Killing raises Ku Klux Klan link in Queensland

Courier-Mail 14 2010

School teacher Graeme McNeil was jailed for eight years after helping a student dump the body of his murdered brother who knew about his links to the KKK.

(Pic: Lyndon Mechielsen Source: The Australian)

The Ku Klux Klan is alive and growing in Queensland, much to the chagrin of the national membership director of the Ku Klux Klan in America.

Travis Pierce represents Arkansas's Ku Klux Klan LLC, what he calls the only legally constituted Ku Klux Klan group in America.

Mr Pierce said Queensland white supremacists were giving themselves Klan titles without recognition from official US Klan leaders.

"Anybody can wake up one morning and decide they're going to form a Klan group," Mr Pierce said. "They've watched a film like Mississippi Burning three times so they assume they know how to operate a Klan.

"They're gonna follow Hollywood's directions and they usually follow Hollywood's directions straight to jail."

Mr Pierce said he received hundreds of letters and emails from Australian white supremacists asking "how do I get a Klan group started in their area".

On Thursday in the Queensland Supreme Court of Toowoomba, Graeme Frederick McNeil, a teacher from Cambooya, near Toowoomba, who confessed to being the "Imperial Kluk" of a Ku Klux Klan group, was jailed for eight years after helping student Anthony Rowlingson dump the body of his murdered brother, who had become aware of links to the white supremacist group.

The case further exposes the rise of race-hate groups in Queensland.

In 2006, Toowoomba residents opened their letterboxes to find pamphlets declaring "Toowoomba is under attack!" and outlining a "program of action" to halt a refugee "invasion" of the city.

In 2007, newspapers reported that Ku Klux Klan affiliates had launched recruitment drives in Toowoomba, Cairns and Rockhampton.

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(Pic: Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

Rockhampton is home to a branch of the World Church of the Creator (aka the Creativity Movement), a group established in the US in 1973 "for the survival, expansion and advancement of our white race exclusively".

In Victoria, WCC spokesman "Reverend" Patrick O'Sullivan defended the group's right to propagate its views. "I don't care if they wish to call us racist . . . we believe in white racial loyalty."

In August that year he was sentenced to two years, nine months' jail for bashing and stabbing a man who questioned his beliefs.

In 2008, Townsville police investigated KKK activity in the city after a local man posted a YouTube video of himself in a Klan hood making racist comments beside a burning cross, in response to the Rudd Government's national "Sorry" motion.

Last month, the Queensland chapter of the Southern Cross Hammer Skinheads distributed flyers for an international white pride festival on the Gold Coast.

Yesterday, McNeil's story was posted on the website for Stormfront Down Under, the Australian face of the global Stormfront white pride internet forum.

The Courier-Mail found a discussion thread where white supremacists discussed KKK membership.

"White-4-Life" asked "if anybody knew how I could get in contact with the KKK on the Gold Coast?" "Hick 311" replied: "If you want you could start your own branch of the Klan. Here is where you can order robes."