You may have seen there was a fellow up in Pueblo who got himself in scalding water with the FBI last week (“Man who spoke of hating Jews held in Colorado temple bomb plot,” Nov. 4). It was not by happenstance, but neither are we convinced the feds foiled the crime of the century. And we don’t know what it says about Colorado, other than the arrest, for which TV networks went to Pueblo, left people in Illinois, Florida, California and New York asking what’s wrong with our state instead of their own for a minute.
The accused, Richard Holzer, 27, just wanted to kill Jews, he said.
We often hear lately about a surge of hate in America, like the display of Nazism in Charlottesville, Virginia, two summers ago, and, on the left, attempts by leaders of the Women’s March to mainstream the minister of Jew-hating, Louis Farrakhan. To debate whether the threat comes more from the left or the right is a trivial deflection when it comes from both ends of the spectrum. The wellspring is numbskull subscribers to conspiracy theories, whose appeal is greatest for the weak and the aimless.
Holzer was entrapped by hate and stupidity, which ought to be one portmanteau word, like “hupidity.”
It begins with him posting bigoted statements on Facebook, which eventually are called to the FBI’s attention due to their threats to do harm to an entire people. This is remarkable when one sees so much of that on social media. Then Holzer is contacted by a woman who says she’s looking for a man just like him.
That must have been a red-letter day for Holzer.
We don’t know if she was a she, but it was an FBI operative. Among the hupid things Holzer told the agent was “I wish the Holocaust really did happen.”
Holzer also told the agent he’d paid $70 to a man who went by the name Mexican Hitler to hex and poison Pueblo’s Temple Emanuel. The FBI said it couldn’t corroborate that, so there still could be a Mexican Hitler in Pueblo charging for hexes.
As Night follows day, this led to Holzer finding co-conspirators, who were also FBI agents, who supplied him with a fake bomb with which he allegedly planned to blow up the temple. When Holzer went to collect the bomb from them at a Colorado Springs motel, he brought a copy of the other Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” whether for identification or because he could not stand to be without it we do not know. It begins to sound like Laurel and Hardy Go to the Sudetenland.
There are about 8 million Jews in the U.S., slightly less than half of all the Jews in the world. They comprise a little over 2% of the U.S. population, one of the smallest minorities. About half are in four states: New York, California, Florida and New Jersey. Ranked by percentages of state populations, Colorado is tied for 13th, with about 100,000 Jews or 1.8%. Dead last are both Dakotas, with a combined total of just over 600 Jews; they are not great places to look for a corned beef sandwich or beatnik poetry, unless they have them at Wall Drug in Wall, which we won’t rule out.
But, says the anti-Semite, the Jews control everything – the media, the banks, Facebook. There’s even Soros and Sanders and Bloomberg. And so he explains to himself his own helplessness with a ready-made theory. What he cannot see is that while Jews may be few in number, they still are not monolithic. To think otherwise is to never have been on a public bus in Israel.
There is a story about a Jew who is shipwrecked on a desert isle. When at last he is saved, his rescuers see he has built a temple with bamboo and palm fronds. It took him five years to complete, he says. Then he leads them to an even nicer temple; this one took him 12 years to build, he explains.
“Why did you build two?” a rescuer asks.
“This one is the one I attend,” he says. “That other temple, I wouldn’t set foot in if you paid me.”
