Jewish communal leaders are keeping watch for further developments in the proposed formation here of a church affiliated with the Christian Identity movement, a melange of right-wing, white supremacist, anti-Semitic groups and individuals active nationally under the guise of a “church.”
The church conducted its first meeting last month in Grandview, Mo., a suburb, and plans to meet again in the future. Between 50 and 75 people, most of them white males, attended the private gathering at Grandview’s Heritage Inn on January 17. A second meeting the following day attracted 25 person.
The event was publicized in fliers mailed to a broad cross-section of area residents ranging from members of the John Birch Society to Jews, according to Carol Smith, farm crisis worker with the Jewish Community Relations Bureau of Greater Kansas City. The JCRB has been monitoring extremist groups through its farm crisis project.
The flier announcing the program made no mention of the Christian Identity movement, but invited individuals to attend a “Christian Church Formational Meeting.”
Speakers on the program included pastors Pete Peters, Jarah Crawford and Ted Wieland, all of whom were identified by Smith as Christian Identity ministers. “They are absolutely as anti-Semitic as you could possible believe,” Smith said.
A native of Tennessee, Crawford is the author of a pamphlet titled “The Jewish Problem,” which was passed out at the meeting. Smith said the publication contains anti-Semitic references in “literally every paragraph.”
In one excerpt from the pamphlet, for example, Crawford responds to an article by Daniel Lehmann, who wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times last year that extremist right-wing groups were taking advantage of the farmers’ plight.
‘JEWS ARE A MENACE TO MANKIND’
“By the Power of Almighty God and Spirit of our Savior Jesus Christ, Christian America declares war on you and your kind throughout the earth,” the pamphlet reads. “We call upon all nations to join us in this Holy cause. You Jews are a menace to mankind; the earth can no longer accept you.”
Peters, a native of LaPorte, Colo., served as minister to David Lane, a convicted member of The Order, a Christian Identity group whose members have carried out violent acts in the past. Wieland, also from Colorado, has been proposed as pastor for the local Identity church, according to Smith.
NOT MUCH RESPONSE
Reports conflict as to the response the ministers received at the gathering. Two individuals sent to the meeting by the JCRB reported that some of those in the audience seemed very sympathetic but that others were less than stirred by the anti-Semitic words.
In fact, Smith said, the two JCRB observers told her that Peters mustered little response when he asked those present to echo his statements with “amen.”
“They said that a lot of people were skeptical,” Smith stated. “They weren’t already deeply into what was being said.”
She added that after the event, the JCRB received a call from one woman who wanted to voice her disgust with the whole affair. “She said she felt she had been tricked,” Smith said. “She had been really shocked at the anti-Semitism. She thought she was just going to a meeting for a Christian church.”
However, another observer at the meeting told The Chronicle that the anti-Semitic rhetoric voiced at the event, with the exception of a statement that violence against Jews could be necessary, received much support.
The observers said that overwhelming cries of “amen” were heard in agreement to statements such as Jews are “Satan’s children” and that Jews are the source of many problems in the United States.
MOTEL WARNED ABOUT THE MEETING
Randy Gould, a member of the steering committee of RUAH/New Jewish Agenda here, went to the motel to protest the event along with three other individuals. They eventually were requested to leave the premises by the Grandview police.
Gould maintained he called the motel upon first hearing of the event and said he warned a motel worker about the Christian Identity movement. He suggested the motel management “find out who these people are and what they stand for,” he said. A spokeswoman for the Heritage Inn acknowledged that two calls had come in concerning the meeting. She claimed the callers “asked if the meeting was being held here and, when they were told yes, they made some threats about what would happen–that there would be protesters and picketers. Then they hung up.”
“When we book a room, we have no idea what those people do in their meetings,” she added. “What they do there is their own business.”
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