Tablet Magazine » Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting

Sundown: Rahm Is Pleased as Punch With Israel

Marc Tracy — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:00:30 +0000

• The White House flatly denied that chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel threatened to disengage from the peace process because he was “fed up” with Israel. Haaretz reported he did this morning. [Jeffrey Goldberg]
• Israel’s deputy foreign minister predicted that a nuclear Iran would prompt a massive regional arms race. [Haaretz]
• Scott Rothstein, the Florida man who allegedly orchestrated a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, is working on a plea that would spare him a life sentence. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]
• Fun with Orange County, California, white-supremacist anti-Semitic political parties. [OC Weekly via The Awl]
• Finally, we just received the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s official statement on the death of James Von Brunn: “The Museum’s thoughts and prayers continue to be with Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns’ family at this time. Officer Johns died heroically defending the Museum, visitors and staff. This tragedy is a powerful reminder that our cause of fighting hatred remains more urgent than ever.”

Holocaust Museum Shooter Dies

Marc Tracy — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:00:00 +0000

The man who last June allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., died today in a prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina. (An anonymous government official has confirmed the death.) James Von Brunn was facing a potentially capital charge of first-degree murder, as well as several smaller charges, including one for committing a hate crime. In the 1980s, he served over six years in federal prison for threatening people in the Federal Reserve Board headquarters with a sawed-off shotgun.

If you want a refresher on Von Brunn’s bizarre racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, TPM published the go-to rundown when the shooting occurred:

Von Brunn, apparently a World War II vet, has a long history of white supremacist writing. His book, Kill The Best Gentiles, embraces Adolf Hitler’s view that Jews concocted World War I as part of a scheme to stab Germany in the back—a myth the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust.

He also wrote an Internet posting complaining that Obama’s birth certificate and other documents have not been made public.

In 2003, he claimed to have conducted an investigation into the ethnic and religious background of Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander at the time, after some U.S. troops were placed under British command in Iraq.

Holocaust Museum Shooter Dies in Prison Hospital [AP/Fox News]

Earlier: So What If Von Brunn Hated Jews?
Related: James Von Brunn: A Profile [TPM]

Daybreak: First Hearing for Museum Shooter

Hadara Graubart — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:57:59 +0000

• James von Brunn, the alleged Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, went to court for the first time yesterday; the prosecution made the case that his crime was premeditated and that with “nothing to lose,” von Brunn cannot be safely set free. [WaPo]
• Citing “violations of international humanitarian law,” Norway has divested from the Israeli company that supplied surveillance materials for a separation wall in the West Bank. [JPost]
• The Israeli government “hinted” that it may retroactively legalize construction in two settlements that would otherwise need to be destroyed. [Haaretz]
• The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner makes the wise point that, with the skepticism of everyone invested in peace between Israelis and Palestinians, “low expectations all around may actually make it easier to achieve results.” [NYT]
• After a visit to Moscow by Natan Sharansky, the Jewish Agency, which he chairs, has partnered with a Russian philanthropy giant to expand Jewish education programs in the former Soviet Union. [JPost]

So What If von Brunn Hated Jews?

Marissa Brostoff — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:12:16 +0000

In addition to being indicted for first-degree murder, alleged U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn was also charged last week with having committed a hate crime. For Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, this charge—which comes a month after the Senate passed new hate crime legislation named for gay murder victim Matthew Shepard—is a perfect illustration of the “folly” of hate-crime laws, which are premised on the notion that some crimes against individuals actually make entire communities less safe. “I am Jewish,” Cohen writes. “But even with von Brunn’s attack, I am more affected by a mugging in my neighborhood that might keep me from taking a walk at night than I am by a shooting at a Holocaust museum.” In the Houston Voice, Rebecca Armendariz fired back: “Just because you, Mr. Cohen, can weigh the effects of a mugging in your neighborhood against the shooting at the museum doesn’t mean everyone can,” then went on to list crime victims, like Shepard, whose sexuality or skin color may have made any neighborhood a dangerous one for them to take a walk. In the San Francisco Chronicle, though, Debra Saunders made a pragmatic argument that aligns with Cohen’s. “It’s hard to understand how a federal hate-crimes law could send a stronger message than life in prison,” she writes. “With or without the Shepard act, Von Brunn could face the death penalty if convicted of first degree murder.”

