Neo-Nazi headquarters on Long Beach Peninsula?


What happens when you shout "Nazi!" in a small beach town?

The owner of the Moby Dick Hotel, Restaurant and Oyster Farm on the Long Beach Peninsula is about to find out.

Early this week, rumors began circulating that Moby Dick owner Fritzi Cohen, who says she is Jewish, is threatening to sell the hotel to the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group said to be in search of a headquarters.

The reason: Cohen and the hotel's manager, Keith Stavrum, have been battling for years to keep their 6.5 acres of oyster beds near the Willapa Bay hotel free of herbicides, which the county deployed in 2007 to wipe out an invasive plant species.

Stavrum said Thursday that he threatened to sell the hotel to the Aryan Nations if the county doesn't stop spraying near his oyster beds.

"If we are sprayed next to, we are going to sell," he recalled telling county officials. "If we sell, you might get someone who isn't good for the community. For all I know, it could be the new national headquarters of the Aryan Nations."

The threat amounts to a bizarre convergence of environmental and social politics that has stirred up towns along the peninsula.

"If Moby Dick's intent was to get people's jaws flapping, they have done just that," said Bryan Harrison, the Pacific County administrative officer. "The community is very upset."

Harrison said Stavrum confirmed to him during a private conversation Tuesday that "he had a $3 million offer from the Aryan Nations and they were strongly considering it."

Still, Harrison said he wondered whether the threat is hoax.

"I don't know what to believe," he said.

Cohen declined to rule out that she is negotiating with the Aryan Nations to sell the hotel, which includes a yoga yurt made of Port Orford cedar, a garden Buddha shrine and rustic sauna.

"Basically, as far as I'm concerned, if I decide to sell, I would sell to whoever met my price," Cohen said. "At that point I'd become a real capitalist. Isn't that what the United States is all about?"

Asked why she would accept money from an organization that has aligned itself with the murder of millions of Jews, Cohen said, "I think it's a much more complicated issue than that. The Jewish people are a very complicated people — very complicated. I would do nothing to try to harm the Jewish people."

Speaking by phone from Washington, D.C, where she owns another restaurant, Cohen said she is considering selling the hotel because she is tired of fighting with the county over the spraying of herbicides and frustrated with a community that didn't back her up on the issue.

"Because of the lack of interest ... I don't feel a real sense of commitment to what they perceive as their well-being," Cohen said.

The county insists the herbicides are safe, and Harrison said Stavrum's threat won't scare officials into halting the spraying program.

The battle between the hotel and Pacific County has been raging since 2007, when the county started spraying herbicide to kill spartina, a non-native species of grass that chokes tidal mud flats and threatens birds. Cohen and Stavrum built a business marketing chemical-free oysters to high-end restaurants, but said they had to shut the operation down because the herbicide is dangerous and customers became suspicious of their product.

In a court case last year, the Moby Dick won the right to control the spartina on its property by mowing and pulling it by hand.

The issue flared again Tuesday during a meeting of the county's Noxious Weed Control Board. Rumors were already flying that Cohen would sell to the Nazi group if the county didn't keep herbicide from drifting onto the Moby Dick oyster beds. Then, according to Long Beach's Chinook Observer newspaper, a man who was sitting next to Stavrum stood up and said: "I just want you guys to continue spraying so my group can come down and buy (the) Moby Dick and Fritzi Cohen's property."

The man did not identify himself, the Observer reported, and witnesses said he did not mention the Aryan Nations by name. The newspaper speculated the man, who held his hand over his face and left after speaking, may have been Paul Mullet, the Aryan Nations leader who drew protests in February when he tried to set up a headquarters for his group in John Day, Ore.

The Observer reported on its Web site Wednesday it had spoken with Mullet, who said he was not in Long Beach this week and denied that he was the man who spoke at the meeting. Stavrum said Thursday that he does not know who the mystery speaker was. But Harrison said the men talked to each other during the meeting and "appeared as though they knew each other."

The man's appearance only compounded rumors that the neo-Nazi group was serious about coming to the peninsula.

Kathie Stern, a bartender at the Long Beach Tavern, said she heard from a bar regular Thursday morning about the hotel's potential sale to the white supremacist group.

"I wouldn't like it at all," said Stern, who lives just around the corner from the Moby Dick. "I raised my boys and our whole family not to be prejudiced. Stuff like that, skin heads and stuff, that's just trouble."

Longview Daily News

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