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New Right-Wing Extremism Causes Concern

After years of worrying about the threat posed by Muslim terrorists, is the recent shooting attack on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — coming soon after the murder of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller — a signal that the Jewish community should be ratcheting up its concern about right-wing extremism?
[additional-authors]
June 17, 2009

After years of worrying about the threat posed by Muslim terrorists, is the recent shooting attack on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — coming soon after the murder of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller — a signal that the Jewish community should be ratcheting up its concern about right-wing extremism?

Those who track extremism and security threats in the Jewish community say that a variety of current factors — such as the poor economy, the first black president and increased immigration — make the prospect of terror attacks from the right something to watch carefully.

“The real threat is lone wolves with extremist views from the right or left,” said Paul Goldenberg, national director of the Secure Community Network, an initiative of the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Goldenberg said the common denominator is that they all target the Jewish community. In the case of the Holocaust museum shooter — James von Brunn, an 88-year-old U.S. Navy veteran — law enforcement officials found a note in his car declaring that President Obama was “created” by Jews and does what his “Jew owners tell him to do.”

The museum shooting on June 10 revived a national debate over a report released and then withdrawn by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier this year warning that the “economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.”

In particular, some GOP lawmakers objected because the report pointed to veterans as possible recruits for such an attack.

But with the museum and Tiller shootings, liberal commentators and organizations have been arguing that the DHS report’s basic thesis was correct and the promised revised version should be released as soon as possible.

While most Jewish organizations have not jumped into the debate, they have pointed to a string of recent plots hatched by anti-Semitic masterminds as evidence of increasing danger posed by extremists of all stripes.

In recent months, a Jewish Wesleyan University student allegedly was killed by a man who was carrying a copy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; four Muslim men were arrested for plotting attacks on Bronx synagogues; and a Muslim man who was charged with killing a soldier and injuring another at a military recruiting center in Arkansas was found to have been researching Jewish sites.

Also, in April, a Pittsburgh man who allegedly shot and killed three police officers was found to have been a frequent poster on extremist right-wing Web sites.

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that they had previously tracked von Brunn.

Jack Levin, a Northeastern University criminologist, pointed to the election of a black president with Jewish advisers as one explanation for the museum shooting.

“Jews and blacks in the White House — that’s threatening to someone who believes that blacks are subhuman and Jews are the children of the devil,” Levin said.

Kenneth Stern, director on anti-Semitism and extremism for the American Jewish Committee, said that while lone wolves are a major concern, he had yet to see a major uptick in organized right-wing extremism such as during the mid-1990s, when the citizen militia movement grew in the Midwest. Stern noted that many of the prominent leaders in the movement over the last 10 to 15 years have died or are in jail.

Some media outlets and advocacy groups have linked the museum attack with Tiller’s murder on May 31, describing them as two specific recent examples of right-wing extremism.

The National Council of Jewish Women, for instance, issued a statement the day after the museum attack deploring the “latest episode of hate violence.”

“Following so soon after the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his church during Sunday services, this latest attack cries out not only for condemnation by public officials, but a commitment to do everything in their power to prevent such incidents from multiplying, including common-sense gun regulations,” NCJW President Nancy Ratzan said.

But Stern said that while there are places where the anti-abortion extremists and neo-Nazis “intersect,” he also said that activists in the two groups are motivated by significantly different worldviews and the two crimes should not necessarily be seen as having a particular link.

“There are hateful ideologies that come from a variety of directions,” Stern said. “We should be concerned about them all.”

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