Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

On CNBC’s The Big Idea, Coulter said that “we” Christians “just want Jews to be perfected”, Media Matters, October 10, 2007

During the October 8 edition of CNBC’s The Big Idea, host Donny Deutsch asked right-wing pundit Ann Coulter: “If you had your way … and your dreams, which are genuine, came true … what would this country look like?” Coulter responded, “It would look like New York City during the [2004] Republican National Convention. In fact, that’s what I think heaven is going to look like.” She described the convention as follows: “People were happy. They’re Christian. They’re tolerant. They defend America.” Deutsch then asked, “It would be better if we were all Christian?” to which Coulter responded, “Yes.” Later in the discussion, Deutsch said to her: “[Y]ou said we should throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians,” and Coulter again replied, “Yes.” When pressed by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like “the head of Iran” and “wipe Israel off the Earth,” Coulter stated: “No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. … That’s what Christianity is.

Yehuda Bauer, A human being without fault, Haaretz, September 27, 2007

Over the years, a strange friendship developed between us: On the dais, we would engage in a virulent argument but afterward, we would drink coffee together and tell each other personal news, talk about new findings and mutual friends. We sought each other out, we went together to book stores in the places where we met, we wrote to each other from time to time, and he would send me his books with the most important dedication of all: “To he who, like me, seeks the truth.”

Like me, he was a total atheist, and like me, he was a warm Jew in every sense. We grew up, as he would tell me, on “the same garbage heap,” with the same mother tongue, in the same cultural milieu. We were born a few months apart and our families fled from Europe in the same month…. During the only conference that was held in his honor, when he retired from his teaching position at the University of Vermont, he insisted that I be the main speaker. There too, as always, I did not hide the differences between us, and he sat and listened. Later, we embraced. Raul Hilberg was a great man, a great researcher, irritable, furious and loving, but above all, a human being without fault. I lost a close and personal friend.

US Holocaust Museum, Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi leadership at the camp, Picture 10, Nazi officers and “female auxiliaries”

Members of the Saint Benedict Center, which has been in a protracted dispute with many of its neighbors, include (clockwise from upper left) Brothers Maximilian Maria and Andre Marie, their superior Francis, and Sisters Marie Therese and Maria Philomena. Andre Marie, whose real name is Louis Villarrubia, condemns “the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals” — one of many reflections of the center’s anti-Semitism. Photography by Dave White

SPLCenter.org: Trouble in Paradise, summer, 2007

In 2004, SBC prior Louis Villarrubia, who goes by the name of Brother Andre Marie, put it like this: “If anti-Semitism means opposing the Jews on religious matters, opposing the Zionist state in Palestine (as St. Pius X did), or opposing the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals (widely acknowledged by Catholic writers before the present age of PC [political correctness]), then we could rightly be considered such.”

That same year, The Boston Globe quoted Brother Anthony Mary, whose real name is Douglas Bersaw, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ and denying the World War II Holocaust: “There’s a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There’s a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It’s all a fraud. Six million people… it didn’t occur.”

In 2005, at a radical conference hosted by a group called St. Joseph’s Forum, Bersaw added that “the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation” and said Jews should be dealt with using “blood and terror if it’s required.”

Today, Douglas Bersaw is Richmond’s town moderator.

Mazower reviews Sacred Causes, washingtonpost.com
Burleigh is nothing if not opinionated. He despises “sneering secularists” but is a considerable sneerer himself. Targets include “humanist radical eggheads,” “tenured radicals” who take a “vampiric interest in female students,” the “horde of bodgers and shysters” in the English construction trades and “dingy Irish theme pubs” with their “relentless, mindless gabbling.”

As the book moves on, jibes and bile clog the writing, and one has the sinking feeling of being cornered by the pub bore, ranting on about 60s swingers, the threat to European civilization, terrorists and trade unions — pretty much everything and everyone except the pope, Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher.

On a summer day in 1944, my mother was herded from a cattle car along with the rest of its human cargo, which had been transported from Belgrade to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. She saw a group of German women, some on foot, some on bicycles, slow down as the strange procession went by and watch with indifferent curiosity on their faces. For me, these women became a loathsome symbol of watching from the sidelines, and at an early age I decided that my place was not with the bystanders.

Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 7.

Bergen, Catholics, Protestants and Christian Antisemitism in Nazi Germany 1994

Steigmann-Gall Christianity and the Nazi Movement: A Response, 2007

Steigmann-Gall, The Nazis’ Positive Christianity, 2007