[browardchad]

Add to the list the Yahweh Ben Yahweh murders.

From the Miami Herald, October 15, 2001:

MONTREAL -- The Nation of Yahweh had much to celebrate when members gathered in Montreal, their ''New Promised Land,'' last week.

Their leader and messiah, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, 65, just got out of prison after serving nearly 10 years for his part in 14 Miami murders in the 1980s. Their numbers are growing again, and they have come out of hiding.

But the question is: Is their message the same?

In the 1980s, the best of it was to make blacks feel empowered. The worst of it was to brainwash those who became Yahwehs to the degree that they would shout that they would ''die for Yahweh . . . kill for Yahweh.''

Then do it.

At their Montreal conference last week, attended by about 600 Yahwehs in characteristic white robes and turbans, there was no promise to either die, or kill for Yahweh.

Yet, more than ever before, most Yahwehs cast themselves as a nation of believers at war with nonbelievers, and the old message of self-esteem has been crowded out by one that elevates their leader to ''Grand Master of All, the God of the Universe, the Grand Potentate, the Everlasting Father and the persecuted Messiah.'' The new message also is more stridently jingoistic, including a ''Pledge of Allegiance'' to Yahweh Ben Yahweh.

''What's different now is that the U.S. is not just a corrupt society in their eyes, it's one that the global nation of Yahwehs is ready to take on. We have become the Infidel,'' said Richard Scruggs, former Yahweh federal prosecutor.

Yet Wendelyn Rush, a Yahweh member and attorney, cautions against demonizing their mission: ''It's not a violent war, it's a war of words,'' she said at an August federal hearing to decide on Yahweh Ben Yahweh's parole restrictions.
[...]

At Yahweh Ben Yahweh's trial in 1992, federal prosecutor Scruggs noted that Yahweh Ben Yahweh had gone from being a poor kid in a dusty Oklahoma town to an Air Force airman to a Black Muslim leader to a radio Christian evangelist to a self-declared prophet the center of the religion he founded, to saying he was the Son of God.

''It took you a while to work your way up, didn't it?'' Scruggs said.

''Certain things were revealed to me with time,'' Yahweh Ben Yahweh replied.

[livius]

Very, very interesting.

There used to be a group of these people - I think they were associated with him, but maybe it was another strange black Islamic group - who would station themselves at various street corners in NYC (frequently in front of Macy's at 34th St.) and scream the most revolting things through their microphones. They were always urging the killing of Jews in particular and whites in general, and I never understood why they were allowed to stand there and spout this stuff.

Maybe because they were wearing what appeared to be Shriner outfits gone berserk - purple fezzes with long gold tassles and strange circus-like purple and gold costumes - they were considered to be just local loonies.

But they were full of hate, and I always considered them dangerous. If people like this have been recruited by radical Islamists, I think we're in trouble.