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Authors: Stuart Wexler

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America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States

BOOK: America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States
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Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Wexler

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wexler, Stuart.

America's secret jihad: the hidden history of religious terrorism in the United States / Stuart Wexler.

pages cm

1. Terrorism—Religious aspects—United States. 2. Violence—Religious aspects—United States. I. Title.

BL65.T47W49 2015

363.3250973—dc23

2015009474

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-689-6

To my parents.

Everything worthwhile I have ever accomplished should be credited to their love and support.

CONTENTS

Preface

1

TWISTED THEOLOGY

The Synagogue Bombings of 1957–1958

2

GENESIS

The Christian Identity Movement

3

THE DAYS OF NOAH

The 1962 Ole Miss Integration Riots and the 1963 Murder of Medgar Evers

4

THE DESECRATED SANCTUARY

The 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing

5

THE BLOOD OF MARTYRS

The 1964 (Neshoba County) Mississippi Burning Murders

6

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Black Militant Reaction and the Urban Riots of 1964–1965

7

THE ALPHA

The Failed Attempts to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr., 1958–1967

8

THE OMEGA

The Final Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967–1968

9

TRIBULATION

Outrage and the Investigation into Who Really Killed King

10

THE END OF AN AGE

The Fragmentation of the Radical Right in the 1970s

11

THE TENTH PLAGUE

The Atlanta Child Murders, 1979–1981

12

JEREMIAH'S WARRIORS

The Order, the CSA, and the 1984 Murder of Shock Jock Alan Berg

13

TIM McVEIGH'S BIBLE

The 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing

14

ZEALOUS FOR HONOR

Lone-Wolf Terrorism through the New Millenium

15

REVELATIONS

Apocalyptic Religious Terrorism Post-9/11

Appendix: List of Key People and Groups

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE

A
merica is waging a war against religious terrorism, but with an incomplete knowledge and understanding of its own history of domestic, religious terrorism.

But terrorism takes many forms, and is difficult, even for scholars, to define. The one-time radical revolutionary Thomas Jefferson thumbed his nose at the bloodthirsty mobs of France during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), but he actively participated in a system of coercion in the southern states that relied upon violence and fear to run its economy; this went beyond the whippings that, daily, sustained the slave-plantation economy, but extended to the threat of torture and killing that maintained the white supremacist social order. If terrorism, as the FBI defines it, involves “
the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives
” then the terror that motivated slaves to work, that deterred them from escaping and that cowed them from revolting, certainly meets the criteria (save, perhaps, for the unfortunate fact that it was “lawful” under state laws). One can easily see the parallels between ante-Bellum pro-slavery violence and the terrorism that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) uses to impose its will on the Kurds and Yazidis in Northern Iraq.

A more conventional manifestation of terrorism emerged after the Civil War ended the practice of slavery. Many scholars now recognize that the Ku Klux Klan, first formed during Reconstruction
as an insurgency against northern military occupation of the south, functioned as a terrorist group. Everything from their aesthetic—hooded men with torches on horseback—to their actions, from vigilante murders to random beatings, were designed to scare free slaves into reassuming their inferior position within southern society. That the Klan ultimately achieved this objective, with the acquiescence of northern elites, places the Reconstruction-era KKK among the few successful terrorist operations in the history of the modern world, so much so that they all but disappeared by the 1890s. The KKK reemerged in a second wave during World War I, becoming one of the largest fraternal organizations in the nation in the 1920s, reaching even into northern cities where southern blacks increasingly migrated to find work and escape routine violence. Increasingly, the organization directed its venomous hate against the large number of European immigrants who recently settled inside the United States, notably against Jews.

Here the KKK petered out, fragmenting with internal dissent and disputes between leaders, losing its force as Americans focused their attention on the economic calamity of the Great Depression. Never fully gone, the Klan reemerged as a major political force in response to the cultural revolution of the civil rights era (1954–1968), but failed, this time, to intimidate either African Americans, or the U.S. government, into preserving Jim Crow apartheid. But their failure did not come without a price for America, in the form of some of the most heinous acts of domestic violence in the nation's history.

These terrorist crimes, such as the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, or the callous murder of three civil rights workers (popularly known as the Mississippi Burning killings) in 1964, have been well studied and documented by scholars. Less well-known is the development of a new ideological strain, built upon a foundation of Christian theology, that developed between the Klan revival of the 1920s and the reactionary violence that started in the 1950s. Until World War II, Christianity had provided an ad hoc veneer that helped legitimate the Ku Klux Klan in America. But while Christianity could and had been spun by racists to justify the southern caste system and segregation, its core message, of forgiveness and compassion, ran counter
to the violence perpetrated by the Klan against blacks. At the same time, a growing number of bigots became attracted to Adolf Hitler's message against Jews; but Southern anti-Semitism, much less a variety of anti-Jewish hatred informed by a foreign enemy responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, did not gain traction with rank-and-file racists. Christianity did not seem to accommodate a worldview that promoted open violence against Jews and blacks: at least not the kind of Christianity with which most Americans were familiar. But a small subset of scholars, with great care and only modest publicity, have identified and illuminated a strain of theology known as Christian Identity, that provided new justifications for terrorism after World War II.

