* Holocaust Museum shooter's letters to Marine Corps General show longstanding ties to racist right

James von Brunn, who is accused of murdering security guard Stephen Johns in the course of a terrorist attack on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10, had longstanding ties to far-right, racist groups. These connections are evident in his letters to retired Marine Corps General Pedro A. Del Valle, himself an activist of the racist far-right, who provided both material support and philosophical inspiration to von Brunn.

According to the memoir von Brunn published on his website (available here, in cached version), his connection to General Del Valle goes back at least to the mid-1960s. In fact, von Brunn credits Del Valle with inspiring his anti-Semitism by giving him a book.

"In 1964 Gen. Pedro del Valle gave me John O. Beaty's The Iron Curtain Over America. For the first time I learned how JEWS had destroyed Europe and were now destroying America."

This book, which Del Valle ardently promoted among his like-minded colleagues in the military, helped popularize among the radical right the myth that modern Jews are descended from a medieval Central Asian nation called the Khazars. It presents a paranoid version of modern history in which the Russian Revolution, the creation of the Federal Reserve system, and the founding of the State of Israel and the United Nations all derive from what it describes as a "Khazar Jewish" conspiracy. The book presents this conspiracy in Cold War terms as a communist plot threatening the survival of the United States.

In his online memoir, von Brunn also refers to the assistance he was given by General Del Valle, stating that Del Valle testified on his behalf at his trial for assaulting a police officer during a DWI arrest, and that Del Valle found him employment with a publisher of racist literature called Noontide Press.

I've had the opportunity to review three letters which von Brunn wrote to General Del Valle in the mid-1970s. These letters confirm the long-standing connections of both men to extremist, far-right racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, American Party and Liberty Lobby, and to neo-Nazis such as Willis Carto and David Duke. I have not yet had the opportunity to review General Del Valle's responses to these letters.

Letter #1

The first of the three letters I've reviewed is dated March 31, 1975. Von Brunn appears to be responding to Del Valle's praise of the American Party and the Liberty Lobby, organizations which von Brunn believed too moderate to be effective.

"Personally I see no significant accomplishments resultant of their efforts --Zionism-Communism control over America has never been so complete. Our country never in such peril. (sic)"

In a hand-written post script, von Brunn elaborates that he believes a more violent approach is needed.

"The AP [American Party] and LL [Liberty Lobby] are ok in most respects, their strategy is wrong (sic). A strike force at the "grass roots level" is called for."

Von Brunn indicates in the letter that he was enclosing a copy of an article he had submitted to Willis Carto's American Mercury magazine, although that article was not included in the file I reviewed.

Letter #2

The second letter is dated August 9, 1975. In it, Von Brunn indicates that several days earlier he had met with David Duke and what he describes as "leaders of the KKK". Von Brunn's letter states that the Klan was in the process of changing from a "vigilante - direct action methodology" to a political one. Von Brunn disapproved.

"Too bad I say. I asked them the rhetorical question, 'what good is a political approach when the machinery of government is controlled by the enemy' . . . All of Western Civilization hangs by a thread. At the mercy of the Zionists. (sic) "

Von Brunn makes clear that he believes in violent opposition to the government, and implies that Del Valle was in accord with this belief.

"You and I have agreed, always, that the time for playing political games has long past. But who will finance the man with a gun? I have found no one . . . I've talked to leaders of the Catholic Church (Monseigneurs) (sic) ... oil company presidents, leaders in industry ... they're all afraid! "

Von Brunn goes on to inform General Del Valle that he had left his job at Noontide Press. In his online memoir, von Brunn alleges that he was fired after discovering that the publisher's defacto CEO, Willis Carto, was publishing a new edition of Iron Curtain Over America without paying royalties to the estate of its author.

Interestingly, von Brunn concludes the letter by asserting to Del Valle that he is not a government agent:

"If you still believe that I was an agent of the FBI or any government agency at any time (other than the USNR [i.e. U.S. Naval Reserve]) give me a lie detector test. I'll gladly answer any question you put to me . . ."

