The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Paranoia as Patriotism:
Far-Right Influences on the Militia Movement


Covenant, Sword, and 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)


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