The Folly of Hate-Crime Laws [WP]
Richard Cohen on Hate Crimes [Houston Voice]
Another Hate-Crimes Bill [S.F. Chronicle]

Sundown: Milk, Honey, and Black Gold

Hadara Graubart — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:00:39 +0000

• Christians and Jews alike have found a reason to love the Hebrew Bible—not just as a record of God’s laws, but as a treasure map detailing where to drill for oil in Israel. [Examiner]
• Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen makes an over-simplified, by-the-books argument against the necessity of “hate crime” laws, but ends with a provocative idea on the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting: “To suggest that the effects of this attack were felt only by the Jewish or the black communities … ghettoizes both its real and purported victims. It’s a consequence that von Brunn himself might applaud.” [WPost]
• The Anti-Defamation League and some other Jewish groups are chagrined that President Obama has chosen to give a Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson; they blame the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights for allowing the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban to be dominated by anti-Israel voices. [ABC]
• Renovations have begun on the oldest synagogue in Beirut, with the approval of Hezbollah: “We respect the Jewish religion.… We have an issue with Israel’s occupation of land.” [LAT]
• On that note, Hezbollah is stockpiling weapons in its capacity as “Iran’s insurance policy” against Israel. [London Times]

Sundown: Evolution of Evil

Hadara Graubart — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:15:45 +0000

• Alleged U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn’s life seemed to start off on the right track, but devolved steadily into paranoid anti-Semitism, particularly following the death of his son two years ago. [WP]
• A new project investigates the number of children left in foster care in Denmark during WWII while their parents fled the Nazis to Sweden. [Copenhagen Post]
• A recent ruling in Britain, which determined that it was unlawful for a Jewish day school to deny admission to a student based on the relative rigor of his mother’s conversion, has opened a debate as to whether the decision brands Judaism racist and whether a religious-observance test would be any fairer a way to filter applicants. [Jewish Chronicle]
• A recently-discovered 2,000-year-old stone quarry in Jerusalem proves the “intensity” of construction projects such as the Second Temple, says an expert. [Bloomberg]
• “There is a difference between the desecration of the Sabbath on an individual basis and the cancellation of the Sabbath,” says one ultra-Orthodox leader of the ongoing protests against a municipal parking lot in Jerusalem with plans to be open on Saturdays. [WPost]

Hitler and Jesus, Together

Allison Hoffman — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:30:19 +0000

A painting “of what appears to be Hitler and Jesus” was among the items seized from the Annapolis, Maryland, apartment of James von Brunn, according to court documents filed yesterday. FBI agents also seized 100 rounds of hollow-point bullets, a handwritten will, and a note regarding plant care in the home of the 88-year-old white supremacist charged in last week’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Von Brunn, a frustrated artist, was known to copy other artists’ work in his own, and among the extant works of another frustrated artist, Adolf Hitler, is an oil painting of a dark-haired Mother Mary cuddling a porcelain-faced, distinctly Aryan baby Jesus. Perhaps von Brunn was copying the artist into the same frame?

Hitler, Jesus Art in Alleged Museum Shooter’s Home [AP]
FBI Seized Hollow-Point Bullets from Supremacist’s Arundel Home [Baltimore Sun]

Earlier: James von Brunn, in His Own Words

Daybreak: Legal Definitions

Hadara Graubart — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:05:59 +0000

• Federal prosecutors have not decided whether to charge alleged U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn with a hate crime. The D.C. city council is urging them to do so. [JTA]
• Meanwhile, Jewish institutions fret over how to buck up security without becoming unwelcoming. [JTA]
• A 1979 State Department legal opinion stating that the Israeli settlements are against international law, long disregarded by U.S. presidents, is newly relevant, but the Obama administration has avoided directly addressing it. [WP]
• Netanyahu will be the first Israeli P.M. not to attend the Jewish Agency’s annual board meeting; he canceled his appearance next week because the group has refused to guarantee Natan Sharansky’s appointment as agency chairman. [JPost]
• Lieberose, a former Nazi death camp near Berlin, has been consecrated as a Jewish cemetery. [AP]

