The Extremists Next Door

By EILEEN POLLACK
NYT

Ann Arbor, Mich.

I MOVED to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building. Although he wasn’t a member of the Michigan Militia, he did attend one of their meetings and practiced building bombs at a farm 120 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. One of McVeigh’s most fervent supporters, Mark Koernke, worked as a janitor at the University of Michigan, where I teach, and in his off hours hosted a vitriolic radio show on which he espoused the militia’s most radical, violent views.

After the carnage in Oklahoma City and President Bill Clinton’s exit from the White House, much of the militia activity in Michigan and elsewhere seemed to subside. Mr. Koernke was sent to prison for fleeing the scene of a robbery he didn’t commit and resisting the efforts of the police to question him.

But I knew the extremists were still out there. One afternoon in 2003, I was reading about a particularly racist and anti-Semitic group called the Christian Identity movement when I received a call from Zingerman’s Deli to come and finalize plans for my son’s bar mitzvah. A block from the deli, I noticed several Christian Identity bumper stickers on the truck in front of me.

Then came the 2008 presidential campaign and the militias regained strength. Last month, nine members of the Hutaree, a band of self-styled Christian revolutionaries, were arrested in and around Ann Arbor for allegedly plotting to kill police officers and any non-members who happened upon their “reconnaissance operations” in the woods. A few days later, I came across a Webcast of the “The Intelligence Report,” on which Mark Koernke, who had served his time, was treating his listeners to the ominous click of a bullet being loaded in a gun and the warning that anyone who breached his “perimeter” would be shot.

(More here.)

You have read this article with the title The Extremists Next Door. You can bookmark this page URL http://ogbcommunity.blogspot.com/2010/04/extremists-next-door.html. Thanks!