I guess you've all heard about the shooting at the National Holocaust Museum, which left one guard dead. Of course, what's really been emphasized in this story is the fact that the man who shot the guard was James von Brunn, an old white supremacist. The combination of a threatened Jewish Holocaust museum, a dead black guard, and a probably insane white supremacist sets the stage for a lot of discussion about political motives. Here's a few of them from the blogosphere:

• Conservative blogger Cassy Fiano asks why the leftist media tries to make a right-wing incident of the story. Well Cassy, there are two simple explanations for this: (1) Democrats are bashing right-wing scandals as often as they can to maintain their current status quo in the media. Although this time it sunk really low, I, for one, am not surprised. You could call it political blowback, because that's what it is. Branding Obama "socialist" and "Fascist" at Fox News gives us the kind of cheap climate in which David Letterman makes sexual jokes about Sarah Palin's daughter. Finally, (2) DailyKos is, and will always be, full of liberal crap.
• HBD blogger Half-Sigma argues that since von Brunn was a member of the Ron Paul for President Yahoo group, Ron Paul has got to be an anti-Semite. I will refrain from commenting on this, because I know HS is simply doing his usual thing: making obviously incorrect statements to get attention. Instead I'll shed some light on his debate around why white nationalists are anti-Israel.

While it's true that modern white nationalism often inherits some of the anti-Semitism from its ideological past, I think the issue is much simpler than that, and can be expanded to include revolutionary leftists, deep ecologists and any group that is against the whole establishment in the West: they support anyone who defies the West (Russia, Venezuela, Iran etc.) and defy anyone who supports it (Israel). The logic behind this: we oppose a government, but x group supports it, thus, we also oppose x. Of course, this kind of thinking doesn't hold water: Russia is not our friend simply because it regards West as a problem, and Israel is not our enemy simply because it happens to support and be supported by the West.

People read too much into this incident, and into anti-Semitism in general. White nationalists and their close friends, revolutionary leftists, use anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric because they base their entire political framework on defensive logic. There's the victim (white working class/Palestinians) and the perpetrator (Israel/Jews). WNs and extreme leftists are radical ideologues who believe they have a holy mission to save a group from being exploited by an uber-powerful enemy. But since this enemy can never be beaten, anti-Semitism becomes a way of expressing the powerlessness of fighting a battle that cannot realistically be won.