Speaking of lies and smears, a story went out last week about a Virginia driver with an anti-jihad sign on the back of his truck, who was made to change his license plate number after CAIR complained that his existing plate number contained coded neo-Nazi slogans. The implication of the story, of course, was that anti-jihadists are neo-Nazis — which, despite the febrile fantasies of libelblogger Charles Johnson and his cohort, CAIR’s amiable stomach-stapled beekeeper Honest Ibe Hooper, flies in the face of the facts: Muslims generally allied with the Nazis during World War II (and Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a major player in the planning of the Holocaust), and actual neo-Nazi groups like the Aryan Nations are pro-Muslim.
And now it turns out that CAIR’s whole story was false in the first place: the driver in question, Douglas Story, is not a neo-Nazi at all, but a racing fan. The alleged code numbers for neo-Nazi slogans were actually favorite race car drivers’ numbers.
Will Honest Ibe Hooper apologize to Douglas Story? Come on, Ibe! It would be the decent thing to do!
“Virginia driver denies license plate had coded racist message,” by Brigid Schulte for the Washington Post, April 29:
Douglas Story, a Chantilly dump truck driver for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says he wanted to grab people’s attention when he paid $224.90 to have a mural of the burning World Trade Center detailed onto the tailgate of his Ford F-150 along with a sticker that reads: “Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11.”
But he got more than he bargained for when a photo of his pickup went viral on the Web last week. Motorists and Muslim groups complained that his Virginia vanity license plate — 14CV88 — was really code for neo-Nazi, white supremacist sentiments. The state Department of Motor Vehicles voted last week to recall Story’s plates and force him to buy new ones.
“There is absolutely no way I’d have anything to do with Hitler or Nazis,” Story said Wednesday. He contacted The Washington Post after an article about his plate appeared last week; the state, citing privacy rules, had declined to release the identity of the plate’s owner. “My sister-in-law and my niece are Jewish. I went to my niece’s bat mitzvah when she turned 13 three years ago. Does that sound like something an anti-Semite would do?”
Story says the numbers 14 and 88 on his plate were not references to a white power slogan or “Heil Hitler,” as the Council on American-Islamic Relations theorized, but an homage to his favorite NASCAR drivers: Tony Stewart, who drives car No. 14, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who drives No. 88.
Story applied for the vanity plate in March 2009, shortly after Earnhardt changed his car number from 8 to 88 and Stewart changed his from 20 to 14.
CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said his group looked into the meaning of the numbers 14 and 88 after receiving complaints about Story’s license plates. He said the group found that among neo-Nazis, 88 refers to “Heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. White supremacists sometimes use the number 14, Hooper said, as shorthand for the 14-word motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”…
Hooper said he doesn’t buy Story’s version “given the overt anti-Muslim bigotry displayed on the truck and the Confederate flags and their historic connotation of racism. But it’s his right to make that appeal to the Virginia DMV.”
Story said he has no intention of appealing. “I don’t want my truck firebombed,” he said.
Story received a certified letter last week from the DMV ordering him to get new plates. And his boss told him that he could no longer park on VDOT property with the anti-Islam mural. So Story spent an afternoon getting new randomized plates and peeling the mural off by hand.
“I feel naked,” he said.
UPDATE April 30: The Washington Post has uncovered evidence that Douglas Story is indeed a white supremacist racist. In that case, he deserves whatever he gets from the DMV.