Is Jared Lee Loughner Jewish?
The Jewish Telegraph Agency picked up the Fox memo and ran with it, emphasizing the idea that Loughner targeted Giffords because she was Jewish: "Memo Notes Giffords' Judaism in Motives of Alleged Attacker." American Renaissance is (absurdly) described as "anti-ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government) [and] anti-Semitic."
However, Mother Jones reports that Jared Lee Loughner's best friend claims that Loughner's mother is Jewish. This would seem to be a problem for the anti-Semitism motive. According to the friend, Loughner disliked Giffords because she didn't answer a his question at a public meeting. The question: "'What is government if words have no meaning?"
In other words, he is a nut case who has trouble with distinguishing real from unreal. From the description provided by the friend, it looks to me like some kind of schizophrenia–for example, believing in an alternate reality where he could fly and where he could dream anything he wanted and make it seem real.
In fact one of his YouTube videos combines the nutcase theme with the Jewish theme. In "My Final Thoughts: Jared Lee Loughner!" he says, "If B.C.E. years are unable to start then A.D.E years are unable to begin. B.C.E. years are unable to start. Thus, A.D.E years are unable to begin." (See here.) Besides the weirdness of the syllogism, B.C.E. stands for Before Common Era, a way of referring to the year Christ was born without referring to anything Christian that is common among Jewish scholars. Non-Jews don't use it unless they are trying to impress Jews with their respect for Jewish hostility toward Christianity.
But the A.D.E. is not standard usage for anyone. Jewish scholars just write C.E.–Common Era and the rest of us use A.D. So maybe it's just another aspect of his craziness.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/01/is-jared-lee-loughner-jewish/
Who knows?
But the reference to his interest in semiotics (as stated in Mother Jones) is interesting. This would necessarily be attached to structuralism and semiotics today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
The writers in that canon would be all from the New Left (following after Saussere into Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and perhaps most importantly Althusser). These books are taught in all humanities programs, or at least their perspectives.
Saussere in the hands of a 22 year-old –who would be reading over his head with no instruction— may have confused him in regards to the relation of words and meaning. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism)
Few in the general public perhaps would connect what he is saying to the New Left and studies in the connections between words and meaning. This can be unsettling for someone who is young, nor schooled in the connections between signs and symbols and meaning (structuralism, the new left, semiotics, semantics, the Prague and Moscow schools).
Perhaps— (crazy though he is) he seems trying to articulate what might be commonplace in semiotics studies while reading the New Left, like in universities, (where signs are simply signs, not connected to things to which they refer, and are studied as such). One non-jew involved (outside Lacan, Derrida, etc.) was Kenneth Burke and this recalls his "A Grammar of Motives" or Language as Symbolic Action. (He was educated in the 20s at Columbia University).
Anyhow— he may have been somehow exposed to some of these New Left materials without instruction or a way to understand (or been exposed to the "filtered down" ideas in these studies.
Obviously, the New Left here is offering ways of thinking about signs, symbols and meaning that are not usually studied by many people, except in colleges.
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