America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States
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No singular figure occupied the same prominent space as Swift in Identity theology after he died, but the Internet, as a communications platform, has served the same function as Swift’s sermon-tape distribution network in the 1960s. Hate group websites not only provide an ideological foundation for new recruits—including tape recordings of Swift’s sermons in some cases—they also help promote the subculture that makes violence possible, notably by promoting and selling white power music. The Anti-Defamation League notes:
Hate music not only tries to stir up anger and resentment, but also acts as a call to action. Confrontation and war are frequent themes in hate music, ranging from crude calls to strike at one’s “enemies” to visions of future race wars or apocalyptic battles. H8 Machine’s (New Jersey) song “Wrecking Ball” is typical. “Wrecking, destroy all of your enemies/Fight back, hit back, hit back takeout another victim/Break down, the walls of opposition.” The song “Thirst for Conquest” by Rebel Hell evokes a grander image: “To war the call we hear, the world trembling in fear/Storming to power, hail to the call/Marching in as one, the blitzkrieg rolling on/As über alles meaning over all.” So too does Before God’s (Minnesota) “Under the Blood Banner”: “Legions attack, shoulder to shoulder/Striking the alien hordes/In battle formation, defending thy nation/With fury we wage, lighting wars!” Sometimes the message is simply one of crude violence, as in the Bound for Glory (Minnesota) song, “Onward to Victory.” “Onward to Victory, the blood is gonna flow/Onward to Victory, we’re gonna overthrow/Onward to Victory, in our battle stride/ Onward to Victory, with our racial pride.”36
What hateful and violent messages they do not take in through their ears, white supremacists often brandish on their skin—with common symbols and messages popularized on the Internet. Nazi swastikas and icons from Norse (Odinist) mythology cover many a contemporary supremacist, sometimes literally from head to toe. One of the most common tattoos lists a motto, the so-called fourteen words. Penned by Alan Berg’s murder conspirator, David Lane, whose tenure with the Order turned him into a celebrity among white supremacists and who became a leading advocate for Wotanism (a form of radical Odinism), the motto reads: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” Another favorite tattoo is “Rahowa,” which stands for racial holy war.
Forty-year-old Wade Michael Page is a perfect example of the mind-set this subculture can foster. He not only listened to white power music, but he played guitar in two white power bands, one under contract with William Pierce’s Resistance Records. Harboring no strong religious convictions, he nonetheless sported the “rahowa” and fourteen-word tattoos. With no history of violence, and with no public explanation, Page opened fire on congregants exiting a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, killing six and wounding four others; he then committed suicide. Page himself may not have been motivated by Christian Identity imperatives or by radical Odinism, but his action fits into a broad pattern described by former undercover agent Mike German. Wade was a byproduct of a “pack mentality”; “a follower of these movements bursts violently into our world, with deadly consequences.”37 Only it is the pack mentality, not the follower, that is informed by radical religion. Hence someone like Page becomes a servant to a militant religious agenda without recognizing its influence.
It is hard to imagine that some fanatic, connected to a white supremacist group and awash in messages, music, and imagery promoting a holy race war, would not be inspired to act amid the widespread media coverage of church and synagogue bombings from 1995 to 1999. Indeed, three of the synagogue attacks that frightened Jewish leaders in the summer of 1999 became part of the Church Arson Task Force’s database of potential hate crimes. The attack by the Williams brothers on two synagogues in Sacramento, California, is one example. But the report never mentioned or discussed the role that Christian Identity religion played in inspiring those attacks, or any other arson attack in the database for that matter.
