-Caveat Lector-
>
>
> www.wsws.org
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : US Violence
>
> Fort Worth, Texas gunman linked to fascist group
>
> By Martin McLaughlin
> 22 September 1999
>
> Back to screen version
>
> The gunman who murdered seven people at a Fort Worth church September 15 had
> ties to extreme-right-wing groups in Texas, according to reports first published
> in the Houston Chronicle. Larry Ashbrook, 47, killed four teenagers and three
> adults before taking his own life.
>
> Writer John Craig is co-author of a 1997 book, Soldiers of God, which examines
> white supremacist and Christian fascist organizations in America. He told the
> newspaper that he had spoken to Ashbrook in 1997 while interviewing members of
> the Ku Klux Klan for the book. Ashbrook told him he was a member of the "Phineas
> Priests," one of the far-right tendencies which are collectively known as
> "Christian Identity."
>
> The Phineas sect is named after a Biblical high priest who murdered a Jewish
> prince for taking a non-Jewish lover. Its membership consists of self-appointed
> "race warriors" who pledge to kill Jews, racial minorities, gays, abortion
> providers and whites who marry across racial or religious lines. The fascist
> gunman Buford Furrow, who attacked a Jewish community center in Los Angeles last
> month and later murdered an Asian-American postal worker, was also associated
> with the Phineas Priests.
>
> Craig suggested that Ashbrook may have targeted the Westbrook Baptist Church for
> violence because the Southern Baptist Convention, to which Westbrook is
> affiliated, recently announced a campaign to convert Jews to Christianity. While
> this campaign was criticized by Jewish groups, the announcement was denounced by
> violent anti-Semitic elements as well. "To a Phineas priest or white supremacist
> that is the ultimate blasphemy," Craig said, "because they believe that they are
> the children of Israel."
>
> According to the Klanwatch Project, which monitors ultra-right-wing activity,
> the Phineas Priests are not so much an organized group as a title assumed by
> individual terrorists who operate like the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy
> McVeigh, or Benjamin Smith, who went on a shooting rampage against Jews, blacks
> and Asians in Illinois and Indiana over the July 4 weekend. "To become a Phineas
> Priest means to commit armed robbery, arson, sabotage, kidnapping and murder," a
> spokesman for Klanwatch said. "It is a commitment to a holy war."
>
> In 1997 four men calling themselves Phineas Priests were convicted in Spokane,
> Washington of a series of bombings and bank robberies during the previous year,
> including bomb attacks on the offices of Planned Parenthood and the
> Spokesman-Review, the Spokane daily newspaper. Three were sentenced to life in
> prison and one to a term of 55 years.
>
> Craig said he had notified the FBI after his interview with Ashbrook and other
> supporters of right-wing terrorism in 1997, and that he called the Fort Worth
> police department "repeatedly" in the days after the Westbrook killings, but
> neither agency has shown any interest in evidence that right-wing politics may
> underlie the massacre.
>
> FBI officials said they had no plans to pursue Craig's story and Fort Worth
> police spokesman David Ellis was unaware Craig had even called the department.
> Another city spokesman dismissed interest in this aspect of the case, indicating
> that with Ashbrook's suicide, there was no point in looking into his background.
> "We're not doing a biography on this subject," he said.
>
> There is no question that Ashbrook was a deeply disturbed individual, likely a
> schizophrenic, from descriptions of his behavior by neighbors. The unemployed
> Navy veteran lived at home with his elderly parents and was socially isolated
> after their deaths—his mother in 1990, his father two months ago. His conduct
> was increasingly erratic, and included agitated letters to the Fort Worth
> Star-Telegram, and even a visit to the newspaper's office, where he met the city
> editor, as well as a telephone conversation with a writer at the alternative FW
> Weekly in which he claimed, "My life has been destroyed by these people—Air
> Force personnel, Tarrant County sheriff's deputies, the Klan."
>
> The fact of his derangement does not, however, render irrelevant the political
> connections which he seems to have formed during the last years of his life, and
> which certainly contributed to the homicidal form of his mental breakdown.
>
> Despite the report in the Houston Chronicle, later amplified by the Los Angeles
> Times and Reuters news agency, the fascist connections of the Fort Worth gunman
> have been generally ignored by the mass media, including the television networks
> and the New York Times. Instead, there has been an effort to utilize the Fort
> Worth tragedy to win sympathy for Christian fundamentalist groups and portray
> them as the target of hate crimes—the slant taken by both weekly newsmagazines
> Time and Newsweek.
>
> While Time quotes the Reverend Jerry Falwell declaring that Christian
> fundamentalists are under siege in America, it appears that the deranged gunman
> was motivated by a more extreme version of Falwell's own ultra-right ideology.
>
>
>
>
>
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