Holocaust Museum Reopens

Allison Hoffman — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:31:33 +0000

A troop of Girl Scouts from Dallas were among the first people in line this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which re-opened today, two days after anti-Semitic Holocaust denier James von Brunn allegedly tried to storm the federal facility. “To say that we can’t do this because of this event is that man winning,” troop leader Liz Johnson told the AP. “We’re not going to let him win.” Von Brunn, who remains hospitalized in critical condition, was charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the killing of guard Stephen T. Johns, who was shot at point-blank range in the chest as he moved to hold a door open for the 88-year-old von Brunn. A high school friend of Johns, a 39-year-old father from Temple Hills, Md., told reporters he was just the kind of person who would help someone like von Brunn. “If Steve saw an old lady struggling with groceries, he’d go help her,” Kevin Martin told the AP. Johns’ mother, Jacqueline Carter, told the wire her son, who spent six years working at the Holocaust museum, was her “teddy bear.”

The AP is also reporting that an official with the union representing the guards says he pushed for bulletproof vests after a man made threatening remarks to guards there several years ago. The wire service notes that von Brunn, a former Navy officer, went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., last month to complain about increased minority enrollment at the school. The museum, meantime, was to host the premiere of a new play on Wednesday, the day of the shooting, called Anne & Emmett, which imagines a conversation between Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both teenaged victims of racism. “I went from opening-night jitters to murder at the museum,” playwright Janet Langhart Cohen told the Washington Post. “It was like a bad dream: A white racist killed a black man at a Jewish shrine.” The play will go on tonight at George Washington University.

DC Museum Reopens After Fatal Shooting [AP via Yahoo!]
Slain Security Guard Remembered as “Teddy Bear” [AP via Yahoo!]
Guards Who Stopped Von Brunn Were Retired Cop, Ex-Marine [WP]
Officials Wanted Vests for Security Guards [AP via Yahoo!]
Attack Underscores Play’s Message [WP]

Daybreak: Bibi Now a Two-Stater?

Hadara Graubart — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:08:22 +0000

• Israeli P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to finally endorse a two-state solution in a big policy speech Sunday, according to the London Times. [Times]
• A note found in James von Brunn’s car says “Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.” In a break from the usual responses to hate crimes, people who knew von Brunn in his hometown in Maryland are not shocked that he was capable of such violence. [WP]
• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will reopen today. [AP]
• In an editorial, Daniel Pearl’s father posits that Israelis were less than thrilled by President Obama’s Cairo speech because he neglected to mention the anti-Israel incitements perpetuated in Palestinian schools, media, and mosques, and because he traced Israel’s legitimacy to the Holocaust, and not a 2,000 year struggle. [WSJ]
• And Rev. Jeremiah Wright clarifies that when he said “them Jews” won’t let him talk to Obama, he meant to say “Zionists.” Phew! [ABC]

American Psycho

Mark Oppenheimer — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:00:41 +0000

There is a lot that we must admit we don’t know about James von Brunn, the white supremacist who (allegedly) shot a guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday. We don’t know his age: I variously read that he was 88, 89, or 90 years old. We don’t know if any of his self-mythologizing on websites—war veteran, painter, author—was true. The New York Daily News seems to have found an ex-wife, but the media can’t even agree if he is a “Von” or a “von” or “van.” That he is a mystery does not, however, mean that he won’t be pressed into service as a stereotype—a typical right-wing extremist, for example, or a typical anti-Semite. Already, one blogger has made von Brunn emblematic of a trend of increased right-wing violence, alongside the shooter of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. It is especially tempting in the aftermath of an anti-Semite’s murder of a Jewish student at Wesleyan University, and of the foiled plot to bomb synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, to look for a simple causal explanation for them all, as if by naming this scourge we could control it.

But acting as if all anti-Semites are basically the same person, just slight variations on a theme, actually underestimates the power of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the power of this pathology lies in its ability to be pressed into service by all kinds of men and women, including people who would never speak to one another. Some anti-Semites are real dangers; others are misguided obsessives; others are just sad sacks. To ignore their diversity is to miss the historical significance of anti-Jewish bigotry.

