Neo-Nazis take over an East German town

And run out the neighbors:

Houses torched, pets killed and outsiders chased away: Such is life in the Eastern German town of Jamel. For years, it has been controlled by the neo-Nazis who live there. Even the mayor says he has given up.

Getting here took them 15 years -- but 20 minutes was all the time they had. Cowering under umbrellas, the delegation from the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania trudged through the village's muddy alleys. State Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier and his group listened in disbelief to the mayor's stories -- stories about newcomers driven out of the town, houses set on fire, pets impaled on the garden fence and gunshots in the woods.

[snip]

It all started in 1992, on April 19 -- Easter Sunday. About 120 neo-Nazis raised the Reichskriegsflagge, a symbol used by Hitler's Nazi party, in front of the old farmhouse at the end of Forststrasse. They wanted to celebrate the 103rd anniversary of Hitler's birth. "We'll smoke you out," the right-wing radicals allegedly told the G. family next door. The family had previously complained about constant neo-Nazi music. And it had paid a steep price for such complaints: break-ins and slashed tires came first. Then one day they found their chickens dead and hanging from the garden fence.

Partying with the Nazis

On Easter Sunday 1992, the family barricaded itself inside the house. The mayor at the time, Fritz Kalf, was there with them, armed with a shotgun. When the police were called, a mere four officers arrived -- and they didn't dare enter the farmhouse where the Nazis were partying. Later, three dozen more cops showed up and put an end to the revelries, but not before the doors and windows of the G. family's house had been destroyed along with Kalf's car. The culprits vanished in the darkness. Indeed, the only who received a citation that evening was the mayor -- for carrying a gun without a permit.

What followed resembles a chronology of terror -- terror against anyone who considered moving to this seemingly peaceful, out-of-the-way spot.

Where despair and poverty exist, there will be fertile ground for fanaticism to grow. Fanatics of every kind.

And we're creating more despair and poverty in the Middle East as we speak. Creating more terrorists by the minute.

Thanks, George.