This would include the attempted firebombing of Temple Emanu-El in Reno by Carl DeAmicis and four others, also in 1999 (described earlier). Prosecutors in that case were surprised to find that the five young men, ranging in ages from nineteen to twenty-six, were motivated by religious ideology. But in the supremacists’ “clubhouse,” with its walls adorned with Nazi flags, a “Whites Only” sign, and a poster of men in KKK robes, investigators found Christian Identity literature. One of the five perpetrators, twenty-year-old Daniel McIntosh, said he was “doing something for his race” in targeting Jews, because “they are evil, they control the media and they put racial mixing on TV and that is wrong.”38 If their Identity connections came as a surprise to investigators, one thing was obvious about the young terrorists from their appearance. They bore shaved heads and skinhead tattoos.
An investigator who studies trends in white supremacist violence would be forgiven if he or she suspected that skinheads perpetrated at least some of the unsolved attacks on America’s houses of worship from 1995 to 1999. Importing their aesthetic of shaved heads and punk fashion from the United Kingdom, skinheads became part of the white supremacist scene in the early 1980s. They became a national force within white supremacist circles over the next two decades, with their numbers growing by tenfold from 1986 to 1991. They developed their own culture, defined, according to the SPLC “by loud hate-rock, cases of cheap beer, bloody ‘boot parties’ directed against immigrants and others, and the flagrant display of neo-Nazi iconography and paraphernalia.”39 Older and senior members over time formed regional networks, such as the Hammerskins, but for the most part, skinheads roved urban and suburban areas as small bands or gangs. They became known for harassment, vandalism, and at times violent vigilante attacks on gays and minorities. These small-scale attacks, when aggregated, nonetheless represented one of the most common sources of white supremacist violence in the 1990s. Jack B. Moore, an American studies professor at the University of South Florida and author of Skinheads: Shaved for Battle, observed, “In less than a decade violence committed by skinheads catapulted them to perhaps the leading position among hate groups practicing violence in America.”40
Harvard ethnographer Raphael Ezekiel, who interviewed and observed dozens of skinheads for several years, described a group of “male, young dropouts without work skills, with a deep fear of personal annihilation—social isolates.”41 According to criminologist Mark Hamm, “The social and political contentions of the Reagan era seemed to have produced conditions conducive to extreme alienation among white, working-class youths in the United States. In turn, this extreme alienation caused certain white kids to shave their heads, tattoo themselves with swastikas, espouse racist beliefs, and commit hate crimes; usually with baseball bats, work boots, guns or knives.”42 Moore quotes the 1989 edition of the SPLC’s periodical Klanwatch: “The emergence of skinhead gangs represents a unique and frightening phenomenon in the history of white supremacy in America: for the first time, a nationwide racist movement is being initiated by teenagers who are not confined to any single geographic region or connected by any national network, but whose gangs sprang up spontaneously in cities throughout the country.”43
The picture painted by the SPLC is something akin to a zombie apocalypse, with random hordes of testosterone-filled vigilantes defying age-old, predictable patterns of racial violence. Offered when the skinheads were just becoming a force in American society, the description became less and less accurate as the group evolved. As noted earlier, the skinheads did eventually network into organizations; the largest, the Hammerskin Nation, boasts nineteen chapters across the United States (as well as ten international franchises). The SPLC did highlight the salient feature of the group, its members’ ages, but it failed to accurately gauge the full implications of that demography. Yes, their ages may have made skinheads more open to violence. But far from being uncontrollable and unpredictable hordes, the young and socially alienated skinheads were perfect candidates for the kind of manipulation and exploitation that has been the hallm
ark of religious terrorist leaders for decades.
Leaders of America’s most dangerous hate groups, who had previously manipulated southern nationalists, farmers, and nativists, never had a more malleable group of foot soldiers to exploit than the skinheads. Men like Fields, Butler, Pierce, and Metzger openly hailed the young men, dressed in Dr. Martens boots and military-style fatigues, as the vanguard of white supremacy. It is worth noting that Ezekiel’s observations about white supremacist leaders who privately harbor contempt for their ignorant and gullible rank-and-file followers derived almost entirely from interviews with skinhead leaders. In her study Skinheads in America: A Movement toward Violence, researcher Regina Raab comments that the “movement seems to be fueled mostly by sustained hatred toward several targeted groups that is manipulated by relatively few leaders to achieve direct action by individual Skinheads.” SPLC leader Morris Dees has asserted that the skinheads are “easy prey for older white supremacist leaders, who cynically offer a sense of family and purpose—along with a hate-filled ideology.”
