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The Jews, they say, are "the synagogue of Satan."

They are not the offspring of the Biblical Hebrews at all. Instead, Jews, they claim, are descendants of the Edomites, an evil race spawned by Esau, the twin brother of Jacob, who was later known as Israel. Today's Jews are liars who falsely assert that they are God's "chosen people" in order to deceive the world. It is not the Jewish pretenders but them, they insist, who are uniquely favored by God.

"The Holocaust is a damn joke!" one of their more vicious leaders shouted in a recent confrontation with a Jewish man in Philadelphia. "Heil Hitler!"

Who are these haters of the Jews?

They could easily be adherents of Christian Identity, the white supremacist theology that asserts that Jews are in league with Satan and that white people are the real descendants of the Biblical Hebrews.

But, in this case, they are not. Instead, they are black men and women who inhabit the racist fringe of the growing Hebrew Israelite movement, a movement that asserts that Christ will soon return to destroy or enslave whites, Jews and others. Their ideology — a phenomenon explored in detail in the cover story of this issue of the Intelligence Report — has been growing more militant in recent years.

"These are African-American groups with a theology that is the reverse of Christian Identity," says Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University professor who is the leading scholar of Christian Identity. "They're mirror images of each other."

Christian Identity began as British Israelism, a theology spawned by well-heeled British Victorians who argued that European whites were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, and thus were the long-lost brothers of the Jews, who descended from related tribes. The theology, which began as a fad in 19th century Britain, was a way of explaining, and justifying, the sprawling British Empire.

Once it reached the shores of the United States, British Israelism morphed into an even more bizarre doctrine, one that identified Jews as the biological descendants of Satan who pretended falsely to be the chosen of God. The resulting theology — Christian Identity — found adherents among those who found the growing diversity of America threatening to the long-favored white race.

Like Christian Identity, black Hebrew Israelism is a theology of dispossession — but in this case, the dispossession is not the waning of special privileges long accorded to whites. It is the very real dispossession of people who were brought to this country in chains and have struggled ever since. Given that reality, it's not hard to understand how the black Hebrew Israelite narrative developed — a kind of "revenge narrative," as Barkun put it.

Much like the theology of the Nation of Islam, the Hebrew Israelite view of the world is in some ways simply a reaction to our country's history of white racism, white privilege and oppression of black people both during and after slavery.

But, if we are to progress together as a nation, we can't excuse black racism just because we can explain it. Ethnic and racial hatred is still the scourge of our times. Serbs and Croats, Turks and Greeks, Chechnyans and Russians, Basques and Spaniards, Jews and Arabs — the list of entrenched ethnic hatreds and antagonisms in recent history is virtually endless. At some point, it has to stop.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: "Violence begets violence; hate begets hate; and toughness begets a great toughness. It is all a descending spiral, and the end is destruction — for everybody. Along the way of life, somebody must have enough sense and morality to cut off the chain of hate."