Rank is wrong for Navy supremacist

Until last week, Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe was a public affairs officer aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. Before that, in two decades with the Navy, he held positions with Fleet Forces Command, Joint Forces Command and at the Pentagon.

Much of the time he has been serving his nation in uniform, he has been doing his best, quite openly, to undermine it. Until a reporter for PortFolio Weekly called the Navy, the armed services never seemed to notice.

That's a sickening commentary on security in the United States armed forces. Sharpe's views aren't dangerous because they're openly racist and anti-Semitic, though that would be bad enough. His ideas are dangerous because they're crazy - and when uttered by a commissioned officer, they take on the aura of authority.

According to Sharpe's newsletters published on the Internet, 9/11 was a conspiracy hatched by "the Powers that Be in order to lead us into a further intervention in world events, to ensure that the liberal-democratic order triumphs based upon the force of arms.... The Zionist New-World-Order gang... plan [ned ] to push the entire world into World War III for the glory of Israel."

His views veer from insanely pacifist conspiracy theories to chest-thumping jingoism with barely a speed bump in between. On one page, the United States is at war in the Middle East to control oil at the behest of the "the War Machine [that ] begins to thirst for blood." Just paragraphs later, he argues that the U.S. should "declare war on Islam and beat it back into Arabia and Mongolia, leaving it with a sore and painful reminder of what happens when idolaters take on the Christian West, or finally, better, still,... declare war on Islam and wage at the same time a war of independence on behalf of the U.S. government and the world financial system against international Judeo-Masonry."

The lunacy goes on and on. Pope John Paul II was a Jewish plant. The current pope is a dupe intent on undermining Christianity at the behest of shadowy Jewish conspiracy. Mourning the victims of 9/11 is "silly." The United States is Israel's "puppet." Jews are responsible for "centuries of usury and at least one century's (and two world wars') worth of godless and conscience-less Empire...."

To top it off, Sharpe used his groups to raise money for holocaust revisionist Jim Condit, an Ohio crackpot who claims that Zionist Jews engineered Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The plan, Condit explains, launched with the participation of President Franklin Roosevelt and the queen of England, was to set up concentration camps and kill millions so the rest of Europe's Jews would move to Palestine and found Israel.

Reacting to all this, a Navy spokesman says the service has launched an investigation into whether Sharpe violated rules that prevent service members from participating in "supremacist causes." Assuming the Navy investigators are literate, the result of that investigation is a foregone conclusion.

What the Navy should investigate is how Sharpe was able to publicly espouse sickeningly anti-American and anti-Semitic views on the Internet for more than five years without anyone noticing.

CLARIFICATION

The editorial quoted material published electronically by Mr. Sharpe, which the Editorial Board considered to be very extreme. In attempting to capture the substance of Mr. Sharpe’s views, the editorial combined sentences from material published at different times, and, in some cases, written over different signatures. Although the Editorial Board stands by its take on his views, the editorial unintentionally attributed some views to Mr. Sharpe that he does not hold, and we regret that.