The fatal shooting of three people in front of a Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas was extremely odious and sickening, mostly because any fool could have seen this coming a mile away! Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said of the incident; "...how can you be surprised when a guy who’s spent his life saying the Jews should be killed decides to go kill Jews?” Frazier Glenn Miller, the shooter who ironically gunned down three non-Jews, in the ignorant belief that only Jews could possibly be standing outside a Jewish Community center so close to the Passover holiday, was arrested and taken into custody by Overland police officers.
Miller is a lifelong white supremacist and anti-Semite. Most white supremacists are virulently anti-Semitic, blaming Jews for all the world's ills but Miller, who shrieked "Heil Hitler" as he fled each of the two scenes of the shootings, is especially hateful towards Jews, more so than against even racial minorities whom he believes would not be so numerous or militant were it not for alleged Jewish plans to "destroy the white race." Miller is one of those who push the line that Jews promote non-white immigration to the US as part of a plan for white genocide (here he awkwardly refers to the 1965 Immigration and Nationalities Act or Hart-Cellar Act which replaced the unconstitutional 1924 National Origins Immigration Act which assigned foreign countries immigration quotas limiting immigration). He further contends that the Civil Rights movement in the US was a hoax claiming that the whole thing was simply part of a grand Jewish conspiracy to destroy whites. In a long interview with Greg Morelli, host of a former progressive radio show called Family Values with an Oy Vey broadcast on Chicago's WCPT, Miller claimed that there was not Civil Rights movement. Regarding African-Americans, Miller stated "You [Jews] siced 'em on us" in order to commit a white genocide!
Miller has appeared on the Howard Stern show as well. In a 2010 interview with Stern and co-host Robin Quivers, who is African-American, Miller fulminated non-stop about Jews. At the start of the show, which hosted Miller due to his 2010 US Senate race as an independent, he raged, "Compared to our Jewish problem, all other problems are mere distractions..." When co-Host Quivers asked why he believed this he replied, "They control the federal government, they control the mass media, they control the Federal Reserve Bank, and with those powers, they commit genocide against the white race..." He went on to add that indeed, Jews control all of America in its entirety!
Insane quotes from Miller abound. He's been an active white supremacist since the early 1970s when he joined the National States’ Rights Party and then the National Socialist Party of America—the Nazis, after being discharged from the US Army for his extremist views and affiliations. He later formed the Carolina Knights of the KKK and trained in military exercises with his followers on a farm he purchased in Angier, NC in 1980. He shunned the traditional white robes of the KKK in favor of green military fatigues and a beret with a white cross fixed to the front of it. Miller ceaselessly expressed his admiration for Adolph Hitler saying, "I would try to emulate Hitler’s methods of attracting members and supporters…I placed great emphasis on staging marches and rallies. It had been successful with Hitler.” Miller also formed the White Patriot Party in the 1980s whose members similarly trained on his Carolina farm. In the late 1980s, he was arrested on weapons charges and for being part of a plot to assassinate Morris Dees, a Jewish Attorney who founded and headed the Southern Poverty Resource Center, an Alabama based civil rights group.
I personally recall Miller on a talk show hosted by Greg Morelli in early 2010 before his run for the US Senate from the state of Missouri. Miller's comments were the most outrageous I've ever heard from such a creature. He denied belief in Christianity, as did most ranking Nazis, condemning it as "a Jewish Cult" and derisively referring to Jesus Christ as "that Kike on a stick!" When asked if this meant that he would never place his hand on the Holy Bible as part of a swearing in ceremony he snidely retorted, "The only book I'd ever swear on is Mein Kampf!"
Miller seemed to be obsessed with Jews almost exclusively. Without Jews, he seemed to believe, other non-whites (he doesn't consider Jews to be white) wouldn't be such a problem for white people. He insisted that the "Jewish problem" had to be solved first, something he's stressed publicly for years. He stated the usual bile about the Jews controlling the banks, the mass media, the government and the economy but then went well beyond the usual nonsense into the realm of the absurd. "Do you know who poisoned the Indians with those small pox infected blankets?" he fulminated. "It was a Jew named Bordeaux!" He reasoned that no good white man would ever stoop to that but the Jews would have you think otherwise. I was curious so I Googled the words, Jews, Bordeaux, Indians, Blankets, Small Pox, US Cavalry, thinking that if there was a Jew named Bordeaux who was the culprit here I'd surely find him. What I discovered was that Bordeaux was the type of wine that the French explorers traded with the Native Americans! Even the neo-Nazi website Stormfront had to deny the validity of this claim (though not without great disappointment!)
