c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

(RNS)-A nervous America will mark the first anniversary of the bombing of Oklahoma City’s federal building on April 19, a terrorist attack that killed 167 people. And the current siege by federal law enforcement officials of the Freemen, a white supremacist militia in Montana, is cause for even more anxiety.

Militia members were once casually dismissed as wackos or crazies, but not any more. They are armed. They are dangerous. And their paranoid visions are fueled by racism and anti-Semitism.

Indeed, Kenneth S. Stern’s new book,”A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate”(Simon and Schuster), makes clear that these home-grown terrorists have specific objectives that are buttressed by violent fanaticism and stockpiles of lethal weapons.

Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s expert on hate groups, analyzes the economic, social and political extremism that fuels the militias. But he also reminds us that racism and anti-Semitism, among the world’s oldest pathologies, are essential components of militia ideology.

Many militia movers and shakers are covert anti-Semites who frequently speak in code, referring to Jews as”international bankers,””eastern elites,””liberal media,”or the”unseen hand”ushering in the dreaded”New World Order.” It does not matter that President George Bush, an Episcopalian, used the term”New World Order”to describe his own foreign policy objectives following the collapse of the Soviet Union. To militia members, Bush and all other presidents are the willing dupes of Jews who are secretly in control of the federal government.

The militias’ hatred of Jews and Judaism is given an ugly theological rationale by the Christian Identity movement, which traces its roots to the 19th century and claims that white Christians have displaced the Jews as the”true Israelites.” In the bizarre world of Christian Identity, Jews are the offspring of Satan and blacks are”pre-Adamic mud people,”a sub-human species that was created before Adam and Eve. Christian Identity also teaches that America is the new”Promised Land”and belongs solely to white Christians.

Militia leaders call Washington, D.C.,”ZOG”for”Zionist Occupational Government.”The income tax, the use of paper money instead of gold, the Federal Reserve banking system and the Trilateral Commission are identified as part of the Jewish conspiracy to weaken white Christians in order to control the world.

It is no accident that some militia leaders pattern themselves after the Nazis and hang pictures of Hitler in their headquarters. And because many Americans are ignorant of World War II and the Holocaust, the militias often distort history and whitewash the Nazi record of mass murder.

Stern is careful to point out that not all recruits to the militia movement are anti-Semitic. Some are drawn to groups like the Freemen because they oppose any form of gun control; others are isolationist and xenophobic. Some are attracted by the militias’ hatred of the central government; still others are white supremacists.

But underlying all militia thought and practice is a subtext of belief in a sinister Jewish conspiracy. And Stern correctly warns that”movements that dabble in anti-Semitism in whatever form are dangerous, not only to Jews but to the fabric of democracy.” The anti-Semitism of militias is a continuation of a phenomenon I first encountered 10 years ago in Iowa, where I spent a month visiting that state’s economically depressed agricultural communities. Religious leaders and farmers’ organizations in Iowa were sounding alarms about the rise of anti-Jewish and anti-democratic movements. I traveled to Iowa to gain first-hand knowledge about groups like Christian Identity, Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations, and other hate mongers who were telling farmers that Jews and their”Washington puppets”were to blame for low crop and land prices.

Their ugly seeds of hate did not take root in Iowa, but I came away from the experience with a sense of foreboding and dread. Now I know why. In time, the hate groups moved much of their operations to the Upper Plains and the Northwest, where they evolved into today’s violent militias.

Americans are sometimes slow to recognize threats to their freedom. The national tragedy that unfolded a year ago in Oklahoma City was a clear warning of the dangers lurking in the mentality of militia members many of us thought were harmless crackpots. I can only hope that the forces of law and the values of a just society will prevail against the powers of this darkness.

MJP END RUDIN