America's Secret Jihad

Starred review from May 11, 2015
Wexler (The Awful Grace of God) convincingly makes the case that America has been victimized by significant domestic terrorism for over half a century, much of it inspired by Christian Identity, a theology that “identifies Jews as the spawn of the devil.” He links atrocities familiar (the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995) and less so (attacks on synagogues in the South during the 1950s) to paint a disturbing picture with practical implications for the War on Terror. Most readers will be surprised by the book’s contention that since 9/11, more people in the U.S. have been killed by far right extremists than by those linked or sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Wexler’s deliberate and critical review of the evidence is also likely to prompt reconsideration of the possibility of wider conspiracies behind Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the Atlanta child murders of 1979–1981. His careful documentation of a religious—as opposed to exclusively racist—motivation for these acts of terror buttresses those, like President Obama, who refuse to recast the War on Terror as a War on Radical Islam.

June 1, 2015
An impassioned investigative report tracing a deeply religious theme to the spate of civil rights violence from the 1950s until today. With urgency and zeal, Wexler (co-author: Shadow Warfare: The History of America's Undeclared Wars, 2014, etc.) exposes how a unique strain of religious racism, caused by a twisted reading of Christianity, propelled the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., among many other incidents of deadly mayhem. While anti-Semitism "had a long pedigree" within the Ku Klux Klan since the 1910s, spurred by nativism, as Wexler notes, cross burnings and intimidation were largely driven by the hysteria over the prospect of racial integration and need to preserve "the Southern way of life." Through an examination of several key instigators-e.g., Georgia attorney J.B. Stoner and the Rev. Wesley Albert Swift, the head of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, based in Southern California-Wexler pursues the strain of a toxic, amorphous belief system called "Christian Identity." This evolved from a pro-Anglo-Saxon ideology into a twisted biblical creation story, a "two-seedline" theory polished by Swift in which white Europeans derived from the line of Adam, while Jews emerged from Eve's spawning with Satan. Wexler carefully differentiates the religiously motivated extremists from the merely white supremacists, and he emphasizes that at some point in the early 1960s, the former (anti-Semites) had to ally themselves with the latter (KKK) in order to enjoy the fruits of a larger segregationist movement and "thus maximize their influence and their financial backing." Wexler demonstrates how the perpetrators of these deadly acts, as well as more recent hate crimes and "lone wolf" violence, all share an element of religious terrorism and must be re-examined as such. An occasionally repetitive but compelling study.

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August 1, 2015

As America wages war against religious terrorism, many wish to cast it as a war against radical Islam. Wexler (coauthor, The Awful Grace of God) rejects this as oversimplified and dangerously ignorant of America's own history of domestic terrorism that is rooted in a radical form of Christian extremism. Beyond telling this story, his wider objective is to illustrate that perverting and distorting religion is by no means limited to Islamic extremists. Between 1957 and the present, numerous significant acts of domestic terror can be traced to a twisted brand of racist, anti-Semitic, apocalyptic theology known as Christian Identity. The goal of its proponents, such as lawyer J.B. Stoner and minister Wesley A. Swift, has been to provoke a holy race war inside the United States. Included among the events Wexler investigates are the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, the 1964 Mississippi Burning murders, the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He also covers lesser-known events, such as synagogue bombings in the 1950s and several more recent "lone-wolf" terrorist acts. VERDICT Despite its considerable speculation and indirect evidence, this book is a fascinating attempt to see beyond conventional narratives and reveal an overlooked facet of religious terrorism. [The book and this review were written before the attack on the AME church in Charleston, SC.--Ed.]--Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY

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