Miller went on to claim that all fourteen Fed chairmen since 1913 were Jews (only four of them were); that US troops murdered 13.6 million German soldiers during WWII, after they surrendered their weapons (it's unlikely this many Germans even saw combat. Most estimates of total German combatants killed hovers around five and a half million more than two thirds of whom were killed on the eastern front by Russians.); that the Jews killed over 300 million white people outright (this figure seems to correspond merely to the total US population at the time of the 2010 US Census); and that the allegedly genocidal behavior of modern Jews can be traced to an alleged quote from the Talmud (Sanhedren 59a) which supposedly reads that "Murdering Goyim is like murdering a wild animal." One scholarly religious website claims that this and other such quotes were fabricated, mostly by white supremacists to defame Jews. The quotes, which are said to appear on the KKK and other anti-Semitic and racist websites, are intended to stir up violent acts against Jews. According to the theological rebuttal;
Sanhedrin 59a does say, recording a conversation between two teachers, that one of them zealously said that a heathen who looks into the Law (the Torah, not the Talmud) should be guilty of death. It goes on to say, however, that the other teacher destroyed his argument, showing instead that a heathen who pries into the Law becomes as a High Priest. So this quote is taken out of context, just like some political candidates take their opponent’s comments out of context for their own ads.Miller's ongoing rant appeared to focus exclusively on Jews, a strange think for a former Klansman whose hatred generally run the gamut of all non-white protestants. My point is merely that such a consistently obsessive individual should be a red flag the size of Russia. Like most such red flags they go unnoticed until it is too late. Now three innocent people are dead.
Miller was one of the better known white supremacist/anti-Semites and one of the most active. Only David Duke had a wider reputation. Miller was nothing short of notorious. There were numerous opportunities to legally restrain him, not because of his obnoxious views but because of his repeated, decades long vow to murder people whose religion and ethnic background he despised. Few who paid close attention doubted that he would one day act on his vile and hateful beliefs. Of course, nothing was done.
According to a recent NYT report, FBI documents detail what a threat this domestic terrorist really was. According to the report;
The archives also show that Mr. Miller received large sums of money from The Order, a white power group in the Pacific Northwest, to buy land and weapons to put his followers through paramilitary training. Mr. Miller’s group paid $50,000 for weapons and matériel stolen from the armory at Fort Bragg, N.C., including anti-tank rockets, mines and plastic explosives. He targeted active-duty troops for recruitment and hired them to conduct training exercises.Miller served a three year sentence for violating a court order and served a three year prison term. He was released in 1990 and went back to his racist activism albeit not violently until recently. The FBI has been documenting hate crimes for over twenty years. In 2012, the FBI confirmed that about 62% of all hate crimes based on religion were against the Jewish Community. In the previous year, 63% of all religious based hate crimes were against the Jewish Community. In 2010, 67% of victims of religious hate crimes were Jews. In fact, the ADL published a compilation of FBI statistics on religiously based hate crimes going back to the year 2000 when 75% of all religiously based hate crimes were against Jews. In the intervening years more than two-thirds of such crimes on average were against Jews. Such official documentation by the FBI should have been ample warning and should have been a sufficiently compelling context for the ravings of Miller and his followers to warrant more action before the current tragedy. Steadily growing anti-Semitism has been a problem not only in the US but globally.
Hate, especially anti-Semitism, has been historically shown to grow rapidly in times of economic stress. This is an especially acute problem in the US currently. In 2009, Homeland security released a detailed report on the danger of the growth of right wing militias in the US. Books have been written since the Gulf War I about right wing hate groups encouraging members to seek military training by serving in the US Armed Forces. This is not just an issue of a few mentally ill individuals or a handful of hateful, disgruntled people. This is all about the proverbial ticking political time bomb that is the not so quietly growing threat of fascism in the US. History teaches us that fascism is the outcome of extreme economic stress. Some would say it is the political expression of a rotten capitalist system in irreversible crisis and decline. Regardless of how one contextualizes the current rise in hate crimes, this should be a wake up call to both the relevant authorities and to people in general.
The real long term threat of domestic terrorism in the US comes from the secular far right, not militant Islam. It is the forces of armed fascism that will be released by continued economic decline, not religious extremism. History shows this to be especially the case when the left is weak and divided as it is now. A flurry of hate crimes today can become a torrent of armed fascist violent destabilization of our democracy tomorrow. It would indeed be naïve to ignore the current warnings about the future. History councils an active legal and political opposition to armed fascism if our democracy is to survive.