Earlier this year, an American serviceman was sent to prison for an attempted terrorist attack that received little coverage. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Emelie Chace-Donahue, and Thomas Plant relate the facts:

In March 2023, authorities sentenced the former U.S. Army private Ethan Melzer to 45 years in prison for plotting a terrorist attack against his own unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, during its upcoming deployment to Turkey. Melzer had leaked sensitive information about the deployment to co-conspirators—one of whom was an undercover FBI source whom Melzer believed was a member of al-Qaeda. The prospect that the attack might kill Melzer himself did not faze him; . . . he hoped his planned attack would provoke the United States into another costly war.

Melzer, despite his eagerness to help al-Qaeda, is not a Muslim at all, but a member of a secretive occult group called the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), which may have as many as 2,000 members. Its philosophy is anti-Semitic and loosely neo-Nazi, and it encourages its members to take radical actions by seeking out what its texts call “insight roles.” Gartenstein-Ross, Chace-Donahue, and Plant explain:

O9A should be seen as a Satanist movement and philosophy that is influenced by elements of fascism. . . . At the heart of the O9A’s outlook is a self-proclaimed mission to aid individual and societal evolution toward enlightenment by balancing human and supernatural forces. To progress toward this enlightenment, O9A holds that Western civilization must unlock its true pagan ethos, which has been corrupted by Judeo-Christian values. To this end, O9A encourages individuals to commit “sinister” and “heretical” acts conducive to liberation from artificial societal norms, thus breaking down the current social system.

Insight roles are lifestyles that adherents adopt that contradict their natural predispositions. For example, someone who considers himself honest might turn to a life of crime. Insight roles have many potential outlets: joining an “insurrectionary political organization,” assassinating those who support the current societal system, “undertaking jihad,” or joining or forming an anarchist or neo-Nazi group.

Some O9A texts also position the “Magian ethos,” [i.e., Judaism and Christianity], alongside white supremacist and anti-government conspiracy theories, including those alleging that a New World Order or Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG) is a hidden hand behind major world governments and events. Moreover, some O9A texts use terminology and references directly linked to white supremacism and neo-Nazism.

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.