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  • Killer at Holocaust museum linked to BNP

    Killer at Holocaust museum linked to BNP

    Man who killed guard at Holocaust museum has links to BNP

    • White supremacist injured in Washington gunfight
    • Records show 88-year-old was at fundraising events

    Matthew Taylor and Daniel Nasaw

    F.B.I. investigators examining a bullet-riddled door at the entrance of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where a gunman entered the building and shot and killed a security guard. NYT
    F.B.I. investigators examining a bullet-riddled door at the entrance of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where a gunman entered the building and shot and killed a security guard. New York Times

    A white supremacist who killed a security guard at a Holocaust memorial museum in the US has links to the British National party, which gained two MEPs in last week’s European elections.

    Thousands of visitors fled the museum in Washington on Wednesday after James von Brunn opened fire, killing a security guard. In the gunfight that followed, the 88-year-old was shot, and is now in a critical condition in hospital.

    Yesterday it emerged that Von Brunn, a longtime antisemite, had attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National party (AFBNP), which was set up to raise funds from far-right activists in America.

    Mark Cotterill, who ran the US-based organisation before it folded in 2001, said: “He did attend meetings. I have just checked my database and he is down as ‘meetings only’, so he was not a major donor, although he may have put some money on the plate when it was passed round.”

    The AFBNP treasurer, Todd Blodgett, also told the Washington Post that he and Von Brunn had attended fundraising meetings in Arlington County. The BNP leader, Nick Griffin, spoke to at least two AFBNP meetings and said the money raised by the organisation made a “significant contribution to the BNP’s [2001] general election campaign”.

    Yesterday a spokesman for the party said: “You get a lot of people coming to meetings but I don’t think you can blame us for that. Even if he did go to meetings, it was nothing to do with us.”

    However, anti-racism campaigners said Von Brunn’s links to the BNP underlined its extremist agenda. “It is clear that Nick Griffin is at the centre of an international network of white supremacists,” said Dan Hodges, of Searchlight. “The BNP must explain the full extent of his organisation’s links with this antisemitic gunman.”

    The far-right party gained its first two MEPs in last week’s European elections – Griffin in the north-west and former National Front leader Andrew Brons in Yorkshire and the Humber.

    During the campaign, photographs emerged of Griffin alongside the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen “Don” Black, who was banned from the UK by the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith. He was also criticised for defending a BNP leaflet that said black and Asian Britons should be referred to as “racial foreigners”.

    Yesterday Von Brunn was charged with murder and killing in the course of possessing a firearm at a federal facility, both capital offences under US federal law; police said hate crime charges were also possible.

    At a press conference in Washington, Cathy Lanier, the Washington police chief, said security guard Stephen Johns was shot when he opened the door of the museum for Von Brunn. Other guards opened fire, and Von Brunn slumped to the ground.

    In his car, officers found a notebook with a handwritten note saying, “You want my weapons, this is how you’ll get them. The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews,” according to a court affidavit.

    Von Brunn’s .22-calibre rifle held 10 more bullets and investigators found more in his car and at an apartment in nearby Annapolis, Maryland, that he shared with his son and his son’s fiancee.

    Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office, said Von Brunn was known to the police as an antisemite and a white supremacist, who had a website that espoused hatred against African-Americans, Jews and others.

    “We know what Mr Von Brunn did at the Holocaust museum. Now it’s our responsibility to determine why he did it,” said Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office. “We have to ask ourselves did all these years of public display of hatred impact his actions.”

    A self-described artist, advertising man and author, Von Brunn wrote an anti-semitic treatise, Kill the Best Gentiles, decried “the browning of America” and claimed to expose a Jewish conspiracy “to destroy the White gene-pool”.

    In 1983 Von Brunn was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the US federal reserve board. At the time, police said he had wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. On the website, Von Brunn blames his six-year imprisonment on “a Jew judge” and “Negro jury”.

    Last night civil rights groups said they had been monitoring Von Brunn for decades.

    Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s intelligence project, said: “He thinks the Jews control the Federal Reserve, the banking system, that basically all Jews are evil. He’s an extreme antisemite.”

    Source:  www.guardian.co.uk, 12 June 2009

  • White supremacist kills man

    White supremacist kills man

    mAn elderly white supremacist with a history of anti-Semitic tirades opened fire inside the Holocaust Memorial Museum, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself.

