As authorities investigate the killings of a federal judge's family in Chicago, a Roanoke white supremacist on Wednesday applauded the murders as justified violence against Jews and the federal government.

"I don't feel bad that Judge [Joan Humphrey] Lefkow's family was murdered," William A. White, editor of The Libertarian Socialist News, wrote in an essay Tuesday on his Web site, Overthrow.com. "In fact, when I heard the story I laughed. 'Good for them!' was my first thought."

In his essay and in a phone interview Wednesday, White said he looked forward to further killings of Jews and their sympathizers. He said he did not encourage violence, but that violence by white supremacists is justified because they are being persecuted for their views.

"I don't advocate the killing of anybody except in cases of self-defense, but when you have a group of people who are committing intolerable acts, then there's no other way of responding," White said.

White said daily hits on his Web site jumped from about 8,000 to more than 20,000 after his postings about the Chicago slayings. But national civil rights groups dismissed him as a marginal figure.

Nancy Appel, associate director of the Central Pacific region of the Anti-Defamation League, said she does not think White is affiliated with any larger group.

"He's kind of an erratic and unstable racist and we take his postings with a grain of salt," Appel said. "He's prone to exaggerating. His ideology is this mix of racism, anarchism, anti-government and anti-police, and he's not necessarily representative of anyone else except himself."

Mark Potok, director of intelligence for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said White is worth watching, but that he is not as important within the movement as he was about two years ago when his Web site was considered a meeting point for racists.

"There was a time when Bill White's site was a must-read in the white supremacist world," Potok said. "Bill White's been largely rejected by the rest of the white supremacist movement, which sees him as unstable and untrustworthy, and I think those words describe him well.

"Bill White's essentially a coward. He's a guy who likes to post real mean things on his Web site and then sit back and watch the flak fly. He's not a guy who gets out there and does any real work for the movement. It's all talk and no action for Bill White."

Law enforcement officials say they are investigating possible connections between white supremacists and the killings of Lefkow's husband, Michael Lefkow, and mother, Donna Humphrey, who were found shot to death in their Chicago home.

Last year, one of the white supremacist movement's leaders, Matthew Hale, was convicted of soliciting the judge's assassination. White said he has met Hale but has no connection to him.

"He hasn't done anything wrong but have a big mouth," White said. "I never particularly cared for him, but I don't believe he ordered the killing. He was deliberately set up."

White said that an e-mail list of potential future targets has circulated among white nationalist discussion groups. "While Overthrow would usually not hesitate to republish the personal information on these scumbags in full, at this time we feel there is so great a potential for action linked to such posting that we are not going to post email and its details at this time," White wrote.

White, 27, said he's not a Nazi or a racist - he's a libertarian socialist and radical traditionalist - and that critics have attacked him verbally and physically as part of a political and personal vendetta.

A Roanoke landlord, White has sued three employees of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is investigating allegations by the Roanoke NAACP that he has evicted tenants on the basis of their race.