Groups’ Role No Surprise to Experts on Hate Crime : White supremacy: Virulent rhetoric characterizes two well-known organizations as well as newer group.

To experts in hate crime, the list of white supremacy groups whose alleged members were arrested Thursday included two chillingly familiar names and one unexpected one.

Based on opposite coasts but united by many of the same ideals, two of the organizations, White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and Church of the Creator, have long and checkered histories.

“It is not surprising to find racists affiliated with the White Aryan Resistance and Church of the Creator charged in attempts to use violence against minorities,” said Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “The officials of these two groups remain at arms’ length of committing violence themselves and, instead, depend on impressionable followers to carry out the groups’ goals.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said both organizations are racist, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic, an assessment echoed by Klanwatch, an arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to Klanwatch, WAR and Church of the Creator have banded together in recent years.

WAR was founded by Tom Metzger of Fallbrook, Calif. The group’s rhetoric is virulently racist, and in its most recent publication, Metzger wrote: “The great White Aryan race must be advanced and protected at all costs and above all other issues.”

In 1990, a Portland, Ore., jury returned a $12.5-million verdict against Metzger and his son for their involvement in the 1988 beating death of an Ethiopian man. That verdict threatened to end Metzger’s organization, but he has remained in the news in recent years primarily by appearing on talk shows, Cooper said.

The Church of the Creator was founded in 1973 by Ben Klassen, a native of Ukraine whose books include the “White Man’s Bible.” Early this year, he turned the organization over to Pat McCarty, who moved its headquarters to Niceville, Fla. Klanwatch and others suspect that Klassen still directs operations behind the scenes.

Interviewed Thursday, McCarty said the church’s mission is “based on the survival, expansion and advancement of the white race.” He said the organization’s records indicated that none of the six adults arrested in Southern California is a member of the church, though he added that one suspect, Geremy C. Von Rineman, is a former member.

While Church of the Creator and WAR are among the most familiar names in white supremacy, a third group identified by law enforcement officials Thursday was harder to trace. The so-called Fourth Reich Skinheads do not have the long, documented past of the other groups, researchers said.

There is a group by that name based in the New York area, but the Southern California version appears to owe its allegiance to WAR. Christopher David Fisher, a Long Beach resident, allegedly boasted to an undercover FBI agent that he headed the Fourth Reich Skinheads. He is said to have told the agent that the group has about 50 members, apparently many of them juveniles.

Although the Fourth Reich Skinheads appear to be a younger, less-established group than the others named Thursday, their rhetoric--as quoted in federal affidavits--is at least as inflammatory.

“Fisher said that his group of skinheads will not be waiting for the race war to start,” one affidavit states, “but rather will be doing things to start the race war.”