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

by Stuart Wexler

  The article was responding to Frazier Glenn Miller’s April 13, 2014, assault on a Kansas City, Missouri, Jewish community center and retirement home. Bergen and Sterman, who research terrorism for the nonpartisan New America Foundation, highlight the fact that Miller shouted “Heil Hitler” after being arrested for his crimes. They then pose an interesting thought experiment in which “instead of shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.”

  The double standard highlighted by Bergen and Sterman extends not just to the media but to law enforcement. Consider two recent prosecutions of two different groups of people, one right wing and one (supposedly) jihadist. The first group is the Hutaree Militia, concentrated in southeastern Michigan but with affiliated members throughout the Rust Belt. At the end of March 2010, law enforcement authorities arrested nine of its members on federal “charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence.” Based on information obtained from two undercover informants, the FBI concluded that the Hutarees intended “to ambush and kill a local police officer and then use his or her funeral as a stage for further killings using explosive devices.” One FBI informant, fifty-seven-year-old Dan Murray, infiltrated the Hutarees by attending meetings and earning their trust over time. He, in turn, introduced the next undercover informant, Steven Haug, as his best friend. Haug so convincingly endeared himself to the group’s leader, David Stone, that he served as the best man at Stone’s wedding. Both Murray and Haug surreptitiously recorded Stone making comments like the following: “We need to quit playing this game with these elitist terrorists and get serious because this war will come whether we are ready or not.” Of the scenario targeting police officers Haug recorded Stone as saying, “And if I kill their wives and their children inside, then so be it, because I’m sending a message to the rest of them.”

  The government presented evidence that the Hutarees had trained (with Haug) to develop explosives, that they had a “kill list” for potential assassinations, and that they had cached as much as 148,000 rounds of ammunition. The Hutarees’ defense team did an excellent job of challenging much of the government’s case. It pointed out that Hutaree members had never actually detonated an explosive device—only Haug had done so—that the kill list included names of people who were already dead; that the government had selectively excerpted parts of the tape recording to highlight its case; that Murray often tried to bait Stone into making incriminating statements; and that the plans for the attack were defensive in nature, not offensive. This last point is particularly important, as the Hutaree Militia followed the teachings of Christian Identity. The war they referenced in the recordings was a holy race war. Their defense attorneys, as assistant religious studies professor Susan Palmer noted in her study of the case, emphasized the religious dimensions of their militia at trial:

  Swor described his client as a firm believer in the Book of Revelation and the rise of the Antichrist. “The anti-Christ as David Stone understands it will come from overseas, and the troops of the anti-Christ will take over America. That is the resistance that David Stone was preparing for.” Swor emphasized the religious purpose of Hutaree training, as “contingency training for the Day of Apocalypse, when the forces of the Antichrist literally—not figuratively, not symbolically, not allegorically—but literally invaded the U.S. and took over the U.S. government and proceeded to impose the will of the Antichrist on the people.” The Hutaree saw themselves as training for that day, Swor noted—but they would never give a date.2

  William Swor’s point was twofold: first, to argue that the supposed plotting on the tape was too vague to constitute an actual conspiracy plot (as opposed to “just talk”), and second, to show that the plot was too fantastic to be taken seriously by the government in the first place. U.S. district court judge Victoria Roberts agreed with the defense; she “gutted the government’s case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities.”3 In her ruling, Roberts asserted that this was a case of free speech: “The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level.”4 The prosecution had presented evidence that the Hutarees had engaged in dangerous activities and were hostile to the U.S. government, but it had never presented any concrete plan, developed by the Hutarees, for an actual conspiracy, she argued. The government’s case fell apart, and all that remained were convictions for illegal firearms possession against two members; the perpetrators got time served. To add insult to injury, members of the Hutaree Militia subsequently sued the government for damages and won.

