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Jacques Pluss
He is charged with threatening the director of the New York regional office of the Anti-Defamation League.
The New Jersey State Police Central Security Unit began investigating Jacques Pluss, 57, of Heights Road, after the ADL turned over emailed threats to Abraham Foxman, Acting NJSP Major Gerald Lewis told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
The unit investigates threats against politicians, judges and other public figures.
“As part of our investigation, we found that he has ties to neo-Nazi organizations, and that he frequently visited neo-Nazi websites,“ Lewis told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
At 6:30 a.m., the Troop B SWAT team — armed with a search warrant — descended on the apartment, along with detectives from the CSU, cyber crimes and K9 units, investigators from the Division of Criminal Justice, and Ridgewood police.
As Pluss was being arrested on charges of bias intimidation and harassment, a search turned up three rifles, Lewis told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
His wife was taken into
Jacques Pluss (courtesy NJSP) custody “for investigative purposes pertaining to possible weapons offenses,” Lewis said.
Her husband had been prohibited from possessing weapons under a restraining order on file in Superior Court in Hackensack.
Fairleigh Dickinson University fired Pluss, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in medieval history, in March 2005 after his neo-Nazi ties were made public. This came after the student newspaper received a mysterious letter postmarked from a small village in Ireland. The letter alleged that Pluss was a member of a neo-Nazi group in America, as well as an IRA member under investigation in connection with a Belfast drive-by killing.
Pluss later admitting writing it himself.
For their part, FDU officials cited six absences in a 15-week semester.
However, Dean John Snyder also told reporters that Pluss‘s view were “not politics“ but “hate mongering.”
“It’s just hatred directed at the very students he taught. His position would be untenable on the basis of student welfare,” Snyder said. “It’s our job to see to it that students are treated with respect and security.”
Pluss, in turn, accused the school of “insane ‘political correctness’ and ersatz ‘social engineering’.”
PROFILE: “I simply do NOT believe that Israel has a right to exist,” wrote Jacques Pluss, a former neo-Nazi leader from Ridgewood charged with threatening the director of the New York regional office of the Anti-Defamation League. “Jews have NO inherent nationality,” Pluss added, “just a portable ‘culture of conspiracy’.” CLICK HERE TO READ….
A posting several years ago on a site called nukeisrael.com said that Pluss, as “a newcomer to the NSM, unleashed a fiery oratory reminiscent of Hitler’s speeches.” However, the National Socialist Movement dismissed Pluss six months after he was fired by FDU. He countered that he had “infiltrated” the group to undermine it and described his true political views as “mainstream Republican.”
A short time later, NSM spokesman Bill White posted online that Pluss was “seriously depressed and taking psychiatric medication for emotional issues since his dismissal from Farleigh Dickinson University. Recently, I am told, he had his prescription and / or dosage changed, and began behaving bizarrely.”
Pluss, a former horse trainer, told journalist and historian Michael Brooks that he produced a weekly Internet radio program for the NSM.
“I created a persona for the program, and the formula was pretty simple: all I had to do was rail against blacks, Jews, and people south of the border,” he told Brooks, adding that his shows were later removed from the NSM archives. “Since I also had the ability to do it with a level of discourse above the 10th grade level, all the better; as long as I could obnoxiously villify people of color, they loved me.”
Yet it was only 13 months ago that Pluss posted a comment on JTA.org (The Global News Service of the Jewish People), in response to an article about the 2009 “Forward 50,” a diverse collection of “men and women who are leading the American Jewish community into the 21st century,” according to the Jewish Daily Forward.
“Man, oh man! The people on this list ought to be imprisoned in Gaza as retribution for Israeli crimes against humanity there, not given honors, awards, or citations!” Pluss wrote. “You folks are just plain crazy–but you won’t stop until you’ve either overtaken Western Civilization (doubtful–but you don’t think so) or started World War III (probable)–which will be the last one! Then, we can all return to scratch-plowing–that is, if we live! I tell you, Jews are all “shadow” schizophrenics, to be sure. You’d be glad to return us all to the Early Bronze Age!”
Pluss, who recently dubbed himself “SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Dr. Jacques PLUSS (honoris causa)” on his since-removed blog, is being held on $25,000 bail at the Bergen County Jail.
Although what he is accused of doing is clearly illegal, it’s still open to question whether Pluss — whom Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine once said was “a few Stukas short of a squadron” — poses an actual physical threat.
“Pluss uses allusions such as dancing on a person’s grave or keeping someone under the radar that are indirect threats but that would require interpretation in a court,” said Stanley Wertheim, former English Department chairman at William Paterson University — and a frequent target for Pluss and other like-minded neo-Nazis. “He is also so apparently deranged that even other Nazis dismiss him as a bad joke rather than a threat.”
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