Chilling emails reveal hate of racist who shot museum guard
FBI and anti-extremist organisation had monitored alleged gunman since 1981
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James von Brunn was yesterday charged with shooting dead a security guard at Washington's Holocaust Museum on Wednesday. He was himself injured after being shot by security guards
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As they get older, they don't always get more harmless. James Von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who was yesterday charged with the shooting that killed one security guard at Washington's Holocaust Museum on Wednesday, had attended fund-raising events for the British Nationalist Party among other activities.
He had also recently shown signs of going over the edge. He was "like a pressure cooker, just ready to go off", according to one neighbour. Nor did you have to be in his home town of Easton, Maryland, to notice. Mr Von Brunn had been dropping hints on the internet too, where he had learned to disseminate his doctrine of hate.
"It's time to kill the Jews," Mr Von Brunn, a hard-core Holocaust denier who once suggested that he had fought on the wrong side in the Second World War, declared in one posting. "America is a Third World racial garbage-dump – stupid, ignorant, dead-broke, and terminal," he offered in another.
You might think someone would have noticed Mr Von Brunn before he finally went off, killing the guard before being shot himself by two other security officers (he was in critical condition in hospital last night). In fact, the FBI and the Southern Poverty Centre, which monitors white supremacist groups, admitted they did know all about him. Sadly, however, there are many Von Brunns in America.
It was for this angry community that he wrote a book expounding his anti-Semitic views. Someone who got acquainted with him was Todd Blodgett, a former aide in Ronald Reagan's White House who had his own interest in the hate groups but also at times acted as an informant for the government.
Mr Blodgett recalled going with Mr Von Brunn to meetings in Virginia of the American Friends of the British National Party, a now disbanded group that raised funds for the BNP.
"Von Brunn is obsessed with Jewish people," Mr Blodgett told The Washington Post. "He had equal contempt for both Jews and blacks, but if he had to pick one group to wipe out, he'd always say it would be Jews."
If Mr Von Brunn had extreme views, he was also capable of extreme action. In 1981, he was arrested with a sawn-off shotgun outside a meeting of the Federal Reserve Board and imprisoned for six years for trying to kidnap the entire board, including the former chairman, Paul Volcker. At his trial, Mr Von Brunn said his goal was to "deport all Jews and blacks from the white nations".
The Poverty Centre confirmed that Mr Von Brunn had been continually monitored by its researchers since his arrest in 1981. While he had never heard Mr Von Brunn speak of taking violent action, Mr Blodgett said that "a lot of these people, when they get toward the end of life, they say they've wasted all these years hating, and they want to make a statement somehow".
John de Nugent, a self-described white supremacist who was in contact with Mr Von Brunn, said: "I think the election of Barack Obama became a tremendous signal of alarm for him."
DC gunman attended BNP rallies in US independent.co.uk/minority-report
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Comments
At the time of the museum's opening in 1993, Jewish writer Melvin Jules Bukiet noted: "It's not Jewish tragedy that's remembered on the Mall this week: it's Jewish power to which homage is paid." The Washington Post, April 18, 1993, p. C3.
For the record, the American Friends of the British National Party was liquidated in 2001, when the British government made it illegal to raise funds abroad. It is not known whether Mr von Brunn ever donated to the AFBNP, or ever had any interest in doing so.
John de Nugent has NEVER self-described as a white supremacist. That is an outright lie. Gerry Gable is aggressively ethnocentric. Should I call him a Jewish supremacist?
John de Nugent describes himself as a white separatist. Yesterday, the American media interviewed him and demonstrated an almost uniform capacity to comprehend the term "white separatist", and to respect it in their reporting.
If you, Mr Editor, reply on Gable and Searchlight you will be fed vile lies. Do your own research. Ask the likes of the BNP and de Nugent for the clarifications you require. Leave these toxic Searchlight people well alone.
That is simply hilarious. Too bad for separatists then that the different races are of the same species and can breed, and what they know as the 'white' race will be nothing more than something in a history book in the future as the technology of the global village fast tracks mixed races
You are such a bitter old tool.
Fortunately, anyone with any education easily writes you off as 'dumb as a stump'.
Another frightening aspect of this is the fact that there are so many people in the UK who are either willing to ignore, or perhaps don't fully appreciate, the disgusting philosophy of racial xenophobia and absolute hatred in which the BNP believes. The BNP's policy of only allowing "white people" (like Peter Ustinov once said, I'm more a pinkish-grey colour than white) to join its organisation, really says it all about this obnoxious organisation.
How on earth do the BNP "classify" people? Does one have to prove pedigree, if so how many generations back? Will the fact that in the early 19th century one's great, great, great, great gandfather/mother married a person of mixed race disqualify one? Perhaps they take people at "face value" - which proves how shallow their odious beliefs are.
They also profess to want to rid Britain of "foreigners", but don't spell out how they propose to do this - they only vaguely say people will be given cash incentives to leave - but don't say what they would propose if people, quite rightly, don't want to leave their homes, family, friends and community.
The depth of xenophobia in the UK is frightening, and I suspect many of those who make very generalised complaints about "foreigners" are quite happy to go to other people's countries. Incidentally, do the BNP also disapprove of foreign investment in the UK such as the Japanese car company Honda, which provides hundreds of jobs (and other companies), or do they wish to get rid of that foreign influence as well?
Links? Show me. Or change your language, liar.
Racial xenophobia! What is your race? Why are you in my homeland? What right do you have to call me vile names when you propose the extinction of my people by dispossession and demographic replacement.
You ask how the BNP classifies people. This is another way of saying the English do not exist, and are not worth preserving.
We are not Pakistanis. We are not Indians. We are not Somalis or Jews. We are not Afghans or Rwandans or Albanians. We are none of those peoples, nor any of the other peoples who are flooding our ancetsral land. How dare you refuse us our existence.
Hater.
Blodgett, btw, was an FBI stooge. Do you think he is believeable? I've got news for you. He takes money to say hateful things about racially-aware white Americans. He wouldn't last five minutes in a witness box, but the media print everything he says as though it was gospel truth.
Blodgett himself, btw, has said that he never passed any information to the FBI about von Brunn. So the guy wasn't worth it. Til now!
Don't trust stooges. They are motivated by other consideratyions than telling the truth.
You are obviously annoyed with the reporting of this story and no doubt many others but as every well educated person knows news will always be biased so many will read a number of papers to obtain a well rounded view.
You need to accept other peoples beliefs and stop trying so hard to black box