  Contrast the outcome of the Hutaree Militia case with that of the so-called Newburgh Four, four Muslim men from the working-class Riverdale community in the Bronx, associated with the Masjid al-Ikhlas Mosque in Newburgh, New York. In 2009 the federal government charged them with conspiring to blow up Jewish institutions and to shoot down military aircraft. Taped conversations from an undercover government informant played a key role in the Newburgh trial, much as they had in the Hutaree prosecution. With the blessing of the FBI, Shaheed Hussain, a hotel operator, had built a rapport with one of the four men, forty-two-year-old James Cromite, inside and outside the mosque. After four months, Hussain (falsely) claimed to be a member of a Pakistani terrorist group and made a proposal to Cromite: the group would give Cromite $250,000 if he helped plot a terrorist attack against U.S. interests. Cromite actually ceased contact with Hussain until weeks later, when the former lost his job. At that point, Cromite recruited three other alleged conspirators: David Williams, Onta Williams (no relation), and Laguerre Payen. Veteran journalist and fellow at the Center on National Security Phil Hirschkorn reported that authorities arrested the four men “on May 20, 2009, moments after placing three ‘bombs’ each equipped with 30 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives inside cars parked outside two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.”5 The explosives, and Stinger missiles also found in the possession of the men, “were duds created by the FBI and made available to the men through Hussain.”

  The fact that the men were caught with the materials represented a clear advantage to federal prosecutors, one not enjoyed by the government lawyers in the Hutaree case. But in many other ways, the Newburgh case was far weaker. None of the men involved in the Newburgh conspiracy had any military background or training with explosives, and one clearly suffered from cognitive impairment. Despite the connection to the mosque, none of the men were particularly devout or pious. Hussain failed to record a number of key exchanges with the men, notably his first encounters with Cromite. In one of the recordings, the men actually expressed concern to Hussain about the loss of human life. More than anything, as Hirschkorn points out, Hussain seems to have served more as an agent provocateur than an informant. “Hussain did all the driving on ‘surveillance’ trips. Hussain suggested the targets and the means of attacking them, and then provided the fake weapons to do so. Even when the temple ‘bombings’ went down, it was Hussain, not the Newburgh Four, who turned on the fake detonators.” But an entrapment defense did not work, and the men received mandatory minimum twenty-five-year sentences. Even the district court judge, Colleen McMahon, asserted during sentencing that “The government did not act to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot; there was no plot to foil… . I doubt James Cromite had any idea what a Stinger missile was.”

  More than one observer has pointed to the surprising discrepancies between the outcomes in the two cases. Judges in both cases voiced serious reservations about the government’s case, but one did it while throwing out the basis for the government’s charges while the other did it following a
jury conviction. But the government’s failure to secure a conviction in the Hutaree case may have as much to do with preconceived notions and ignorance about the history of religious terrorism as it does with free speech. In the Hutaree case, the government presented the religious motivation of the Hutarees but then let defense attorneys dismiss the end-times beliefs of Stone and his followers. Palmer notes how Stone’s lawyer, Swor, “emphasized the ludic, speculative quality of Hutaree battle plans.” She quotes his closing argument:

  They liked to sit around and fantasize about their battles in the End Time. Someone suggested that they hire strippers to act as decoys in the future battle with the Devil (that shows you how realistic they were). Mr. Stone was constantly talking about the End Time. All you have to do with Mr. Stone is say ‘Hello’—and he’s off!6

  The defense lawyers refer to Stone’s eschatological beliefs as “fantasy.” Here again, a full understanding of radical Christian Identity and its connection to domestic terrorism would have led to the realization that the apocalyptic claims of the Hutarees, far from being fantasies, had factored into countless terrorist attacks and attempted attacks by a variety of American far-right paramilitary groups dating back to the 1960s. The individuals who plotted or carried out these attacks often imagined the same exact scenario offered by David Stone on tape: a small-scale attack followed by provocative acts of violence that would metastasize into something much greater—a holy race war. Ignorance of the past here led to a gross underestimation of the danger.

