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Ex-white supremacist tackles 'spike' in B.C. extremism

David P. Ball (http://www.metronews.ca/authors.david-ball.html) | Toronto Metro (http://www.metronews.ca/) | 5 October 2016

http://www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2016/10/05/ex-white-supremacist-tackles-spike-in-bc-extremism.html

B.C. law student Daniel Gallant used to hate. But after turning his life around, he has a warning for us all.


Extract: Daniel Gallant isn't your typical law student.

The 41-year-old Kamloops resident came to study the justice system after having been involved in it — as a self-described former white supremacist recruiter in B.C.

"I spent 10 years within the right wing," he told Metro in a phone interview. "I did all the street stuff."

Gallant may have long left hate behind, and today is part of an international campaign to "counter-recruit" extremists away from white supremacy and religious extremism alike.

But with residents of several Lower Mainland cities finding packages labeled "Ku Klux Klan" on their doorsteps this week and controversy over a fledgling Vancouver chapter of the street patrolling Soldiers of Odin, Gallant said British Columbians should wake up to a resurgence of dangerous campaigns.

"These campaigns are a way to instil terror and typically to further inflate racialized tensions within communities, which already exist," he told Metro.
However, the president of Soldiers of Odin B.C. told Metro in an earlier interview that the group — originally co-founded in Finland last year by a white supremacist jailed for violence — are completely non-racist and purely charitable.

"I don't care what they do in Europe, us and the U.S. (chapters) don't care about racism, it has nothing to do with us," Bill Daniels said.

But Gallant said he has no doubts about the racist origins of the group, and doubts the group's claims to be unaffiliated with white supremacists.

"Odin himself is the Norse god of war — the whole context of Odin has to do with conquest, war and protecting bloodlines," he explained. "I've been monitoring them online, and what I'm seeing is people who are not of the right wing joining who don't understand the context of the organization itself, nor are they aware of the doctrine behind its philosophy.

"It's disappointing that people are being dragged into an organization that they obviously don't know much about, and are emulating the same rhetoric coming from the right wing."

He said that given the Soldiers of Odin's Finnish origins, the group's more "charitable" approach in North America should fool no one.

"White supremacists founded it in order to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment, and to literally beat Islam out of Finland," he said. "They literally beat the life out of at least one person — that we know of."

Gallant's own personal doorway to hate was through a group called the White Aryan Resistance, or Warskins, in East Vancouver, he said.

Eventually he joined the National Alliance and the Church of the Creator, groups that were less street-violence oriented, and more focused on recruitment and spreading ideas.