* * *

Since January I have been working on a long investigation for Tablet (to run later this month) of the Holocaust denial movement, of which von Brunn is reported to be a proud member. But as I have seen close-up, it is so riven by internal divisions that it is hardly a “movement” at all. For example, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, is nothing like von Brunn, from what I can tell of news reports describing the alleged D.C. shooter. Weber does not believe in race-mixing, thinks Jews are almost ineluctably disloyal to the countries in which they live, and has worked with some of the worst racists in America. But his temperament is not that of the paranoiac. Rather, he is something of a history buff gone wrong, an obsessive whose deep intelligence collects facts but can’t place them in any kind of context. The Jews fascinate him in an unhealthy way, but he doesn’t attribute to Jews magical powers to plan vast conspiracies and keep them secret. What’s more, in my interviews with him, Weber conceded to me that there may in fact have been gas chambers; he also wrote an article, discussed intelligently in the Forward last January, criticizing several famous Holocaust deniers for being stuck in the past. (Weber would prefer to stop talking about gas chambers and focus instead on the threat of Zionist influence on American foreign policy.) Many of his beliefs are loathsome and wrong, but Weber is not delusional and he is not violent. He is more comfortable with books than with guns.

For many years Weber was closely allied with Bradley Smith, the founder of a one-man shop called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Like Weber, Smith would never encourage violence, and he too sees himself as something of a litterateur. But while Weber has a master’s degree in history and is widely read, Smith is almost gleeful about his anti-intellectualism. Before becoming active in questioning the existence of Nazi gas chambers, Smith was active in the libertarian movement, and he was drawn to Holocaust denial because he believed questioning of the Holocaust was a taboo worth smashing. Smith sees himself as a free-speech zealot whose great contribution is to ask a question—were there gas chambers?—that most of us are too afraid to ask. And for what it’s worth, Smith has no problem with race-mixing: he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife.

Smith, in turn, has no use for Willis Carto, who lost control of the Institute for Historical Review in a lawsuit in the early 1990s and went on to found The Barnes Review, perhaps the strangest publication I have ever read. Its purpose seems to be extreme historical revisionism, including Holocaust denial but also the defenses of the indefensible (Charles Lindbergh, Rudolf Hess) and a bizarre white man’s pseudo-populism (“Rediscovering the Forgotten White Ancestors Of Many American Indians”). Carto is where anti-Semitism and racism intersect with a mystical, LaRouche-like detachment from reality.

And then there are the outright Nazi sympathizers or Klansman types, those who may share elements of other, more cerebral forms of anti-Semitism but also have a visceral sense that the Jews are vermin. In the writings of James K. Warner, for example, one sees none of Weber’s almost admiring sense of the Jews as a cohesive people, nor any of Smith’s relish for testing the limits of free expression. In fact, reading Warner’s attack on Weber as a Mossad agent, alongside his theories about Scientologists and the CIA, one sees exactly the kind of undifferentiated, enraged stupidity that I imagine von Brunn possesses. It’s a zealotry far different from what I have found in Bradley Smith or Mark Weber.

It is tempting, of course, to say, “So what?” The world would be better off without any of it—the racial fear-mongering of Weber, the provocations of Smith, the trashy publications of Carto, the deranged bile of Warner—so why bother to waste too much effort in classification? First, we should be more sophisticated in our thinking; let’s do better than those who pervert truth for a living. Second, it’s smart and pragmatic to try to tell the maniacs from the misguided, the merely stupid, and those just seeking attention. It’s good policing, in other words.

Third, while von Brunn sounds mentally ill in a very obvious way, many anti-Semites and bigots have become what they are by exaggerating in themselves certain traits that are in all of us. Oddly, it would be comforting to imagine that von Brunn’s fellow anti-Semites are all like him, homicidal and deranged. At least we would know what we’re dealing with—and, better yet, we don’t have worry that we or anyone we know could ever be like that.