  The double standard regarding prosecuting terrorism in the United States reveals prejudices about which religious faiths are more prone to violence and terrorism. Few experts doubt that the Newburgh conspirators’ Islamic background played a role in their conviction. That is why the defense attorneys in that case did everything to minimize their clients’ piety.

  In contrast, the Hutaree Militia attorneys embraced their clients’ Christian devotion (while dismissing concerns about their unusual eschatological beliefs) and won a startling victory. A thought experiment, similar to the one proposed by Bergen, puts an accent on the contradiction. Imagine if the Hutaree group had been a terrorist cell of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) instead of being Christian Identity militants. In an excellent study of the group for a recent article in The Atlantic,7 Graeme Wood outlines the key features of ISIS’s ideology. Its members believe that their legitimacy comes from occupying land governed by strict Sharia law; they believe that the end-times is soon approaching and that the final battle will take place in Syria; and they believe that their soldiers will play an active role in fighting the forces of the Antichrist until Jesus (who is the second-most-important prophet in Islam) vanquishes the enemy and ushers in a paradise. Many experts believe that by publicizing its shocking acts of violence, ISIS hopes to bait the West into invading the Middle East. The group’s interpretation of the end-times in Islam requires an invasion from “Rome,” which could mean the United States. It is not hard to see the parallels to Christian Identity militants, but it is almost impossible to imagine a defense attorney owning up to this comparison, ridiculing it as a fantasy, and leveraging that to convince a federal judge that members of ISIS are not a threat.

  Wood’s article enters into dangerous territory when it asserts that a group like ISIS (or Al Qaeda) is “Islamic. Very Islamic” and that it “derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”8 It is true that some leaders of ISIS are devout Muslims whose hyper-literal and orthodox application of Islam and Sharia date back to the late eighteenth century, to an Islamic offshoot known as Salafism. Attempts to minimize this connection by pointing to the large number of young, disaffected rank-and-file members who form the bulk of ISIS’s constituency and appear to be recent converts with little or no familiarity with Islam, misses the point. The degree to which the young foot soldiers are motivated by genuine religious fervor rather than socio-ethnic grievances is irrelevant. If they advance the goals of devout leaders, even obliquely, the result still serves an apocalyptic and religious agenda. This is no different from what happened with skinheads in the 1990s.

  It is also true that most Salafis represent a small subset of the Islamic community and that most Salafis are apolitical and nonviolent. But that, by itself, also does not mean that those who do embrace violence are perverting the religion; Islam is not an inherently pacifistic faith. But those in ISIS and Al Qaeda break from long-standing traditions and norms within their faith in a key way: their willingness to excommunicate supposed infidels and apostates in their own community. The concept, known as takfir, involves the expulsion and treatment of those within the Islamic faith who betray its core values; such individuals could be subject to harsh punishments if one takes a literal reading of the Quran and the Hadith. But in the fourteen-hundred-year history of Islam, this kind of excommunication is very rare and is applied only after consensus of a host of scholars and clerics.

  In contrast, Al Qaeda and ISIS excommunicate fellow Muslims en masse and seemingly allow just about any ISIS (or Al Qaeda) operative to judge and execute apostates. The process effectively creates thousands of enemies whose presence in the Middle East demands immediate attention and action. Couple that with another relatively new innovation in militant Islamic theology—the idea, spread by Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s mentor, Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb , that the West, by promoting materialism and promiscuity, is engaged in a cultural assault on the Muslim community—and one has the core and idiosyncratic basis for militant Salafi jihadism. For the vast majority of Muslims, jihad refers to an internal struggle to become a better believer, not a holy war against external enemies. Muhammad’s words and teachings hold that “Muslims constitute one brotherhood”; that Muslims should not “do injustice” to any fellow Muslim; that they should allow nonbelievers to live in peace if they pay a tax. One seeing a Middle Eastern world where Muslims are the most victimized group by ISIS and Al Qaeda, and where non-Muslims are beheaded or crucified, is wrong to blame Islam for this calamity. It is not by applying Islam that terrorists justify their behavior but by widening the scope of those to whom they do not have to apply Islam—and then creating something like a siege mentality (fears of cultural imperialism) among alienated foot soldiers. Here too one finds echoes of a Wesley Swift, who fundamentally reinterpreted the book of Genesis to move Jews and minorities outside the orbit of Christian concern, who constantly warned of an impending Armageddon to encourage and justify violence against Jews and blacks.

