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Column: The only thing we have to fear ...

Patrick Buchanan is gaining popularity by the day. He is one of the three or four most likely candidates to be the next leader of the free world.

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After finishing second in the New Hampshire Republican primary in 1992, Pat Buchanan declared that "Buchanan's brigades" were taking over the Republican party.

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Adolf Hitler's brigades murdered 6 million Jews between 1939 and 1945. Hitler systematically forced people from their homes, put them to work, starved them and killed them.

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Adolf Hitler was "a man of great courage" and "extraordinary gifts," according to Patrick Buchanan.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped orchestrate many peaceful civil rights demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s. Largely because of King's work, blacks now enjoy freedoms unavailable to them 40 years ago.

"I have a dream that some day ... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," King said.

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"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history," said Pat Buchanan in The Washington Post.

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When Jews showed up at a 1992 Buchanan campaign stop, he responded to their charges of anti-Semitism. "This rally is of Americans, for Americans and for the good old USA, my friends."

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The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City last spring killed more than 100 people. The suspects in the bombing, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, attended meetings of a militia group in Michigan, which spouted racist and anti-Semitic views. Militias like this one are believed to be operating in at least 40 states and have at least 15,000 members, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

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It is not uncommon for these militias to argue that the United States government is a puppet of Jews and blacks who are trying to steal money from other Americans.

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On more than one occasion, Patrick Buchanan has said that Washington, D.C., is "Israeli-occupied territory."

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German intelligence estimates that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, most of whom are Skinheads. Among the acts committed for anti-Semitic purposes in Germany in the past five years: arson, fire-bombings and child-killings.

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William F. Buckley is Patrick Buchanan's former mentor and founder of The National Review. Here is Buckley's response to accusations that Buchanan is anti-Semitic: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge."

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The ADL estimates that there are 3,500 Skinheads in the United States, among 70,000 around the world. The ADL considers the Skinheads in the United States to be "extensively linked" to Skinheads around the world through music, paraphernalia, and the trading of various propagandist literature.

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About 2,000 crimes of anti-Semitic bias occur in the United States each year. Over the past 10 years, at least 37 murders have been committed in this country by Skinheads. The victims have varied from homosexuals to Jews to blacks.

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In Ann Arbor, Mich., bathrooms on the University of Michigan campus are routinely plastered with swastikas and racial epithets.

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Patrick Buchanan is gaining popularity by the day. He is one of the three or four most likely candidates to be the next leader of the free world.

-- Michael Rosenberg is Jewish and scared. He can be reached over e-mail at mcr@umich.edu.