Finally, we need to recognize the multifarious nature of anti-Semitism. It is different from other bigotries—not worse or more harmful, just different, in historically significant ways. People who hate blacks or Hispanics don’t accuse them of plotting world conspiracies or controlling the Federal Reserve; nobody has accused Mormons of plotting to overthrow capitalism. But Jews are conceived as both money-hungry usurers and anti-American communists; as preening materialists and dirty, schnorring paupers; as genetically inferior but able to control the world through secret cabals. As Sartre famously remarked, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him. Anti-Semitism is not simple, for if it were, it would not be so useful.

Mark Oppenheimer, a Tablet contributing editor,is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. He is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

‘Dangers of Holocaust Denial’

Allison Hoffman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:48:26 +0000

The historian Deborah Lipstadt, an expert on Holocaust denial, is a fellow this year at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and was in the building when yesterday’s shooting began. She had just begun a seminar for museum donors when she heard shots fired. “I was about to say, ‘The dangers of Holocaust denial are…,’ ” she told Tablet. “And that was it.”

At first, she said, she thought the noise might have been a piece of equipment falling down stairs, making a “kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk” sound. But then the group heard the sound of returning fire and realized the museum was under attack. “I just stopped,” said Lipstadt, a Tablet contributing editor. Within minutes, museum staff escorted them out of the building and to safety on the National Mall.

Did Lipstadt, best known for winning a much-publicized court battle against Holocaust denier David Irving, ever anticipate coming under physical attack, even indirectly, by Holocaust revisionists? “Oh, no—not at all,” she said. “I’m sure if you go to David Irving he’s going to say it’s a terrible thing. The smarter ones amongst them know it doesn’t make them look good. But in their hearts are they sort of happy they closed this place down for a day? I don’t doubt it.”

Related: Museum Shooting: Witness Account [CNN]

Is ‘Obama Effect’ to Blame

Hadara Graubart — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:43:46 +0000

An “Obama effect” has “generated a backlash of white supremacy,” which may have contributed to yesterday’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University, told the Christian Science Monitor. “Jews and blacks in the White House—that’s threatening to someone who believes that blacks are subhuman and Jews are the children of the devil,” Levin said. The CSM explores the trajectory of radicalization, which, as first employed by the Ku Klux Klan, often involves an ideological movement with no clear leader, built up of various “organs of information”—all protected by the First Amendment—that build up to imply, rather than state, that a violent solution could be called for. That structure makes it hard for law-enforcement to anticipate and stop the so-called “lone wolves” who end up acting on those implications, experts told the paper. It’s all fueled now, the paper said, “by overseas anti-American fervor as well as by homegrown right-wing groups angered by the state of the economy and the election of the nation’s first black president.” Great.

Holocaust Museum Shooting: A Spike in Domestic Extremism? [CSM via JTA]

Protest Museum Shooting and Iran, Together

Marissa Brostoff — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:31:54 +0000

Was alleged Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn in cahoots with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Of course not. But that didn’t stop Fuel for Truth, an organization that gets young people drunk so as to turn them into Israel advocates, from proudly issuing a press release promoting an event in a New York nightclub tonight to “rally for immediate action regarding the shooting at D.C.’s Holocaust Museum, Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program, and the possible reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” (We presume the preposition error is inadvertent; even these guys, we’re pretty sure, will be rallying against Iranian nukes and Amadinejad’s relection.) How to show your dedication to this tripartite cause? “To draw renewed attention they will be holding a Ahmadinejad look-alike contest as part of the rally,” according to the press release. Yes, no doubt that will certainly help insure “immediate action” against von Brunn.

Fuel For Truth [Official site]

And here’s the full press release:

June 11, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NYC RALLY FOR HOLOCAUST MUSEUM SHOOTING, AHMADINEJADs TO ATTEND

(Times Square) – Fuel For Truth’s hundreds of young activists are at it again – this time at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in Times Square. The advocacy and action group known for it’s 1,000 person events and rallies expects more than 500 young urbanites to rally for immediate action regarding the shooting at D.C.’s Holocaust Museum, Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program, and the possible reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To draw renewed attention they will be holding a Ahmadinejad look-alike contest as part of the rally.

The event will start on the street at 6pm and then spill into Times Square’s hottest nightclub, Arena. [135 West 41st St.] Doors open at 7pm, with a multimedia presentation starting at 8pm.

