White Supremacist Shooting Spree Kills Three Jews In US

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WASHINGTON – A nation that delivers lofty lectures to various countries on religious freedoms and related discrimination and violence – including to plural, secular democracies such as India – had the ignominy on Sunday of facing up to a dreadful anti-Semitic attack in which a white supremacist shot and killed three people outside Jewish facilities in a Kansas neighborhood.

Frazier Glenn Miller, the 73-year old founder and former leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party is said to have shot and killed a boy and his grandfather outside a Jewish community center before moving on and fatally shooting an elderly woman at a Jewish assisted living facility nearby. After authorities apprehended the suspect at a nearby elementary school and bundled him into a patrol car, he was heard shouting ”Heil Hitler,” eyewitnesses told the local media.

The shootings occurred a day before the start of Passover, the eight-day holiday in which Jews commemorate their liberation from slavery in Egypt more than 3,300 years ago. The civil rights outfit Southern Poverty Law Center, which also monitors hate crimes, said Miller is a ”raging anti-Semite” who is a former ”grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan, the white extremist hate group. He is said to have posted more than 12,000 times on Vanguard News Network, a white supremacist network whose slogan is ”No Jews, Just Right.”

The attack came just days after a US human rights panel held a hearing on religious freedom in India and pilloried the country for various infractions, going on to express concern about the fate of minorities if a Narendra Modi-led BJP alliance came to power. Katrina Lantos Swett, vice-chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) told the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (established to honor her father, a holocaust survivor) that the State Department should elevate religious freedom concerns in the bilateral strategic dialogue mechanism.

The Lantos panel has held hearing over on the last two years on religious and human rights issues in India, Turkey, Vietnam, Burma, Columbia, Honduras etc., but none on the US itself, where anti-semitism is evidently alive and killing. In fact, the Jewish NGO Anti-Defamation League said it had warned last week of the increased possibility of violent attacks against community centers in the coming weeks, ”which coincide both with the Passover holiday and Hitler’s birthday on April 20, a day around which in the United States has historically been marked by extremist acts of violence and terrorism.”

According to surveys by the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitism is rejected by clear majorities of Americans, with 64% of them lauding Jews’ cultural contributions to the nation in 2011. However, a minority continues to hold hateful views of Jews, with 19% of Americans supporting the antisemitic canards such as Jews co-control Wall Street, were responsible for 9/11 etc.

The Kansas Jewish killings come nearly a century after the lynching of Leo Frank, a prominent Jewish businessman in Atlanta, after he was falsely accused and convicted of killing a worker, Mary Phagan, in the pencil factory that he managed. After then Georgia Governor John Slaton stayed Frank’s execution because of a lack of evidence, a mob dragged him from jail and lynched him. The incident led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which at that time claimed to have four million members, more than all the Jews in the United States.

In the midst of the turmoil, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916, the first Jew to serve on the Court. Such was the prevalent anti-semitism that Justice Brandeis had to endure taunts even from his fellow justices. It has taken America a century to overcome such prejudice, even though there is plenty of residual discrimination and hate crimes.

Incidentally, the 100-member US Senate has about a dozen Jewish Senators, including California’s Diane Feinstein and New York’s Charles Schumer. The 435-member House of Representatives has 22 Jewish lawmakers – 21 Democrats and one Republican.

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