  This gets to the heart of the current debate between the Obama administration and its detractors in the military, in the Republican Party, and in conservative media outlets over how to define one’s enemy. Obama has argued that extremists of all religions have perverted their faiths to engage in terrorism; his supporters offer the Ku Klux Klan as an example. The war on terrorism is really a war on extremism, the president has argued. He refuses to say that radical Islam is the root cause of terrorism because that would legitimize extremists. Obama’s critics (even including a few liberals like Bill Maher) imply that there is some fundamental aspect of Islam that accommodates violence in ways that Christianity does not and that defining the “enemy” with the broad term extremist distorts the antiterrorism campaign in practical ways. They argue that one should not spend resources to combat or undermine extremists of all stripes when the obvious source of terrorism is Islamic radicalism. If the president just says that this is a war on Islamic radicalism, they argue, he will crystalize the objective and focus the nation’s resources accordingly.

  In ignoring the legacy of Christian Identity terrorism, both sides risk putting the nation’s security in danger, however. But in pointing out the influence of Christian Identity theology on the history of U.S. terrorism, we do not want to fall into the trap of overgeneralizing. Defining an enemy too broadly is problematic, and the generic example of the Ku Klux Klan illustrates the point. Factions of the KKK undoubtedly were terrorists, but for much of the Klan’s history, Christiani
ty was an ad hoc cover for neo-Confederate, secular terrorism. The Klan used religious imagery—the fiery cross—and quoted scripture, but its members could never fully reconcile their religious veneer with their actual conduct. At the peak of the Klan’s influence, in the revival of the 1920s, it featured Romans 12 as its key passage of scripture, a facade so incongruous with its record of violence that even the FBI ridiculed it in reports.

  The very fact that the influence of the KKK ebbed and flowed over its 150-year history shows its secular core. The widely recognized four waves—during Reconstruction, during the 1920s, during the civil rights era, and during the Reagan and first Bush administrations—were all obvious reactions to secular political developments: the expansion of political rights to freed slaves, the influx of foreign immigrants and the migration of blacks to the North, the movement toward racial integration in the South, and the economic dislocation of working-class whites throughout the country, respectively. In contrast, Christian Identity terrorists legitimately saw themselves as warriors in God’s army. From the 1950s on, Christian Identity radicals infiltrated several KKK groups and exploited them for their religious agenda. But that did not happen in all KKK organizations. For example, there is little evidence that the United Klans of America, the largest KKK group in the United States during the civil rights era, was hijacked by Identity radicals; Robert Shelton, the longtime Grand Wizard of the UKA, does not appear to be a Swift follower in any way.

  The danger in broadly characterizing all KKK activity as extremist and hence lumping a secular KKK group together with a group like the NSRP is that the two operate differently and require different responses from the government. Most experts on terrorism are careful to distinguish between religious and ethnonationalist terrorists for that very reason. Religious terrorists are more willing to engage in provocative acts of violence, to accept “collateral damage” to civilians, to use “propaganda of the deed,” and to persist in the face of adversity.9 As the waves of KKK history show, secular-nationalist groups tend to die out depending on whether or not they succeed through their reactionary violence (as the KKK did following Reconstruction) or fail with those same reactionary tactics (as the KKK did following the Voting Rights Act of 1965). In contrast, even during the period of fragmentation following the death of Wesley Swift in the 1970s, the number of Christian Identity believers grew. The reason offered by scholars of terrorism is easy for a layman to grasp: religious terrorists desire and expect a massive and profound change in the world order whereas secular terrorists pursue some limited political aim.