The club promoters-turned-activists who founded Fuel For Truth days after 9/11 are committed to using the power of pop culture to reach the hearts and minds of young people. The organization, considered by many to be the most effective at reaching young people, has drawn more than 15,000 people to their events and programs.

The rally will be a combination of deadly seriousness and the kind of biting comedy that takes down public figures. Speakers will include former U,S Army Green Beret Terry Schappert, who has served for more than a decade in the Middle East and is now the star of History Channel’s “Warriors.” Also speaking will be Fuel For Truth founder and Chairman Jon Loew and Executive Director Joe Richards. The rally will conclude with an Ahmadinejad look-alike contest complete with rewards for who most closely resembles Iran’s Clown-in-Chief.

But despite the fun, there could be no more serious moment in history. Says Fuel For Truth’s Executive Director Joe Richards, “Ahmadinejad may be the most outspoken supporter of terror, but he’s not alone in the Iranian regime. We’re here to bring attention to this growing threat to America. We’re here because we’re not afraid to speak the truth.” Founder and Chairman Jon Loew adds “The fact is, we haven’t heard a candidate in their election express serious interest in peace with Israel or America. As an American, I’m embarrassed by how we have been manipulated and stalled while the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism pursues a nuclear weapons program. The Iranian regime has been killing Americans since the 1970s, and repressing and killing it’s own people – and we’ve done nothing in response. We engage in talks.”

“But the Obama victory was a wake-up call to our generation,” says Joe Richards. “Not only can young people change the world, but we can do it from the ground up, with our own style and our own tools.”

Schappert, a member of Fuel For Truth, will alert both Americans and Iranians to what an Ahmadinejad victory will mean. “This is a guy who is committed to getting the Bomb for Iran,” says Schappert. “Think you pay a lot at the pump now? Wait until you see the price of fuel with a Mideast destabilized by a nuclear Iran.”

The theme of the after-party at Arena is, “This Is What We Mean by ‘NEVER AGAIN,” which will serve up the key facts every young American needs to know about the dangers fomenting in the Mideast that are hitting closer to home every day and what young New Yorkers can do to get into the fight for a world where radicalism is sidelined instead of growing.

Fuel For Truth is a not for profit organization dedicated to empowering young adults to effectively make change in the world. They are the “Special Forces of democratic advocacy.” We equip young Americans with the basic facts and skills necessary to advocate to young adults, to increase support for true democracies like Israel to battle radical Islamic terror. Israelis, Americans and citizens of all democracies must work together to combat this global threat.

James von Brunn, in His Own Words

Allison Hoffman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:48:45 +0000

It’s easy to dismiss the sprawling autobiography alleged Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn posted on his own website (now offline) as the work of a wingnut. It’s hard to see someone who always writes “JEW” in all-caps as a reliable source, even to their own life story, and already some of his claims—including the assertion that he worked as a copywriter for the ad agency BBDO after serving in World War II—have come into question. [Update, June 12: According to the New York Times' City Room blog, BBDO has now found record of von Brunn working there as an assistant art director for 18 months starting in 1947.] But von Brunn, at some point in the not-so-distant past, wrote a far more lucid portrait of the anti-Semite as young artist, which he posted to the artists’ directory AskART. He posted it also with a work of his own: a painting depicting one of Picasso’s Cubist women looking down on a Fragonard girl reading a book.

Von Brunn writes in the AskART biography that he was born in St. Louis in 1920. His father, Elmer, whose forebears he says came to America from “Germany/Austria” in 1845, worked as the superintendent of a steel mill and designed a plant that manufactured 40-mm shells for the U.S. military during the war. His mother, Hope, was an “accomplished pianist,” he claims. As a child, von Brunn says, he wandered limestone bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, and, armed with Scribner’s Illustrated Classics and a set of oil paints from “grossemutter,” dreamed of painting like “Pyle, Schoonover, and Wyeth.”

But in college, at Washington University, von Brunn writes, he found art classes dominated by “Marxist/Liberal” concepts, and his beloved American realism and “Western Culture” replaced by “expressionism”—not-so-well-concealed code, presumably, for “degenerate Jewish art.” “We see the results today in expensive art produced by monkeys, elephants, Pollack and pianists who play with their elbows,” von Brunn writes, archly.

