Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.white-power
Subject: Paranoia as Patriotism: The Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord

Archive/File: pub/orgs/american/adl/paranoia-as-patriotism/
              covenant-sword-arm-lord
Last-Modified: 1995/08/19

      The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord

Founded in 1971 by former San Antonio fundamentalist minister
James Ellison, The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the
Lord (CSA) was a paramilitary survivalist group which operated
an Identity-oriented communal settlement near the
Arkansas-Missouri border. Under the guise of being a church,
the CSA was a violence-prone purveyor of anti-Semitism and
racism. The 100 or more inhabitants of the settlement believed
American society to be approaching economic collapse, famine,
rioting and a "coming war." They stockpiled arms, food, and
wilderness survival gear, and trained in the use of weapons in
a mock village called Silhouette City.

Kerry Noble, an elder and "ordained minister" of the CSA
explained: "We are Christian survivalists who believe in
preparing for the ultimate holocaust." The organization's
materials proclaimed that the settlement's purpose was "to
build an Ark for God's people during the coming
tribulations,"the coming war is a step towards God's
government."

CSA operated the "Endtime Overcomer Survival Training School,"
offering to members and selected non-members course in urban
warfare, riflery and pistolcraft, military tactics, "Christian
martial arts" and wilderness survival. The school was run by
CSA founder and leader James Ellison.

The CSA's anti-Semitism flowed from its Identity-movement
doctrine, which declared: "We believe the
Scandinavian-German-Teutonic-British-American people to be the
Lost Sheep of the House of Israel which Jesus was sent for."
Its members were told that "Jews of today are not God's chosen
people, but are in fact an anti-Christ race, whose purpose is
to destroy God's people and Christianity through its Talmudic
teaching, forced inter-racial mixings, and perversions." The
Jews, said CSA seminar organizer Bill Thomas, are "the seed of
Satan, not the seed of God." Kerry Noble stated, "We do
believe non-whites and Jews are a threat to our Christian,
white race" and that "Jews are financing the training of
Blacks to take over most of our major cities."

In addition, CSA's official booklist offers a number of
anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi, and racist tracts, including _The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion_, _The Talmud Unmasked_,
_Who's Who in the Zionist Conspiracy_, _The Negro and the
World Crisis_, and _A Straight Look at the Third Reich_.

In the wake of the 1983 Aryan Nations conference, CSA leaders
engaged in a series of criminal activities, including the
firebombing of an Indiana synagogue, the arson of a Missouri
church, and an attempted bombing in Missouri of a pipeline
supplying Chicago with natural gas. In April 1985, 200 FBI
agents raided the CSA compound on the Missouri-Arkansas border
and seized hundreds of weapons, bombs, an anti-tank rocket,
and quantities of cyanide allegedly intended to poison the
water supply of an unnamed city.

In September 1985, CSA leaders James Ellison and Kerry Noble
and four other CSA activists - Gary Stone, Timothy Russell,
Rudy Loewen and David Giles - were sentenced to lengthy
Federal prison terms on racketeering and illegal weapons
charges. CSA member Stephen Scott pleaded guilty in an
Arkansas Federal court to charges he dynamited a natural gas
pipeline near Fulton, Arkansas in 1983. Ex-CSA member Kent
Yates also pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to make
and transfer automatic weapons silencers. The convictions and
guilty pleas in effect broke the white supremacist group.
(Anti-Defamation League, 13-14)

                       Work Cited

Anti-Defamation League. [Special Report] Paranoia as Patriotism:
Far-Right Influences on the Militia Movement. 1995.

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