The FBI and local authorities are continuing an intensive investigation of militant hate groups in Southern California, following the arrest last week of eight white supremacists who were allegedly plotting deadly attacks on black and Jewish targets.
At least one of the suspects told an FBI undercover agent of plans to blow up a leading African American church and machine-gun its congregation, according to the criminal complaint.
Other possible targets included Rodney King, the victim of the famed videotaped beating by white police officers; the Rev. Al Sharpton, a radical black activist from New York; rap music star Eazy-E; and unspecified “Jewish leaders.”
The suspects hoped that the attacks would bring them national attention and trigger a race war, the FBI said following the July 15 arrest.
If any of the attacks had succeeded, the reaction would “have made last year’s (Los Angeles) riots look like a Sunday school picnic,” one black leader said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office would not name any of the alleged Jewish targets. Telephone calls to major Jewish organizations and individuals in Los Angeles and Orange counties did not produce the name of any person who had been alerted of possible danger by law enforcement agencies.
The arrests of the eight suspects in four Southern California counties yielded an arsenal of weapons, a portrait of Adolf Hitler and swastika banners. Most of the suspects are being charged with federal weapons offenses.
Authorities identified the suspects — four men, two women and two juveniles — as members of three white supremacist groups, each apparently with its own agenda.
The most militant suspect, Christopher David Fisher, 20, and the two juveniles were said to belong to a shadowy group calling itself the Fourth Reich Skinheads, which allegedly planned the assassinations and attack on the black church.
The other, better-known hate groups were identified as the White Aryan Resistance, or WAR, based in Orange County, and the Church of the Creator, based in Florida.
RABBI MAY HAVE BEEN TARGET
Initial news stories reported that Fisher had been arrested while preparing a mail bomb to be sent to an Orange County rabbi. The rabbi was not identified, but circumstances pointed to Rabbi Michael Mayersohn of Temple Beth David in Westminster. The temple had been vandalized and smeared with graffiti in January.
Fisher allegedly told an undercover agent that he had at one time lobbed a Molotov cocktail at the temple, but that the incendiary device did not ignite because it was raining.
Mayersohn said in a phone interview that while checking the graffiti damage, inspectors had found a broken window in a remote part of the temple. No sign of the Molotov cocktail was found, and it was uncertain whether the window had been smashed at the same time as the vandalism attack.
Beth David is clearly visible from the busy San Diego Freeway, but Mayersohn said he could think of no other reason why the temple had apparently drawn the attention of hate groups.
In any case, he said, “I am not going to change who I am and how I present myself because of the bigotry and hatred of others. That is what they would want us to do.”
Mayersohn contacted the FBI last Friday and was told that the news reports were exaggerated and that there was no indication that he was a specific target.
An FBI spokesman said that only Rodney King and leaders of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church were warned because they were thought to be the only ones in real danger.
However, Marc Greenberg, the lead prosecutor in the case, said that on the night before the arrests, members of the skinhead group began preparing mail bombs intended for members of the Orange County Jewish community. It was at that point that the law enforcement agencies decided to break off their covert operations and move in on the suspects.
Both Sharpton and Eazy-E have protested the FBI’s failure to warn them of possible threats against their lives.
GENOCIDE AS A ‘HOLY MISSION’
Jewish organizations remained on alert following the arrests and praised federal, state and local agencies for their effective work.
The Anti-Defamation League pointed out that only a few days earlier it had released the seventh in its reports on the threat posed by neo-Nazi skinheads.
ADL officials Jonathan Bernstein in Orange County and Cheryl Azair in Los Angeles saw in the arrests a vindication of the organization’s fact-finding methods, which have been under attack by the San Francisco district attorney and the California news media.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the suspects’ alleged plans should show Jewish, black and Hispanic groups that it is in their self-interest to act together against the common threat.
The Wiesenthal Center has been monitoring the Church of Creator for some time.
In one pamphlet, the group speaks of the need to “pull the White Race out of the dismal quagmire of Jewish domination and tyranny.”
“We gird for total war against the Jews and the rest of the goddamned mud races of the world,” it says.
Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said that “the arrests reflect the violent menace of many skin head groups and their growing affiliation with other racist and anti-Semitic organizations.
“These organizations, such as the Church of the Creator, cloak bigotry in religious garb in order to make genocide appear as a noble mission,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
