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

  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

  10987654321

  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

  America 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 onetime 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 anteBellum 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.

  Bui
lt 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 subhuman 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 nationwide 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 cofounded, 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.

  This book does not aspire to take sides in the culture war that has become part of the dialogue on terrorism, but in some ways this is unavoidable. There should no longer be any question that Christianity can and has accommodated domestic terrorism inside the United States, not as a veneer, but as at least one motivating force shaping the character and contours of the violence itself. In the 1960s, Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ–Christian functioned in much the same way that Al Qaeda functioned from 1996 to the present: as an ideological umbrella for a network of zealots, that facilitated interactions between otherwise decentralized “chapters” of terrorists, with key figures cross-affiliating among different groups. Neither Swift nor his successors plotted and executed these crimes on a case-by-case basis, any more than Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahir micromanaged the terrorist attacks on the USS Cole, on American Embassies in Africa, on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, on a passenger train in Madrid, or on the subway system in London. But if devout Christians fail to recognize their religion in the preaching of Wesley Swift or in the rants of J.B. Stoner, that too is understandable. The exegetical contortions necessary to change a religion that compels a follower to love his enemy, into a religion that condones genocide and ethnic cleansing, are enormous. But so too are the contortions necessary to change a religion that says that suicide is forbidden, that Muslims should never harm other Muslims, that respects Jesus Christ and Moses as high prophets, into a crusade that routinely uses suicide attacks to kill Jews, Christians, and primarily, other Muslims. Perhaps this book will lead non-Muslims to a measure of self-reflection and humility when a Muslim insists that Islam has been perverted or distorted by extremists.

  1

  TWISTED THEOLOGY

  the SYNAGOGUE BOMBINGS of 1957–1958

  In its forty-year history, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA), formed in 1917 to collect and disseminate Jewish-centric news to journalism outlets worldwide, reported only two bombing attacks against Jewish targets inside the United States. So the following news story may have seemed an anomaly:

  Attempt to Dynamite Charlotte Synagogue Fails; Police Investigate

  CHARLOTTE, N.C. (Nov. 26, 1957) Charlotte police today continued their investigation of an attempted dynamiting of Temple Beth El here which could have killed some 40 women who were attending a meeting.1

  But by February 1958, when another dynamite bomb failed to detonate at Temple Emmanuel in Gaston, North Carolina, a sense of dread began to permeate America’s Jewish community. Within another month it became clear that these concerns were well placed. The JTA reported:

  F.B.I. Investigates Bombing of Jewish Centers in Miami and Nashville

 
; WASHINGTON (Mar. 17, 1958) The Department of Justice stepped in today to investigate the bombing yesterday of Jewish centers in Miami and Nashville with a view to determining whether a violation of Federal laws occurred.2

  The two earlier attacks had failed because of issues related to the bombs’ fuses. The first successful explosion occurred with the March 16 Miami bombing, producing a noise that local residents compared to a plane crash.3 At eight o’clock that same evening, another bomb caused $6,000 worth of damage to the Jewish Community Center in Nashville, Tennessee, “smashing the front doors, ripping down the ceiling of the reception hall and smashing windows in the building.”4

  Like a double-tap gunshot execution, two more, almost simultaneous attacks occurred the following April in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Jacksonville, Florida. The former failed when the “25-foot fuse burned to within 18 inches” of fifty-four sticks of dynamite, enough, the JTA noted at the time, “to demolish the temple.” The Jacksonville bomb did ignite, failing to kill or wound anyone but causing $3,000 in damages, almost $25,000 in today’s money.5

  Two additional bombings followed. The most notable occurred on October 12, 1958, when an estimated forty to fifty sticks of dynamite caused serious damage to Atlanta’s oldest synagogue, the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple, known to many simply as the Temple. A caller from a group referring to itself as the Confederate Underground—a then largely unknown organization that tied itself to several of the previous attacks—ominously warned that all Jewish and black-owned businesses were now potential targets. “We bombed a temple in Atlanta,” the caller insisted. “This is the last empty building in Atlanta we will bomb.”6