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

272 Pages·2015·2.28 MB·English

by  Stuart Wexler

Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Wexler
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may
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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
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Distributed by Publishers Group West
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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 one-time 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 ante-Bellum 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