    Tourists scattered in panic, ducked and took cover as the shots rang out in the museum’s crowded entrance shortly after noon in the heart of the US capital, not far from the White House.

    The attack drew reactions of shock and sadness from President Barack Obama and other US leaders, Israel, and a US Muslim organization.

    The gunman was identified as James von Brunn, 88, a Maryland resident who has done time in prison for taking a gun into the US Federal Reserve in an apparently botched anti-Semitic attack, a federal law enforcement official told AFP.

    “It appears to be a lone gunman who entered into the museum and opened fire with what appears to be a rifle at this point,” Police Chief Cathy Lanier said.

    Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, of nearby Maryland state, was pronounced dead after being rushed to a nearby hospital, police said. The gunman was in critical condition, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty added.

    Obama — who last week became the first US president to visit the Nazi death camp in Buchenwald, Germany — expressed dismay, saying the incident underscored the need to counter prejudice.

    “I am shocked and saddened by today’s shooting at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms,” he said in a statement.

    The Holocaust-denying Von Brunn has written books on Adolf Hitler and his views on white superiority, including “Kill the Best Gentiles,” which his website calls “the culmination of his life’s work.”

    In a recent posting on his blog, he railed that “America is a Third-World racial garbage-dump — stupid, ignorant, dead-broke, and terminal.”

    Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had no warning of the attack, which erupted at 12:50 pm just inside the packed museum, which is often visited by school groups.

    The FBI said it had sent a special response squad to support the police, but it had no information “to indicate threats to area landmarks.”

    “An armed gunman came into the entrance and immediately opened fire striking one security guard. There was fire, gunfire returned. The gunman was hit,” Fenty said.

    Former defense secretary William Cohen said he was standing outside with a museum official when the gunman entered, apparently from a red vehicle left parked in the street.

    “When the shots rang out, we just ducked down and scattered,” Cohen said. “So we ran up the stairs. We didn’t know how many shooters were there, how many shots were going to continue, how many people were involved.”

    Cohen had been at the museum because a play written by his wife Janet Langhart Cohen was to be staged there Wednesday evening.

    Angela Andelson, 22, visiting from San Francisco, was walking toward the museum’s exit when she heard a loud bang “like someone had dropped something.”

    Then she saw a “gunman coming in (carrying) a long looking kind of gun.

    “I just ran in to one of the exhibits to try to take cover,” she said.

    “People were screaming and ducking down, getting on the floor, getting under benches.”

    Another witness, Maria Hernandez, was with her grandparents walking through the haunting exhibits which chronicle the Holocaust and the genocide of six million Jews under the Nazis.

    “We were in the exhibit ‘Remember the Children’ and we heard rounds fired and through the glass doors I saw a security guard firing towards the shooter and a man on his belly on the floor and when I looked back again, we were heading toward the exit, I saw blood all over the floor,” she told AFP.

    Israel said through its embassy that it was “shocked and saddened by today’s shooting incident.”

    The Muslim Public Affairs Council swiftly condemned what it called a “hate-motivated shooting.”

    “Tragic incidents like this one only strengthen our commitment to combatting intolerance in all forms through education and dialogue,” MPAC executive director Salam Al-Marayati said.

    Analysts noted the attack took place just five days after Obama became the first US president to visit the Nazi death camp in Buchenwald, Germany, where he renewed a historic commitment to Israel.

    Obama said Buchenwald was “the ultimate rebuke” to those “who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful.”

    “It’s hard to ignore the timing of this incident,” Brian Levin, a professor from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told AFP.

    “Maybe he (von Brunn) feels his country is slipping away. So he sees a black president at Buchenwald, remembering the Holocaust, and decides to attack the biggest symbol of the Holocaust in the United States.”

    Mark Potok, director of the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said the shooting followed a string of violent incidents by extremists in recent months that included the killing of three police officers in Pittsburgh in April and the murder of an abortion doctor in Kansas last month.

    “It’s really been quite an extraordinary period,” Potok told CNN, saying that there had been a “definite” surge in hate violence since Obama’s election.

    More than 30 million people have visited the museum since it opened in 1993, including 85 heads of state.

    AFP