Synagogue Defaced by White-Supremacist Graffiti

Less than a week after Agoura residents reported finding anti-Semitic leaflets labeled with an Internet address in their mailboxes, a West Hills synagogue was vandalized with graffiti that included the same Web address of a white supremacy group.

The graffiti was discovered Friday morning on an exterior wall at Temple Solael on Valley Circle Boulevard, said Bob Howe, a detective supervisor with the West Valley Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The words “stop murdering the white race” and the Internet address were scrawled in red spray-paint next to the synagogue’s west entrance, Howe said. The vandalism is being investigated as a hate crime.

“It was on one of the main walls that fronts our sidewalk so that the teachers and the parents and the children coming to our preschool all saw it,” said a synagogue member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Rabbi Ron Herstik of Temple Solael declined to comment on the incident.

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The Internet address found on both the leaflets and the temple wall leads to the web site of the National Alliance, a West Virginia-based organization that espouses white supremacy. The group’s goals, according to the site, include “White Living Space” and “An Aryan Society.”

David Lehrer, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the National Alliance “the most venomous anti-Semitic and racist group in America, hands down.” The group’s leader, William Pierce, is the author and publisher of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel describing violence against Jews, blacks, government officials and others that was said to be a favorite of Timothy McVeigh, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber.

Pierce could not be reached Monday for comment, and a call to the National Alliance was not returned.

It is not known whether the vandalism or leafleting were the work of someone affiliated with the National Alliance.

“We theorized that the actual group and the distributors [of the fliers] may not even know each other,” said Capt. Bill McSweeney of the Malibu-Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, which is investigating the leaflets in Agoura.

Anti-Semitic fliers similar to the ones found in Agoura have surfaced recently across the metropolitan area. Two Glendale residents who live several miles apart reported receiving fliers in their mailboxes July 27, said Sgt. Rick Young of the Glendale Police Department.

In Encino, a woman found a flier inside an unsealed box of ice cream snacks she had purchased July 26 at a Ralphs grocery store on Ventura Boulevard, said Howe. Three people reported receiving fliers in their mailboxes in Santa Clarita on July 21, said Lt. Tim Peters of the Santa Clarita Sheriff’s Station.

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The incidents echo a spate of hate leaflets distributed in the Los Angeles area several years ago. In that episode, Allan Eric Carlson of Glendale admitted slipping racist messages in the mid-1990s into unsold notebooks and food products and distributing fliers insulting Jews and other groups.

A Superior Court judge issued an injunction against Carlson in 1995, and the Los Angeles City Council passed a bill prohibiting the placement of material in unsold merchandise without the permission of the store manager. Carlson was later sent to prison for shooting out the windows of cars in Newport Beach.

No suspects have been identified in the current rash of leafleting or the vandalism of the temple, police said.

The anti-Semitic message of the fliers, according to Todd Rubenstein, a deputy district attorney in the Hate Crimes Suppression Unit, is protected speech unless it contains “a specific threat of actual force or violence with the apparent ability to carry it out.”

Rubenstein said that the fliers do not appear to meet the threshold for a hate crime.

Vandalism of a synagogue or church, however, is a felony if the motive for the crime was to intimidate or interfere with a person’s civil rights, including the free exercise of religion, Rubenstein said. The desecration of Temple Solael, he said, was “definitely a hate crime.”