Scott Shepherd, a onetime KKK Grand Dragon who now crusades against racism, saw this exploitation from the inside. “[The leaders] prey on the short comings of rank and file,” he insisted.44 Christian Identity theology, which Shepherd says is now “embedded in the [white supremacist] movement and continues to grow,” is an important part of that dynamic. “Racial war and racial holy war is their [the leaders’] main goal they want this to happen … and try and provoke it.” The idea of a racial holy war is “not discussed or used as recruitment subject but after members had joined it was part of the indoctrination and pushed widely.” He lamented, “You had a lot of troubled kids that fell into that trap.”45
No white supremacist leader exploited skinheads more than Tom Metzger. The onetime Christian Identity minister formed the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) at approximately the same time the skinhead movement began to take hold in the United States. Michael Waltman and John Haas, in their book The Communication of Hate, report that “Metzger set out to create, through WAR, an organizational structure that would permit him to distribute his ideas to skinheads, providing them with more ideological grounding than they possessed in the past. By mentoring skinhead groups across California, he hoped to create a cadre of young racist warriors who would take the racial holy war to individual Jews and minorities across California.”46 Metzger’s influence became public knowledge when the SPLC sued him for inciting skinhead Dave Mazzella to violently assault an Ethiopian immigrant (who later died) in Portland, Oregon. A onetime organizer for Metzger, Mazzella claimed to have been brainwashed by the WAR leader, and he detailed Metzger’s Machiavellian relationship with Portland’s skinhead community. The SPLC won a multimillion-dollar judgment for the victim’s family. According to Waltman and Haas, Metzger’s subsequent “bankruptcy and the belief among many skinheads that they were being ‘used’ and exploited by Metzger contributed to his diminishing influence on racist skinheads.”47
Yet the authors note that the skinheads increasingly came under the sway of Matthew Hale and the WCOTC, with many identifying themselves as Creativity ministers. Others flocked to the welcoming arms of Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations. Michigan skinheads interviewed by Ezekiel were heavily influenced by Christian Identity ideology, much like the five young men who tried to set Temple Emanuel-El on fire in December 1999.
In missing or ignoring the relevance of Christian Identity (or Odinism or Creativity) theology and its influence on one of the fastest-growing supremacist groups in the country, the Church Arson Task Force may have missed an opportunity to solve at least some of the arsons and firebombings in its database. The task force did take great care to analyze firebombings and arson attacks on black churches as a separate category of crimes, in hopes of identifying patterns that suggested a racist conspiracy. History, of course, is full of examples of KKK chapters sponsoring waves of church bombings, and that is the prism through which investigators looked when considering the possibility of a wider plot against religious institutions. But the history covered in this book shows that Christian Identity radicals were often more than happy to launch waves of violence that targeted both black and Jewish religious institutions. Stoner did this in 1957–1958; Bowers did this in 1967–1968.
When viewed through that prism, subsets of the hundreds of arson and firebombing attacks that were never solved offer a new avenue of investigation: Look for an attack on a synagogue that occurred relatively close in time and distance to an attack on a black church and then explore possible connections between local supremacist groups with religious affiliations and either crime. The Church Arson Task Force posted lists of solved and unsolved crimes, and at least a handful of unsolved cases fit the profile of Identity-influenced crimes. One is the Temple Beth Chai arson in Hauppauge, New York, on August 15, 1999, described earlier. On the same day someone set fire to the temple’s business office, an arsonist struck the black First Presbyterian Church in Staten Island, one hour away by car. Neither case has been solved, and there is no evidence that the task force considered the possibility that the two crimes were connected, despite the propinquity.