He goes on to claim that he painted watercolors in his spare time as a PT boat captain in the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters during the war, and moved to New York in 1947 to study figure painting at the Central Park School of Art. He apparently also “tried to crack into the newspaper business but all doors were closed to conservatives”—so, instead, he went into ad copywriting, but he writes that he also illustrated books for William Morrow. He got married, had a son, and exhibited his easel paintings at “the Commodore Hotel, the Hotel Biltmore, Abercrombie & Fitch, and the Eastside Gallery.”

In other words, von Brunn was living the Madison Avenue dream, and was on his way to a split-level in the suburbs, just like Don Draper. But, instead, something snapped. “The so-called ‘Holocaust’ burst upon the scene,” he writes, and colleagues began advising him to drop the “von” from his name, telling him he’d “never make it in New York” if he didn’t. His descent into Holocaust revisionism began with the gift of John O. Beatty’s Iron Curtain Over America, from one of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s senior military commanders, Pedro del Valle; in due course, he writes, his wife, Patricia Beverley-Giddings, got fed up with his “political posture” and filed for divorce. By then von Brunn was living with her in Maryland, where he tried to start his own ad agency, but on the night of his 48th birthday, he was arrested after a bar brawl with “a prominent Jewish businessman” that started because he made an “unfavorable” comment about Abe Fortas, the Jewish Supreme Court justice.

Von Brunn wound up going to prison for two years, he writes, after being convicted of drunken driving and resisting arrest. The rest of his life unspools as a tale of resentment growing unchecked. He painted cloud formations, he developed a staph infection, he moved to Florida and married a nightclub singer named Pat Taylor, and he moved to Northern California, where he published books including Zionist Rape of the Holy Land (originally titled Conquest through Immigration). He describes an arson fire that drove him back East, “where he devised a scheme to expose his enemies”—his 1981 attempted shotgun takeover of the Federal Reserve, a “caper” that landed him in a federal penitentiary. Taylor divorced him while he served six-and-a-half years of an 11-year sentence, and on his release, in 1989, von Brunn writes that he went to live with his sister, Alyce, and claims he began showing his artwork under an assumed name after “pusillanimous” gallery owners refused to exhibit him.

“In small towns across America the blind and cowardly scramble, push and shove getting and spending while their homes are burning and their complexions grow progressively darker,” von Brunn finishes with a flourish. “Von Brunn paints and plots.”

James von Brunn [AskArt; subscription required]

Daybreak: Tragic Shooting in Washington

Hadara Graubart — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:03:22 +0000

•The Washington Post gathers coverage on yesterday’s horrific shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. A guard, Stephen T. Johns, was killed, an unidentified victim was wounded, and the suspect, 88 year-old James W. von Brunn, was also shot and is in critical condition. [WP]
•Meanwhile, the man who allegedly shot and killed a Wesleyan University student and had designs on the campus’s Jewish community has pled not guilty. [JTA]
•Reform rabbis issued a statement supporting President Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze in Israel. [JTA]
•Rev. Jeremiah Wright tells the Virginia Daily Press that he forgives Obama for his “bad choices” but that “them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me.” Presumably he’s talking about Rahm Emanuel and Barney Frank, who personally screen all the president’s calls. [Daily Press]
•Tuvya Stern, a jailed financial con artist, was allowed to hold a swanky bar mitzvah for his son in the prison’s gym. But as the hora wound down, reality set in, and several employees, including an imam and a rabbi, were disciplined for permitting the bash. [NY Post]

Email From a White Supremacist

Michael Weiss — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:34:52 +0000

The Anti-Defamation League uncovered a five-year-old email from James W. von Brunn, the 88-year-old gunman who shot and killed a security guard and wounded two others today at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Tablet contributor Jeffrey Goldberg posted the email on his Atlantic blog. Here’s the text:

—– Original Message —–
From: James Von Brunn
Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 4:08 AM
Subject: From a Friend in Germany

Time to FLUSH all “Holocaust” Memorials.
jvb
……………………………………………………………………..