A handwritten note on the bottom of the letter, presumably written by von Brunn himself as a post script, reads

"Wilmot Robertson's Dispossessed Majority says it all -- says it well."

Letter #3

The third letter is dated November 18, 1975. Von Brunn refers to meeting with David Duke, seemingly the same meeting referred to in his August letter. Again, von Brunn advocates that the Klan take a more violent approach. He also alludes to his belief that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, General George Patton and Senator Joseph McCarthy were all victims of a Jewish conspiracy.

"David Duke, KKK, is a fine young man. Apparently, he is doing well with the movement. But, as you know, my advice to him was to form a strike-force. The Enemy will allow him so much rope - no more. When he becomes bothersome he will meet the same fate as Forrestal, Patton, McCarthy and the rest of the Patriots."

Von Brunn mentions his money and career troubles, and indicates that he is attempting to produce a film with an anti-Zionist theme. He writes that he has pitched the film to several unnamed "well-heeled individuals", and asks if Del Valle knows any "wealthy Arabs". He also states that he is waiting for a reply from "General Glubb". This reference to Sir John Bagot Glubb, Britain's last proconsul for the Middle East (read here and here and here) is explained in a movie pitch which von Brunn enclosed with the letter.

According to the pitch, the film was to be a fictional adaptation of Conquest through Immigration, an anti-Zionist book of non-fiction by George W. Robnett. Robnett was the founder in 1937 of the Church League of America, an anti-Semitic and anti-communist group known for publishing the names of individuals it identified as purported subversives. The single sentence of von Brunn's movie pitch which outlines the plot describes an implausible conspiracy theory regarding Israel's attack on the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 war. His gist was that the Israelis intended to sink the ship and pin responsibility on "the Palestinians". Von Brunn's proposed title for the project was "Blood Bath in Zion".

According to the proposal, General Glubb was to serve as "Chief Advisor to the story and film". Von Brunn apparently believed that Glubb was a friend of Robnett and had the pipe dream of using this connection to help fund his film.

At the time he was marketing his film idea, von Brunn had actually moved his family into the home of George W. Robnett's widow, Florence, a woman he describes on his website as

"83-yrs old, but possessed of a brilliant mind. She had been Dean of Women at Northwestern University. She was a fervent right-wing Aryan."

While living in her house, von Brunn had made republishing George Robnett's book and producing a film based on it a cottage industry, so to speak. Although von Brunn did assist Florence Robnett in privately publishing an edition of the book (under the title "Zionist Rape of the Holy Land!"), the film version, not surprisingly, was not to be. Within a year, von Brunn moved his family out of Florence Robnett's house because, according to him, his step-daughter was having difficulty dealing with going to an integrated high school. They moved to a virtually all white area of northern California.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the librarians at the University of Oregon library for their assistance in providing copies of these letters.

More information on General Pedro Del Valle is available here and here.

US Navy suspends anti-Semitic activist officer

from the Southern Policy Law Center website:

SPLCenter.org: Extremists in the Military

Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe Jr., the public affairs officer for the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, was temporarily relieved of duty and placed under investigation in early March for allegedly violating a rule that forbids all personnel in the U.S. Navy to "participate in any organization that espouses supremacist causes."

The anti-Semitic activities of the 1993 Naval Academy graduate were first revealed in an exposé in the Winter 2006 edition of the Intelligence Report that explored the "radical traditionalist Catholic" movement in the United States. Sharpe was suspended after a reporter for Port Folio Weekly of Norfolk, Va., where the Carl Vinson is based, asked military officials if Sharpe's activities were permitted.

The Report article detailed two of Sharpe's organizations, the Legion of St. Louis and IHS Press, both now listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups. The story also noted that Sharpe was a vendor at the 2006 conference of American Renaissance, a racist publication (Sharpe was at a table next to a man selling "White Power" T-shirts). And it reported he is on the board of the St. George Educational Trust, a radical British Catholic group whose trustees once included convicted Italian terrorist Roberto Fiore. The trust has been accused of helping fund a project by the anti-Semitic International Third Position (ITP), which sought in the late 1990s to create a radical Catholic community in Los Pedriches, Spain.

