Archive/File: people/b/burdi.george/press/charged-promoting-hatred.970923
Last-Modified: 1997/09/23
Source: The Globe & Mail, Sept. 23, 1997

Music publishing firm a hate tool, OPP says
Woodbridge, Toronto men charged

By Henry Hess
Crime Reporter

TORONTO - The Canadian founder of a white supremacist music
and publishing company is facing charges of using his
Detroit-based business to promote hatred against blacks,
Jews and Asians.

George Burdi of Woodbridge, Ont., just north of Toronto, is
one of three men charged by the Ontario Provincial Police
with violating Canada's laws against hate propaganda.

Mr. Burdi, 27, together with Joseph Talic, also of
Woodbridge, and Jason Snow of Toronto, were charged on
Sunday with wilfully promoting hatred. They are to appear in
a Windsor court on October 10.

OPP Detective Sergeant Tom Whittaker said the three men
operate a company called Resistance Records that produces
and distributes rock music as well as a quarterly magazine.

The charges come after a nine-month investigation that
included a series of searches by police in Windsor and
Detroit.

Mr. Burdi, also known as George Eric Hawthorne, is a
prominent figure in Canada's white-supremacist movement.

In addition to founding Resistance Records, which was
incorporated in 1994, he is the lead singer in the skinhead
rock band Rahowa, shorthand for Racial Holy War, whose songs
include _Third Reich_, _Race Riot_ and _White Revolution_.

Resistance Records handles music from about a dozen skinhead
rock bands, including Aryan, based in London, Ont., which it
distributes via a telephone hot line, a magazine and a site
on the World Wide Web.

In 1995, Mr. Burdi was sentenced to a year in jail for
assault causing bodily harm after a woman was kicked in the
face during a 1993 clash between skinheads and antiracists,
the latter of whom were demonstrating against a concert by
Rahowa in Ottawa.

The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the sentence in February,
describing the incident as "a brutal assault committed in
the name of racist ideology."

[...]

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