Booksellers Urged Not to Sell Novel Admired by Extremists

Jewish groups have joined a campaign to boycott the selling of a book that is believed to have inspired the Oklahoma City bombing.

The American Jewish Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have contacted major booksellers across the nation, asking them not to distribute. “The Turner Diaries,” a fictional work about gun control written by neo-Nazi William Pierce.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization headed by Morris Dees that monitors and fights extremism, first raised concern about the book’s publication and distribution.

The novel has been in circulation since it was completed in 1978. At that time, it was published by National Vanguard Books, an arm of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group. More than 185,000 copies were sold.

But it was inaccessible to the general public until Barricade Books decided to publish it. A spokeswoman for the publisher said the book was “in production” this week.

Calling the book a “bible” of the extreme right wing, Kenneth Stern, program specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview that the book promotes ” a political agenda of making Hitler’s dream come true.”

In a letter to booksellers, Stern wrote, “The distribution of this book will help finance one of the main organizations for promoting hatred and violence against innocent Americans.”

Pierce is a leader of the National Alliance, Stern said, adding that the neo- Nazi group also promotes the book.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center also is urging leading U.S. bookstore chains not to stock the “racist tract,” the organization said in a statement.

“It is almost beyond belief that on the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City massacre, a mainstream publisher would announce publication of a book which depicts the destruction of a federal facility by a truck” carrying a bomb, “a book which was found among Timothy McVeigh’s possessions following Oklahoma City,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center’s associate dean.

“The Turner Diaries” is believed to have inspired McVeigh, who is charged with blowing up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

The book also allegedly inspired The Order, a neo-Nazi group which took its name from the group in the book, to kill Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1985.

Barricade Books publisher Lyle Stuart has defended his decision to publish the novel by evoking the right to free speech.

But Cooper said, “The issue here is not censorship — Pierce’s work has already impacted the McVeighs of the world — but of mainstream access and legitimacy to those promoting the Balkanization of America.”

In an introduction to the novel, Stuart acknowledged that “The Turner Diaries” is a “dreadful” and “bigoted book.”

To emphasize his point, he quotes Pierce, a former university professor, as saying: The book “offends almost everyone: Afro-Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians, liberals, communists, Mexicans, democrats, the FBI, egalitarians and Jews. Especially Jews: for it portrays them as incarnations of everything that is evil and destructive.”

But explaining his decision to print the book, Lyle said: “The majority — you and I — must always protect the right of the minority, even a minority of one, to express the most outrageous and offensive ideas.”

“Only then is freedom of expression guaranteed,” he wrote in his introduction.

In his letter to bookstores, Stern acknowledged their right to distribute the books, but asked them to “consider the ethical question” of supporting a neo- Nazi author and organization.