Skinhead hate group movement petering out

FORT WORTH, Texas, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- The skinhead movement is waning, a hate watchdog group's spokesman said, adding the election of the first black U.S. president has not increased hate crimes.

Mark Briskman, director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, region, said that although Internet activity shows an increase in what he called right-wing domestic terrorism since Barack Obama was elected the U.S. president, the event has not engendered a noticeable rise in hate crimes, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Saturday.

Briskman said although 17 convictions for hate crimes by the area's skinhead group, the Confederate Hammerskins, in 1990 did not prevent skinheads from killing a black man a year later, the 1993 conviction may have signaled their last hurrah.

"We have not seen a return to the (skinhead) heyday of the 1980s and 1990s," Briskman said.