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]

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

In reality, however, that caricature grossly misunderstands this anti-Semitic Holocaust skepticism, which is not a unified movement but a loose confederation of people who often have very little in common. The major American organization known for its theories of Holocaust denial, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), received just under $250,000 in contributions for the 12 months ending on April 30, 2008, the last year for which figures are available, and that money could have come from only a handful of contributors; the Institute’s publishing arm had sales of $53,269—or, to give a generous estimate, about 5,000 books. The Institute’s Journal of Historical Review was last published in 2002, and the very next year a rival publication, The Revisionist, which had already folded once before, ceased publication. The world of Holocaust denial comprises one-man enterprises, fledgling organizations with tiny budgets and few followers, and amateurish magazines with the lifespans of fruit flies.

These enterprises seem poised to become even more fragile, thanks to an internecine feud that began early this year and threatens to cripple an already lame Holocaust-denial movement. In January, IHR director Mark Weber posted an article on his web site arguing that Holocaust “revisionism” has failed to gain traction in either history departments or with the public at large: “[T]here has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective,” Weber wrote. And, he continued, it was time to leave the Holocaust behind and focus on Jewish malevolence today: “Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.”

Soon after Weber’s statements became public, his onetime friend and colleague, 79-year-old Bradley Smith, was quick to denounce his former fellow traveler. “There are those who feel he has … betrayed the revisionist movement,” Smith told the Forward.

Holocaust deniers are a touchy bunch, prone to infighting, but the war of words between Weber and Smith, two old allies, was something special; a battle had been joined in the heart of the American Holocaust-denial movement.  I was intrigued by Weber, this man who claimed to be leaving Holocaust revisionism behind. It was easy enough to judge him just an anti-Semite at war with other anti-Semites. If anything, Weber’s shift to anti-Zionism only confirmed his anti-Semitism; after all, if he were just a disinterested, objective historian, then having dropped the historical question of the Holocaust he’d begin a study of, say, the British raj or the history of Hawaiian agriculture. That he continued to be obsessed with the alleged lies and machinations of Jews seemed proof of an objective disorder.

But because I believe in redemption, and because Weber’s web site offered a curious mixture of anti-Semitic nonsense and mainstream news articles about Israel, and even articles from the Jewish press, I decided that it was worth trying to talk to Mark Weber. Maybe he was a new man. Or maybe he was trying to become one. And while I was at it, I figured, I might as well also try to talk to Smith.

Between February and May, I met in person and spoke multiple times on the telephone with both Smith, who lives in Mexico and whose cuddliness in person seems to mock his reputation as a dangerous extremist, and Weber, a 57-year-old native Oregonian who seems a good deal smarter than Smith but also a good deal less mirthful. These were men whose friendship was on the outs, and each was eager to emphasize his differences with the other. But they were also similar, in ways I did not expect. For example, both Weber and Smith seem to think of themselves as Enlightenment liberals: Smith fashions himself a free-speech absolutist, whose Holocaust skepticism is merely about usefully breaking taboos, while Weber sees himself as a positivist, sifting evidence to determine what is true and what is not. Each man, too, seems to want to be loved and, I thought, a bit puzzled that it has not worked out that way.  Most surprising, both Weber and Smith loved Jews. They don’t love Jews generally, of course, but each man has a Jewish woman in his past with whom he has had a close relationship. Discovering these contradictions in the lives of Smith and Weber did not arouse in me any sympathy, and of course it doesn’t discredit their ideas, which are wrong on their own merits. But to meet these two men late in their careers in anti-Semitism, and to get to know them as they tangled with each other, helped illuminate what kind of man might choose to cross the borders of respectable opinion, and what inner needs might keep him exiled from his fellow man.

****

After I had secured the Weber interview, Smith, whose home in Mexico is just 100 miles from where Weber lives in Southern California, volunteered to drive across the border and meet me. For one airfare, I could meet two extremists.

Of the two men, Bradley Smith is much closer to the common perception of a classic Holocaust denier, singularly obsessed with disproving the existence of the Nazi machinery of death. But the elderly Smith was kindly enough to endure the traffic jam at the Mexican-American border and meet me at the Starbucks in San Clemente, California, the beach town where Richard Nixon began his exile. Smith had left a message on my mobile phone saying that he would wait for me in the parking lot, and that’s where I found him, snoozing behind the wheel of his pickup truck. I rapped on the window, and the aging radical opened his eyes with a start, remembered where he was, smiled at me, popped open his door, and lumbered out, smiling warmly. In his worn flannel shirt and jeans, a scraggly white beard dressing up his weather-beaten face, Smith looked like an old, sagacious cowhand, the kind of guy whose favorite story is about how he forgave the beloved bull who once got startled and kicked him in the head.

Once we were both seated at the coffee shop, I tried to ask Smith about possible flaws in the works of great Holocaust historians.

“You’ve read all the standard accounts,” I asked, “like Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg?”

“Yeah,” Smith said, “that’s what I started with, I read Hilberg. I didn’t read them very closely. Because I’m not really interested in the history of the period.”

I was a little shocked. “I mean, you read Lucy Dawidowicz’s book on the period? You read David Wyman?”

“Not thoroughly,” Smith said. “Wyman, I didn’t read. He came a bit too late.”

I was astounded. “But that’s kind of amazing, right? Because here are these classic works of Holocaust literature that purport to show it all and you say you haven’t read them closely. So you have read Arthur Butz, who’s a nobody in the field, closely, but you haven’t read the great titans in the field closely?”  “You know what? I’m not interested in the story,” he replied. “Revisionists have written very detailed documents about the holes—”

“So what are you interested in?”

