Earlier this week, James von Brunn went into the National Holocaust Museum and shot and killed Security Officer Steven T. Johns. This was news all over the country and if you want to find out more details on this story, just step outside cave you must be living in. The point of today\u2019s blog isn\u2019t to tell people about the story, but to analysis the reason for it.<\/p>\n
James von Brunn is a well known white supremacist and while Officer Steven Johns was black, that was not the reason for the shooting. Von Brunn hated Jews and last I looked in the mirror, Jews are white\u2026 at least this Jew is (pale would be a more accurate term). So the real question is why would Von Brunn hate Jews?<\/p>\n
I want to separate two things here because the term \u201cJew\u201d describes two different things which in most cases are lumped together. There is the religion and there is the ethnicity. While I am ethnically Jewish, I am no longer religiously Jewish. In that respect, I am an ex-Jew. I have no problem attacking the Jewish religion and have done so many times. I consider the Jewish religion on par with the Nazi ideology in that both believe that they are the chosen people of God and I find that type of righteous superiority to be immoral.<\/p>\n
Religious beliefs can change but ethnicity cannot. The fact is that the Nazis did not care whether someone was ethnically Jewish or religiously Jewish; they wanted to throw all Jews into the ovens. James von Brunn didn\u2019t care either. He had a hate for all Jews based mainly on his view of God and of his Christianity. The fact is that Von Brunn\u2019s hate for Jews stemmed from the same source as the Nazi hate for Jews and Mel Gibson\u2019s hate for Jews.<\/p>\n
In the Bible, the Jews killed Jesus. While mainstream Christians obviously don\u2019t hold that view, many fundamentalist Christians (although not all) disagree. Von Brunn was one of those who disagreed. He believed that the Jews killed God in the Flesh. He strongly believed based on his interpretation of the Bible that God\u2019s chosen people have fallen from grace in the eyes of God and are now doing the Devil\u2019s work. While his website (HolyWesternEmpire.org) has now been taken down, the site did contain conspiracy theories about how the Jews now control the government and the media. Clearly I would not classify this guy as a sane individual despite the fact that many sane people hold similar grand conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n
The point here is that anti-Semitism is a direct result of an understandable interpretation of the Bible. I say \u201cunderstandable\u201d because it isn\u2019t an interpretation that is unrecognizable from reading the text. In other words, someone doesn\u2019t have to perform a series of mental gymnastics or change word meanings in order to get that interpretation. That interpretation wouldn\u2019t be an irrational stretch from a reading of the text. Without the Bible, these people still might hate Jews, but they would have far less grounding for such hate. In fact, without the Bible, such hate for Jews would be baseless.<\/p>\n
While no one has ever made such comments to me, I know Jews who have told me that Christians have asked them about their horns or their tails. Even in this day and age, a surprising number of Christians still think that Jews have horns and tails. Why would someone think that a Jewish person would have horns and a tail? Clearly the reasoning for this lies in the view that Jews are agents of the Devil and are Christ killers.<\/p>\n