The shooting rampage at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota puts American neo-Nazism back on the front page and adds an awful top spin to yesterday's e-mail debate about David Irving and C-SPAN.

As you've doubtless read by now, Jeff Weise — a self-described Ojibwe Native American teenager who killed 10 people, wounded seven others, then committed suicide — wrote messages on a neo-Nazi web site saying he had "a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideas"; his tribe needed "more pure bloods"; and his high school teachers frowned on anyone who espoused "racial purity."

Taking the names "Todesengel" (Angel of Death) and NativeNazi in e-mails posted in a chat room of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, Weise wrote:

When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi's were (are) evil and that Hitler was a very evil man ... Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich adressed, I began to see how much of a lie had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better.

The only one's who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a Klansman, or a White Supremacist thug.

The alienation that underpinned Weise's anger and distorted his sense of reality is evident in his writings. So is the peculiar irony of a Native American allying himself with neo-Nazi white supremacists. He wrote:

Most of the Natives I know have been poisoned by what they were taught in school. The basic "Nazi = Bad, Jew = Good. Defend Jew at all costs." You get the idea, the public school system has done more harm then good, and as a result it has left many on this reservation misled and misinformed. ...

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