“In a free exchange of ideas.”

“But you aren’t interested in trying to find out which ideas are right?”

“Not particularly. You know what I’m really interested in? Every generation has its taboo, and I happen to be here with this taboo. I happen to be here with this one. And I can see how it’s exploited, and who benefits from the exploitation.”

And so it went for a while. As we got up to leave, Smith said that he had a gift for me. He reached into his bag and produced paperback copies of The Man Who Saw His Own Liver and his self-published memoir, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist. He assured me that they were both good reads.

TOMORROW: Part II of “The Denial Twist”: Meeting Mark Weber.

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

Griffin could do without these kinds of encomiums. As one of the new BNP European Parliamentary members, Griffin’s electoral success demonstrates the effectiveness of his strategy to emphasize the party’s British nationalism while adopting an amnesiac approach to its neo-Nazi origins. The elections marked a breakthrough.

The party has never secured any kind of parliamentary representation before. However, Griffin and his supporters know that the European parliament does not have the significance or the prestige of the British parliament at Westminster. Those who bother to vote in European elections often do so to register a protest against the establishment parties. When the time comes for a Westminster election, the good sense and caution of the voters kicks back in. If Griffin is to buck that trend, he must cast away any associations with de Nugent, Von Brunn, and people of that ilk.

To be sure, the BNP has quite a history to overcome. Nothing better symbolizes the unashamedly Nazi roots of the party than the October 1963 wedding between Colin Jordan and Françoise Dior. Jordan was the founder of the National Socialist Movement, from which the BNP is directly descended. His bride, the niece of fashion designer Christian Dior, was a Hitler worshipper who had spent most of her life on the edges of the moldering French aristocracy. Their nuptials were a macabre celebration of Nazi occultism. Having sworn that they were both of pure Aryan stock, Dior and Jordan pricked their fingers and let their mingled blood drip onto a virgin copy of Mein Kampf.

A Royal Air Force reject, Jordan founded the National Socialist Movement on what would have been Hitler’s 73rd birthday, April 20, 1962. He was the most foul of racists, obsessed with the image of black males as sexual predators. (“Semi-savages are given material rewards to mate with the women of one of the leading civilized nations in the world,” he spat.) These demons in his head were fueled by the svelte, hard-faced Dior, who taunted him about her previous relationship with John Tyndall, Jordan’s deputy. When Jordan eventually dismissed Tyndall, Dior said: “I once thought Colin was weak. Now he has proved his strength.” A few months later, she dumped him.

Such melodrama makes it easy to forget that Jordan and Tyndall—when they were not fighting each other or doing time for such offenses as an arson campaign against synagogues—were at the helm of a group that never had more than a few hundred members. By the end of the 1960s, Jordan had been eclipsed and Tyndall was slowly realizing that winning elections was a necessary condition of political success. He reasoned that labels like “British nationalist” were probably more appealing to the public than “National Socialist.”

Tyndall became one of the leaders of the National Front, which dominated the British far right during the 1970s. What distinguished the National Front was not so much its hostility to immigrants—a plentiful sentiment in the Conservative Party of the time—as its strident racism and proclivity for violence. These were never moderated for electoral purposes. Rude Boy, a film released in 1980 starring The Clash, features documentary footage of a National Front candidate ranting menacingly about an opponent who is “half wog, half Jew!” For nationalists like these, race and nation were one and the same—and always would be.

In his public statements, Nick Griffin may have eschewed the racist verbiage of his predecessors—
“wog,” “coon,” “yid,” and so forth—but racial nationalism remains the thread which links the British National Party with the National Socialist Movement. The BNP’s constitution restricts membership to “indigenous Caucasians.” “Rights for Whites,” a racial slogan, is one of the party’s favorites. Moreover, most political reformers will tend to disown or at least apologize for an unsavory past. Griffin has not done so, either on behalf of himself—his career highlights include teenage activism in the National Front, Holocaust denial and authorship of a brazenly anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled
“The Mindbenders”—or his party.

However, the BNP only won two seats, and not to the national legislature, so how worried should Jews and liberals in the United Kingdom be? Wasn’t it possible, I asked Mark Gardner, head of the Community Security Trust—the British Jewish communal body which tracks antisemitic incidents and trends—that the BNP could suffer the same kind of humiliation that the National Front did in the 1979 election, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to power with British pride as one of their themes? “The Conservatives will need to say to that sector of the electorate, ‘we hear your concerns, we won’t let you down,’” he answered. “They might not be as blunt as that.”

So who is politically in a position to shape the fight against the BNP? Historically, that role has been fallen to the far left—but to allow it to do so now might mean courting further disaster. As one of the Britain’s more outspoken bloggers put it, “The first step towards defeating the BNP is to take the fight against the far right out of the hands of the far left.”

As 10 years of Israel fixation on the far left can attest, the tropes of anti-Semitism are not just the preserve of the farthest right. Indeed, they have become so embedded on the left that one British advocate of an academic boycott of Israel has promoted the latest crackpot myth doing the rounds of anti-Semites, namely that Lehman Brothers transferred its assets to Israel before going under. Other characteristics of the far right—the scorning of internationalism in the name of a selfish, parochial isolationism, admiration for tyrants, depicting terrorists as “resistors” or “political soldiers”—have also penetrated the far left. All of which suggests that if the people who might vote for the BNP are to vote for someone else, they need a credible centrist voice to persuade them accordingly.

Ben Cohen is the associate director of communications for the American Jewish Committee. He blogs at Z Word.

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]

Weekly Standard May Have Been Shooter Target [Politico]
Earlier: If Murdoch Sells ‘Standard’ Will It Lose Its Balanced Israel Stance?