Rage, Rage Against Hate

What was it that the suspect in the Jewish Community Center shootings is said to have told the FBI? “All Jews must be destroyed”--was that it? Almost. Those words, however, came from Wesley Swift, a self-styled preacher who repeated that message, over and over, to a congregation at Hollywood and Vine in the 1950s. He is widely regarded as the progenitor of the Christian Identity movement, a hate-filled “faith” now based in Idaho that spun off a virulent political wing called Aryan Nations and, briefly, a violent “military” wing called the Order. The suspect in the Granada Hills shootings, Buford O. Furrow, reportedly had ties to all three, and a violent past. What a source said he actually uttered was that “he wanted this to be a wake-up call to America to kill Jews.”

Swift, like most hate group leaders, didn’t himself issue orders to kill. He and his successors have said they have made no direct calls to violence, but followers have heard otherwise, especially those who were unbalanced to begin with or looking for excuses for their own failures.

Just a month ago, Matthew Hale, leader of another neo-Nazi hate group called the World Church of the Creator, denied making any specific call to violence against the non-Aryans he so loathed. But a follower, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, over the Fourth of July weekend killed an African American and a Korean American and wounded nine others, including six Orthodox Jews walking to or from their synagogue. He killed himself when cornered by police in Illinois. Creator and Christian Identity beliefs have been linked to the two Sacramento brothers suspected in three synagogue bombings and charged in the apparent hate murders July 1 of a gay couple. The evil word might not lead directly to the evil deed, but it gives permission.

After a gay man, Matthew Shepard, was beaten and left to die on a Wyoming fence post last autumn, too many Wyoming officials bristled at calling the killing a hate crime, saying that a murder is a murder, period. No, it’s not.

Federal law treats hate crimes differently, and should, because they are crimes against what this republic is supposed to stand for. In some ways, it’s like killing a police officer, which we regard as a crime against law and order and against society. Some forms of violence are far more socially destructive than others.

A determination to see hate crimes differently is a beacon of hope. As long as most Americans are particularly repelled by neo-Nazis and the Klan, those who follow their hatreds to a violent end can be contained--for instance, by laws that would help prevent them from gathering arsenals. As long as worsening acts of violence--now, horribly, against children--don’t numb the public’s sense of revulsion, a healthy outrage can be the first step to healing. Outrage can also lead to solutions, like the bankrupting lawsuits that the Southern Poverty Law Center effectively has used against hate groups. In one, an Alabama Klan group was forced to deed all of its property to the mother of a lynching victim. We applaud this tactic.

Furrow’s past--his confessions of hate, the fantasies of killing that he related to police, his hate group associations--should have triggered much closer scrutiny from judges, probation officers and police. And clearly, dangerous people who show abundant need for psychiatric help, as Furrow apparently did in the Seattle area, ought to get it, voluntarily or involuntarily. But Furrow drifted out of the justice and mental health systems unaltered and now is suspected of killing a Filipino American postal carrier as well as wounding three children, a teenage counselor and a receptionist at the Jewish center.

Then, of course, there’s the problem of Furrow and those like him having easy access to guns. As a convicted felon, he was legally forbidden to buy guns, but that’s only since late last year. In his van were large amounts of ammunition in metal military-style boxes and ammunition magazines for an assault rifle. Among his weapons was a semiautomatic weapon built from parts.

Militia and neo-Nazi groups both encourage members to assemble private arsenals, and without much-needed federal registration and licensing these arms are impossible to track.

In the end, a whole society must respond against hate. As the Holocaust historian Walter Reich and others have noted, social intolerance for ethnic slurs is the first, best line of defense against worse acts. By condemning bigotry and refusing to give it power, even as we protect repellent speech under our Constitution, Americans prove that a free society can also be a just society.