WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL SHOOTER THINKING?
(photo) National Holocaust Museum, Washington, D. C.
It is particularly disturbing to me when Jew-hating violence is intentionally promoted and acted upon in this nation - because I believe that the USA is the LEAST anti-Semitic country in the world. So, any reminder of anti-Semitism in America is disturbing, but I believe that Americans overwhelmingly reject the extremist views propagated by a handful of extremist nut-jobs who seek to foment hate and violence on websites and in crude publications.
I hope Mr. von Brunn, the shooter at the Holocaust Memorial in D.C. is, after all, just a crazed, senile lone wolf - and not part of an organized movement. But we must always keep our guard up against extremist haters from the right or the left who would seek to turn us against one another on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin or sexual orientation.
What did the 88-year-old shooter hope to accomplish with his 22-caliber rifle? If James Wenneker von Brunn, a self-described Aryan supremacist and a Holocaust-denying Jew-hater, had a death-wish to "go out in a blaze of glory" for his perverted cause, he has attained fleeting notoriety by killing an African-American security guard at the Holocaust Memorial. And, for a while, he serves as a horrific example for the rest of us.
Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong writes:
... anti-Semitism was rampant in all of Europe and indeed in the United States and Canada.
Anti-Semitism is the child above all else of the Christian faith. It finds its first expression in the gospels. One thinks of such horrendous texts as Matthew having the Jewish crowd say of Jesus, "His blood be upon us and upon our children," or John having Jesus say that the Jews have Satan for their father. It was fed by the writings of the Church Fathers, Jerome, Chrysostom, Irenaeus and Polycarp. It was excited by the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century, for which the Jews were blamed. It is rampant in the words of the Reformation Leader Martin Luther and it found expression in every nation of Christian Europe, including Poland, though it reached its highest level of killing frenzy in Nazi Germany.
We are called to move into the future, but none of us must do it by ignoring the past or denying its dark shadows.