Built on an idiosyncratic reading of the Book of Genesis that identifies Jews as the spawn of the devil, Christian Identity theologians, starting in the 1940s, spoke to a cosmic conspiracy, one where Jews manipulated sub-human minorities (notably blacks) in a covert war against the true chosen people: white Europeans. Having “otherized” Jews and blacks accordingly, killing them became not only morally acceptable, but a religious imperative. In fact, this book will demonstrate that the past 60 years of domestic terrorism in the United States is unintelligible outside of the context of Christian Identity theology.

In doing so, this book is revising the history of domestic terrorism in a fundamental way. Those scholars who assign Christian religious motives to acts of domestic terrorism have, to a person, started their narrative no earlier than 1983, with a cell of Identity-influenced terrorists known as The Order. In an otherwise excellent analysis of the types and styles of terrorism inside the United States since 1992, Dr. Arie Perliger, of West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center, asserted that the “fundamentalist movement” (of which Christian Identity was his main focus) was “relatively late” to develop its “violent nature”; that this was because, for decades, it “lacked an effective nation-wide organizational framework” and because it lacked a unifying “charismatic pastor.” Hence a theology that was fully formed by the late 1950s did not motivate any acts of terrorism until the 1980s, other experts, such as RAND scholar Bruce Hoffman, assert.

These experts are not alone in this kind of assessment. Three scholars who wrote excellent treatments of Christian Identity theology, professors Chester Quarles, Michael Barkun, and Mark Juergensmeyer, offer similar narratives. They are all wrong. A network of religious terrorists did develop cross-affiliations and methods of communication that inspired horrible acts of violence, as early as 1957. This oversight is not a result of the scholars' lack of judgment, rather they have lacked access and exposure to sources that offer a very different perspective on major acts violence in American history. These sources, primarily law enforcement reports and documents, many of which are newly released or difficult to obtain, detail the internal thinking and operations of some of America's most notorious domestic terrorists and the groups that they managed. Law enforcement officers, conversely, failed to recognize the significance of this information in their own files, in part because they were unfamiliar with Christian Identity theology, and in part because they limited their own investigations for fear of exposing sources and methods. With the ability to data-mine these sources, to interview new witnesses, and to synthesize the documents with insights from religious scholars, a new picture emerges. A group of dedicated religious zealots, some well-known to historians, pursued a multi-decade strategy for a frightening goal: an apocalyptic race war inside the United States.

America's Secret Jihad
presents this story for the first time. It begins by describing a forgotten yet unprecedented wave of anti-Semitic violence in the late 1950s, and revealing the man who orchestrated those crimes: racist Georgia attorney Jesse Benjamin “J.B” Stoner. Stoner is the archetypical Identity terrorist, a man who recognized great opportunities for foment racial polarization during the civil rights era, but who struggled to figure out how to leverage those opportunities.
Chapter 2
connects Stoner, and the organization he co-founded, the National States Rights Party, to the milieu of Christian Identity theologians who develop their hateful ideology in the 1940s. These men synthesized separate theological threads and ideas which had been exported from England and germinated for decades.
Chapter 3
introduces the pivotal figure in promoting this new synthesis, and the violence that follows from it, Reverend
Wesley Albert Swift. These chapters show how a series of events from 1961–1963 suggested to Swift, and to Stoner, a plan-of-action to realize their ultimate goal; from there, Identity terrorists become key figures in some of the most important domestic crimes of the 20th century.
Chapter 4
connects Identity terrorism to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Chapter 5
offers a new interpretation of the Mississippi Burning murders through the prism of religious terrorism; it also shows how the most cunning and violent of Klan leaders, Samuel Bowers, manipulated events in pursuit of a religious agenda.
Chapters 6
through
9
show how developments during the Age of Social Upheaval inspired America's Identity terrorists to conspire to murder Martin Luther King Jr.
Chapter 10
discusses the evolution of Identity thinking in the wake of King's murder, how it evolved in response to law enforcement tactics, how it came to influence other religiously-oriented racist ideologies, to the point that, as one former Klan member recently asserted, “Identity is embedded in the white supremacist movement.”
Chapters 11
,
12
, and
13
apply the insights from
Chapter 10
to three additional acts of domestic terrorism: the Atlanta Child Murders starting in 1979, the assassination of radio host Alan Berg by The Order in 1984, and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
Chapter 14
shows how religious terrorism became synonymous with lone-wolf terrorism on through the new millennium, including a possible connection to a wave of church bombings from 1995–1999. Finally, in
Chapter 15
, we will consider how insights about six decades' worth of militant Christian Identity terrorism could help law enforcement, and the public, better appreciate modern, radical Islamic (militant Salafi) terrorism. The recent debate, over who the “enemy” is and how to define the enemy, will take center stage.

BOOK: America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States
9.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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