Suspected Christian extremists post directly to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation its offer of $5,000 for the murder of any of its members, upping it to $6,000 for the “kike.”
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Police have been called to investigate after suspected Christian extremists posted a call Saturday directly on the site of a religious freedom group for assassins to kill its members, with a bonus for its Jewish leader.
“$5,000 will be payed [sic] to anyone who beh3ads [sic] an MRFF member. A thousand more if they are a kike,” said the threatening message found in the Comments section of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) website.
The founder and head of MRFF is Mikey Weinstein, who is Jewish. According to the foundation’s website, both he and his group have been targeted often by “white Christian nationalists,” with death threats having “escalated over the summer.”
They allege that this latest threat, which they say reaches “a whole new level,” was from the same unknown individual who has sent messages in the past such as, “I am going to murder Michael Weinstein and his supporters.”
After one such threat in July, Weinstein posted a defiant message on YouTube to “the cowards” who “sit behind keyboards” trying to intimidate him and his supporters. Although they have “limited intelligence and … certainly no honor,” he said he was willing to talk to them and publicly announced his cell phone number on the clip.
This time, the former U.S. army veteran has called for help, as he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) Monday that soliciting murder is a crime and someone could act on the call.
“We are working very closely with federal, especially federal, and local law enforcement agencies to try to track these people down,” Weinstein said to the news agency, adding that the police have told his organization to take the threats seriously.
This is just the latest iteration of a years-long hate fest directed at Weinstein ever since he founded MRFF in 2005 with the purpose of keeping an iron wall between religion and state in the armed forces.
It has gone beyond dozens of vicious emails a week and hateful phone calls, he told CNET News in 2017. The windows of his house in New Mexico have been smashed twice, he found a swastika and a cross painted near his front door and, in separate incidents, a decapitated rabbit’s head and eviscerated rabbit as well.
MRFF has worked with Muslim civil liberties groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations as well as Jewish and other groups to discourage any kind of religious indoctrination or coercion in the military.