Sharpe is on administrative leave pending the outcome of the Navy investigation, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing his extremist activities. At press time, he was still slated to speak at an August conference of the anti-Semitic St. Benedict Center, a New Hampshire group also profiled in the Report article that believes "the Jewish race" is working to overthrow Christian society. And Sharpe's Legion of St. Louis was still selling an array of anti-Semitic books, including Hilaire Belloc's The Jews and Henry Ford's The International Jew, on its website.

Sharpe also co-published an anti-Iraq war two-volume set, Neo-Conned!, with "D. Liam O'Huallachain," who is really Derek Holland, a British extremist and former member of the racist National Front and ITP, which seeks a "third way" that is neither capitalism nor communism. Holland is also a director of IHS Press.

Another radical traditionalist profiled by the Report, hard-line anti-Semite E. Michael Jones, caused a ruckus during a March speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Jones joined other extremists at a conference held to promote the ideas of white nationalist columnist Sam Francis, who died in 2005. The meeting was organized by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, where Francis was a resident scholar. The foundation is headed by Fran Griffin, who runs a public relations firm, Griffin Communications, that also publishes Sobran's, a newsletter by columnist Joe Sobran. Sobran is an anti-Semite who has written for a Holocaust denial journal.

A red-faced and shouting Jones devoted a full hour to denouncing the "revolutionary Jew" who, he claimed, has been fighting the Catholic Church and Christianity in general for some 2,000 years. Among other things, Jones denounced the civil rights movement as "controlled by Jews" who used blacks as "pawns."

Jones' furious speech was not received well by most attendees, who had expected a more dignified gathering. Attendee Peter Brimelow — the man who runs Vdare.com, a white supremacist website named after Virginia Dare, who is said to be the first white born in the New World — even called Jones a "Catholic bigot" and mocked him as "a prize specimen even by the standards of my lifelong study of characters on the American right." Jones was so extreme that C-SPAN decided to cancel a planned broadcast of the event.

Anti-Semitism Drove Chaplain to Resign from U.S. Army, Now He's Slandered as Deserter

Swastikas at Hunter Airfield, and a Rabbi on the Run

By Jason Leopold (t r u t h o u t | Report, 7/17/2007)

A former Army chaplain who has been listed as a deserter by the Department of Defense intends to file a civil rights lawsuit against the United States military for refusing to discipline three Evangelical Christian Army chaplains at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The three allegedly subjected Rabbi Jeffrey Goldman to vulgar displays of anti-Semitism in 2001 and 2002.

Goldman, 35, a native of Toronto, said the Army listed him as a deserter in retaliation for speaking out about other chaplains' anti-Semitic behavior at Fort Stewart. Goldman contends that he legally resigned from his stint as an Army chaplain in January 2002 when his transfer requests were rebuffed.

Mikey Weinstein, head of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said Goldman approached him last month after reading a story reported by Truthout in which Weinstein exposed a pattern of anti-Semitism displayed in Biblical teachings by chaplains at Fort Leavenworth.

Rabbi Goldman's civil rights "were perniciously raped in a literally mind-boggling, intentional manner," Weinstein said in an interview. "The Army retaliated against him for speaking out. The Army refused to lift a finger to address Rabbi Goldman's complaints despite documentary evidence that supports his claims. And now the Army is going to find itself the defendant in a lawsuit our organization will file on behalf of Rabbi Goldman for grossly violating his civil rights."

According to documents obtained by Truthout, an investigation by the Army Inspector General into Goldman's claims of anti-Semitism shows that in May 2001, Captain Robert Nay, a Christian chaplain at the Fort Stewart Army base, hung Nazi uniforms and swastikas on the wall of the officers' club at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, during a May 23, 2001 interfaith prayer breakfast Goldman was ordered to attend.

