THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: A bigoted backlash against President-elect Barack Obama, America's first black leader, threatens to snuff out the post-election glow of racial progress and harmony.
Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama." Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars - have highlighted that stubborn racism that remains in America.
Police across the country are logging an upsurge in hate crimes.
From California in the West to Maine in the East, a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack, have been recorded
There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.
One was in Snellville, Georgia, where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.
She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.
"It definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they're capable of and what they're really thinking."
Potosaid he believes there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them."
Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries." >>> | November 16, 2008
THE SUNDAY TIMES: Conservative Backlash Begins against Barack Obama
Barack Obama's election may have been met with celebrations around the world, but for some Americans his honeymoon is over before he has even taken office.
Disgruntled conservatives are making plans to oppose his every move over the next four years, and - patricularly in some parts of the South - emotions are running high, sometimes spilling over into outright hostility.
Any hope that partisan rancour might ease after Mr Obama's historic election victory have been rapidly dispelled - not least in Georgia, where a bitter new Senate election battle is under way. Elsewhere, wrangles over continuing knife-edge Senate recounts in Minnesota and Alaska have ensured that the divisions in the run-up to the election persist.
Under Georgia law, a senator must win at least 50 per cent of the vote, but a third party candidate prevented Saxby Chambliss, the Republican incumbent, from doing so on election day and forced a run-off vote.
Republicans have begun running advertisements urging voters to back Senator Chambliss in the run-off vote against his Democrat opponent Jim Martin on Dec 2, warning that a Democratic victory could hand Mr Obama a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, giving his party almost unfettered power.
With emotions running high, Republican Congressman Paul Brown denounced Mr Obama as a Marxist, and compared his plans for a national service corps - to help out in natural disasters - to the formation of the Nazi brownshirts.
"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany," he said. "We can't be lulled into complacency... Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, what I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road."
Conservative displeasure at the president-elect is not confined to Georgia. A Roman Catholic priest in South Carolina told his parishioners not to seek Holy Communion if they voted for Mr Obama, because supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil" as the President-elect backs abortion rights.
The Rev. Jay Scott Newman of St Mary's Catholic Church, Greenville, sent parishioners a letter telling them that they must first do penance for their vote. >>> By Tim Shipman in Washington | November 16, 2008
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: White Rage: The Rednecks Out to Kill Obama
"We have changing demographics, and the Census Bureau projection that whites will lose their majority status in America by 2040. We have the tanking economy, and now... a black man in the White House. This makes some Americans feel they are losing their world – the sense that the country their forefathers built is slipping away from them." - Mark Potok, one of America’s leading researchers
When millions watched Barack Obama give his history-making victory speech in Grant Park on election night, one thing stood out starkly – the bulletproof screen surrounding him. But just how serious is the threat of assassination to the President-elect?
Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell fancied that 28 August, 2008 would be a good day for the next president of the United States to die. They had the guns – Gartrell was later caught with a Ruger Model M77 Mark II bolt-action rifle with an attached scope and bipod, and a Remington Model 721, also with a scope. They were believers in a radical white supremacist ideology that gave them the motivation they needed to risk their own lives, if necessary, to prevent a black man from entering the Oval Office. (Or, as a friend reported Adolf as saying: "No nigger should ever live in the White House.") >>> By Andrew Gumbel | November 16, 2008
TRIBUNE DE GENÈVE: Depuis l'élection d'Obama, les incidents racistes explosent
AUGMENTATION | Les incidents racistes sont en forte hausse aux Etats-Unis depuis l'élection de Barack Obama à la Maison blanche. Observateurs et universitaires mettent en garde contre un «retour de bâton» au sein d'une partie de la communauté blanche.
En Pennsylvanie (est), un couple mixte a découvert une croix brûlée sur son perron. En Californie (sud-ouest), des voitures ont été maculées de croix gammées et de slogans racistes comme «retournez en Afrique». Des mannequins pendus ont été retrouvés sur une île du Maine (nord-est), tandis que dans l'Idaho (nord-ouest), des élèves ont chanté «tuez Obama»: autant d'exemples parmi «des centaines et des centaines» de cas, selon Mark Potok, directeur du «Southern Poverty Law Center» basé dans l'Alabama (sud). >>> AFP | 19.11.2008
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