Holocaust museum guard dies after shooting

June 14. Link to DCist article with a list of memorial funds.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum guard Stephen Tyrone Johns died today after being shot. The accused shooter has been identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, himself strongly linked with white supremacist and anti-Semitic causes.

(So tell me why this wasn’t a terrorist act?)

My prayers go to Mr. Johns’s family and the museum staff. News of a memorial fund, if one is established, will go here.

Coverage at DCist

By Scott Wells

Scott Wells, 46, is a Universalist Christian minister doing Universalist theology and church administration hacks in Washington, D.C.

7 comments

  1. Some people think there is a Jewish conspiracy. Some people deny the Shoah happened. Some people think 911 was a Jewish conspiracy.

    If you believe that, well than I think you’d have at least an understanding of some sort towards John’s murdering a co conspirator with the Jews. John’s not a terrorist in their frame of thought.

    I certainly don’t believe that. I don’t think there is a Jewish conspiracy. I don’t deny what happened to the six million, and indeed believe were far to closer to another Shoah…. which will perhapes happen and than denied also.

    John’s talk about Jews is not all that unusual in Chicago. Witness our Sister Muhammed as member of the Illinois Head Crimes Panel. She and her talk frightens me deeply. I’ve never been more pessimistic about the future of Israel and the Jewish people than I have been the past few years.

  2. Norman Cohn, in his book Warrent for Genocide, wrote of the time best, if you’ll allow me to quote,

    It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history. —Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the JewishWorld-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, page 18

    I fear we’re at one of those moments again in history.

  3. @Bill. Well, yes, there are some people who think Jews conspire against all others. One problem is equivocating rants with fact-based discourse, and that’s been degrading badly in an age of a simulacrum of journalistic balance. I have no interest in coddling lunatics, or enabling them. So I’m glad you clarified your point.

    Let me repeat though: Johns was murdered, he was not the murderer.

  4. sorry, I got shooter and the Mr Johns: the murdered guard; switched.

    I have little stomach for these stories…

    …but you get my point about whether the shooter a terrorists or not. Hatred towards Jews has become common place and I hear it now in places and from people I never thought would say such things.

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