In an interview, Goldman said seeing the Nazi uniforms did not entirely surprise him. A month earlier, Nay had informed Goldman that he thought it would be "funny" if he dressed up soldiers in the Nazi uniforms on Holocaust Memorial Day, a time when the world memorializes the six million Jews who were slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II.

When contacted for comment, Nay hung up the telephone. A public affairs official at Fort Stewart would not comment for this story, nor would he disclose his name.

Goldman says he complained about Nay's anti-Semitic tirades to his Fort Stewart chaplain supervisor, Major Larry Sharp. In a sworn affidavit, Goldman said Sharp told him that he "needed to get along with people who hate Jews." Moreover, Goldman was then informed by Sharp that he would now be reporting directly to Nay. Goldman said he immediately contacted Rabbi David Lapp, head of the Jewish Chaplains Council in New York, who had sponsored Goldman's chaplain service in the military.

Lapp said he was made aware of the Nazi paraphernalia and the episode of anti-Semitism Goldman says he was subjected to, but he dismissed that as "no big deal."

"Lots of people collect Nazi material and swastikas," Lapp, now retired, said in an interview from his New Jersey home. "Sure, he told me about it. But that's not the issue here. The issue is he ran away from his commitment when he found out he was going to be sent to Afghanistan in 2001."

Goldman disputes that account. He said he was never privy to information regarding "troop movement" and that Lapp's accusation is an attempt to cover up the fact that he "turned a blind eye" to Goldman's numerous complaints of anti-Semitism and his requests for a transfer.

"I would have willingly gone to Afghanistan," Goldman said. "I just didn't want to be subjected to anti-Semitism at Fort Stewart. The whole reason I volunteered to become a chaplain is because I was eager to help Jewish kids who chose the military and needed spiritual guidance while being far away from home serving" in the Army. "Rabbi Lapp told me over and over again not to rock the boat in the military and that I should just do what the goyim(gentiles) want and keep four meters away from the people who were anti-Semitic."

Lapp agreed that he told Goldman to ignore the alleged anti-Semitism at Fort Stewart.

Goldman said Lapp requested his [Goldman's] resignation, which was approved by Major General Buford C. Blount at Fort Stewart, according to documents.

Goldman then returned to Toronto in January 2002. But because the Army was terribly short of Jewish chaplains, the deputy assistant secretary of the Army Review Boards in Washington, DC, overturned Goldman's resignation and demanded he return to service at Fort Stewart, documents show. Goldman agreed, but only on the condition that he be reassigned. The Army declined and Goldman refused to return. In 2002, Goldman was listed as a deserter, meaning he is subject to arrest if he returns to the United States.

Goldman enlisted the help of the Canadian Parliament to address the military's claims that he deserted his post. On July 16, 2004 Dan McTeague, parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs in Canada, intervened and wrote a letter to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, seeking an amicable resolution to the matter.

"Mr. Secretary, it is my hope that you can offer some assistance in dismissing the charges against Rabbi Goldman," McTeague's letter to Rumsfeld states. "Rabbi Goldman has no intention of returning to the United States to be arrested and forced to endure a court-martial that he believes would not be conducted fairly. Given the documentation Rabbi Goldman has provided me, I share his concern about him receiving fair treatment."

The Army's criminal division responded to McTeague's letter on October 13, 2004, saying the desertion charges would stand and urging Goldman to turn himself in to US military authorities to face a court-martial. Moreover, the Army said there was no truth to any of Goldman's claims of anti-Semitism - in contradiction with the Army's own internal investigation.

Weinstein said he expected the Army's denials to Goldman's claims, so he demanded that the rabbi take a lie detector test to measure the validity of his allegations of anti-Semitism. The administrator of the test, John McClinton, a forensic polygrapher and former Canadian military intelligence officer, said Goldman scored a "+21" in response to questions about claims of anti-Semitism at Fort Stewart, which McClinton says suggests Goldman is "being more than truthful."