Hate group to picket Kansas City funerals

WASHINGTON — The Westboro Baptist Church, an extremist organization known for its anti-gay activism, announced that it will picket the funerals of the three people killed in Sunday afternoon’s shooting attacks at two Kansas City Jewish sites.

The church, which has famously picketed funerals of US military personnel and has protested against the American Jewish community, sent out a tweet shortly after the shooting saying, “Thank God for shootings at Overland Park KS jewish centers! Westboro to picket funerals. God did not passover.”

The Topeka, Kansas-based group is not affiliated with any Baptist organization, and has a long history of anti-Semitic provocations.

In 1996, now-deceased WBC pastor Fred Phelps held a protest outside of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

https://twitter.com/WBCSays/status/455448827000942592

During that event, Phelps said that “Whatever righteous cause the Jewish victims of the 1930s–40s Nazi Holocaust had (probably minuscule, compared to the Jewish Holocausts against Middle Passage Blacks, African Americans and Christians — including the bloody persecution of Westboro Baptist Church by Topeka Jews in the 1990s), has been drowned in sodomite semen. American taxpayers are financing this unholy monument to Jewish mendacity and greed and to filthy fag lust.”

Phelps, who was more widely-known in the US for his anti-homosexual agenda, said that “God has smitten Jews with a certain unique madness … Jews, thus perverted, out of all proportion to their numbers energize the militant sodomite agenda,” adding that “Jews are the real Nazis.”

The organization has also protested at the dedication of a Holocaust memorial in Topeka as well as at a number of Washington, DC Jewish institutions.

In a 2009 release, the group wrote that “JEWS KILLED JESUS! Yes, the Jews killed the Lord Jesus…Now they’re carrying water for the fags; that’s what they do best: sin in God’s face every day, with unprecedented and disproportionate amounts of sodomy, fornication, adultery, abortion and idolatry! God hates these dark-hearted rebellious disobedient Jews.”

Phelps died last month, but a number of his family members have carried on the church’s tradition of radical intolerance.

Both the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center have monitored the group’s actions over the past two decades. The SPLC has described the Westboro Baptist Church as “arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America,” and “basically a family-based cult of personality built around its patriarch, Fred Phelps.”