TWO CONVERSATIONS:

Paul:

This morning I visited Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin. Its about my 12th visit. Why do I keep returning there? Because I learn something new every time. The first thing I noticed this visit was that the whole camp is a building site, with workmen swarming all over the camp area. The country’s economy is going South at full speed but they still seem to have millions to invest in renovating the concentration camps.

The next obvious thing I noticed was, the new design plays down the very significant role of the suffering endured after the war by the thousands of Germans who were imprisoned and murdered by the Soviet occupiers, (who are now known as ‘Liberators’ because they liberated millions of Germans from most of which they owned or loved ). The German victims are mentioned on signs and documents but in such a way that the uninitiated are led to believe that these people too were victims of Nazi terror and not Soviet victims after the war had ended.

Because of the ‘renovation work’ being done much of the camp was cordoned off today, but other parts I had previously not been able to get close to, were open. The last time I was in the camp I asked the Museum curator where exactly the camp brothel was situated, at first she pretended that there never was such a building in the camp, but I pressured her into admitting it was ‘approx’ around the Hospital barracks ‘somewhere’.

Today I could get up close to the Hospital barracks, so I started looking into all the windows hoping to discover something new…one hinderance is, many of the windows are actually glazed with milchglas, (milk glass)

However a museum staff member noticed my staring through all the windows, and asked me what I was looking for ? I told her I was looking for the Brothel, she looked at me in surprise and said ‘I don’t know where the Brothel was, but it might have been in the Underground rooms below us’ THIS was news for me, the Area below the two Hospital Barracks had underground rooms?

If you look at this area on the photo below there is no clue that anything like underground rooms exist between the two rows of hospital barracks.

There are no air vents or similar to give clues, and nothing about underground facilities is mentioned in the camp tour broschures.

I started to quiz this lady as to what else was in these underground rooms, she shrugged her shoulders and said ‘ Mitunter, eine Kegelbahn’ (Amongst other things they had a bowling alley) I questioned her whether I had heard her correctly, she said “Ja, aber ich muss weiter” “Yes but I have to go now” , and she went inside the barracks. Hey! A BOWLING ALLEY ??…. I had learnt something new.

Is there anyone receiving this letter that can verify what this woman told me?

Conversation Two:

While I was walking on from this last conversation I was approached by a middle aged couple who spoke no German, and English only with a strong accent I didn’t recognise.

He approached me and started asking me questions about where were the ‘gas chambers’ ? I told him there were no gas chambers in Sachsenhausen, he became agitated and he actually frothed at the mouth, his voice went up an octave, saying I should not lie , his Grandparents had been in Auschwitz and they had told him that gassings occurred in all camps (I then realised I had just met Mr and Mrs Victimnumber from Israel)

Mr and Mrs Victimnumber told me they had just come from Dachau and he had seen the ‘gas-chambers there, where the sign says in 5 languages ……..QUOTE: ‘never used as a Gas chamber’

But, he told me seriously ‘THEY ALL LIE’ he had been in the Dachau gas chambers and SEEN the shower nozzles in the roof (shower heads are there, the whole place was dandied up by US forces after the war).

There is a law in Germany forbidding people telling the facts, so I chose to shut-up and ask him to tell me what HE thought it was all about. According to him, this is how the Nazis did it, …..

‘The Nazis had a gas….it was a solid gas’ Solid Gas???? I asked. ‘Yes it was like a soapy substance and dey trowd it true roof holes down true the shower heads and the peoples are dying witin a few seconds.

OH I said, is that right ? Yes! he asked me angrily, ” VY do you tink dey had shower heads in these rooms ?” “Ah! To take showers with”, I answered.

VY VOOD ZEY VANT to shower ? he foamed at me….

I looked at him and said “Don’t they have showers in Israel?”

End of conversation two.

I almost expected to get back to the Camp Entrance and find the ‘thought-police’ waiting for me. Nope it was OK.

What I did notice however was the large library of Holocaust-anti-German-hatenazi- Literature on sale in the Entrance Hall. One could get the feeling that every survivor has written at least three books.

The propaganda is enormous, on the photo only one half of the books being offered can be seen.

Revisionists
are NOT keeping up with this flood.