Virginia stamps out license to hate: DMV recalls plate with coded racist message

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2010

Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles is so accustomed to drivers trying to sneak lewd, gross, hateful or racist messages onto personalized license plates that it has a rigorous process to root them out.
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The owner of a Ford truck bearing the license plate 14CV88 will have to find a new message after the DMV on Wednesday canceled its earlier approval of that series of letters and numbers.
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A few hours later, the DMV agreed that the plate contains a coded message: The number 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled to signify "Heil Hitler," said {Council on American-Islamic Relations's} Ibrahim Hooper. "CV" stands for "Confederate veteran" -- the plate was a special model embossed with a Confederate flag, which Virginia makes available for a $10 fee to card-carrying members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And 14 is code for imprisoned white supremacist David Lane's 14-word motto: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

The giveaway that something was amiss, Hooper said, was the truck itself. An enormous photo of the burning World Trade Center towers covers the entire tailgate, with the words: "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11."
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"If the license plate had been on a VW Beetle with nothing else on it, or a Volvo station wagon, no one would probably have noticed," said Hooper. "But when the Confederate flag is thrown in . . . it shows the convergence of anti-government and anti-Islamic sentiments that unfortunately seem to be growing."