Attacks on Jewish houses of worship represent a small fraction of the database’s cases. But the database does not include vandalism of Jewish houses of worship (or Jewish cemeteries) or attacks on broadly defined Jewish institutions. For instance, Furrow’s attack on the Jewish community center would not have made the database. If Christian Identity ideas motivated such ancillary attacks, expanding the types of criminality under consideration and then correlating them with attacks on black targets could conceivably yield additional leads and suspects in the 1995–1999 arson wave. As the South Carolina case illustrated and as the history of Christian Identity violence suggests, Identity zealots, or those under their influence, often find black targets more readily available. Identity ideas about Jews became more widespread and accepted in the 1980s, but it was still the case, per Ezekiel, that recruits entered hate organizations with antagonism toward blacks and Hispanics and then were inculcated with hatred toward Jews. Thus it was likely easier to sway members to go after black targets than after Jewish targets, much as it was during Sam Bowers’s tenure as Grand Wizard in Mississippi. The only difference in the current environment is that Bowers directly ordered his attacks, while Identity terrorists, since 1985, had been inspired by or socially conditioned by men like Bowers but have operated as individuals or through small groups.
Law enforcement scrutiny forced domestic terrorists into ever-more-decentralized units of activity; the result was atomized, individual fanatics—Louis Beam’s lone wolves—who are limited in their capacity for mass casualty or debilitating attacks but who can only be managed and contained. Identifying a lone wolf or preventing his actions is, as former FBI man Mike German concedes, daunting: “like finding a needle in a haystack.” But German argues that law enforcement must therefore start looking at the “needle factory”—the leaders, groups, and subculture that make the terrorism possible. That effort must include recognition of a religious impulse that motivates some terrorists directly and that indirectly shapes the contours of the terrorist mind-set of many others. For all its flaws, the Megiddo report represented an important first step in that regard, but the timing of its release, in 2000, could not have been more inopportune.
Within a year, Al Qaeda launched the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil in the nation’s history. If failing to appreciate the full history of religious terrorism in America, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to the arson wave of 1995–1999, has obscured law enforcement’s understanding of crimes, then this same ignorance, in regard to both domestic and foreign extremists, continues to jeopardize American security.
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REVELATIONS
APOCALYPTIC RELIGIOUS TERRORISM POST-9/11
On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda launched the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil in the nation’s history. The tragedy fundamentally reoriented
law enforcement’s approach to terrorism. Understandably, the government focused its resources on identifying and disrupting Al Qaeda cells inside America’s borders to prevent another mass casualty attack. Domestic terrorist groups became a secondary concern, so much so that FBI agent Mike German, who infiltrated white supremacist groups for the agency, resigned in 2005 and became a whistleblower. He gave interviews and wrote columns that attempted to put the terrorism problem in perspective, specifically highlighting the danger still posed by domestic terrorism. An examination of acts of terrorism (and attempted terrorism) on U.S. soil shows that in terms of the number of acts, as opposed to the number of people killed or injured, incidents of American right-wing terrorism far outnumber instances of foreign jihadi terrorism.
More and more terrorism experts have been arguing this point. Among them is journalist Peter Bergen, author of several books on terrorism and one of the only people to interview Osama Bin Laden. In a 2014 article for CNN’s website, cowritten with terrorism expert David Sterman and titled “U.S. Right Wing Extremists More Deadly Than Jihadists,” Bergen wrote,
Since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, antiabortion extremists and antigovernment militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11… .
By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11… .
Moreover, since 9/11 none of the more than 200 individuals indicted or convicted in the United States of some act of jihadist terrorism have acquired or used chemical or biological weapons or their precursor materials, while 13 individuals motivated by right wing extremist ideology, one individual motivated by left-wing extremist ideology, and two with idiosyncratic beliefs, used or acquired such weapons or their precursors.1