The danger of hate

The danger of hate

Long Island Newsday: Hate does not age out. Though some people can rise above it, far too many never do. That is the sad and alarming lesson of 88-year-old James Wenneker von Brunn’s assault on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The attack also reminds us of the network of white supremacist, neo-Nazi hate groups flourishing from sea to shining sea. They hate blacks, hate Jews, hate gays, hate the federal government. And they love violence as a solution. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama keeps track of them, and the center had identified von Brunn’s Web site in 2003 as a hate site.

Von Brunn has a history of extremism. He served prison time for trying to arrest — or kidnap, as the law viewed it — the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He saw the Fed as part of some vast Jewish conspiracy. And he hated blacks with similar intensity. Tragically, the attack lived out both hatreds: He targeted an institution created to remind us forever of the Holocaust and to fight against all genocides, but the person he killed was a black man, Stephen Tyrone Johns, a security guard.