acutely embarrassing situations in order to prove his power over them.
Dennis King, a writer who has tracked the LaRouche cult for over 30 years and runs the Lyndon LaRouche Watch website, states: "LaRouche is putting forward black followers as a smokescreen to cover up his agenda of hate. Last year, a black woman from his movement actually won a Democratic congressional primary in Texas--in a solid Republican district where Democrats were asleep at the wheel--and LaRouche then used her candidacy to promote his 'impeach Obama' slogan. He's also used his Jewish followers in a similar manner, as a cover for his anti-Semitic campaigns."
King continued, "The June 8th chimp joke proves once again that LaRouche is not a friend of African-Americans, just as his notorious joke about how many Jews you can fit into a Volkswagen ashtray shows he is no friend of the Jews.
"It's time for the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to speak out against the hate rhetoric of LaRouche's cult and its use of deceptive come-ons and 'ego-stripping' indoctrination methods to recruit and exploit young people of all races. It's also time that black, Jewish and other student organizations at colleges targeted by the LYM demand that LYM recruitment tables be banned from their campuses and that college officials take steps to warn students about the trickery employed by this cult," King concluded.
LaRouche's racism dates back at least to the early 1970s when his followers engaged in numerous violent clashes with black nationalists and circulated racially charged leaflets and pamphlets.
Between 1977 and 1994, LaRouche and his organization supported the South African apartheid regime by way of numerous propaganda efforts. According to an investigative series in The New York Times (Oct. 7-8, 1979), they also "produced private intelligence reports on anti-apartheid groups in the United States for the Bureau of State Security of South Africa."
LaRouche hired the Grand Dragon of the Pennsylvania Ku Klux Klan as his security advisor in the early 1980s. In 1987, the advisor, Roy Frankhouser (now deceased), was convicted in federal court of obstructing justice on LaRouche's behalf after LaRouche came under FBI investigation for massive nationwide credit card and loan fraud. LaRouche and Frankhouser both ended up serving time in federal prison as a result of those investigations and the subsequent trials.
Extensive documentation on LaRouche's history of racism can be found at www.lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama-menu.htm. For information on his criminal history, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaRouche_criminal_trials