Hate Leaflets Found on 2 Campuses in South County

Hate leaflets targeting Jews and African Americans were dumped at two south Orange County public schools early Wednesday, less than a week after someone sent anti-Semitic e-mail to 400 employees at nearby Irvine Valley College.

The latest incidents shocked school officials, who denounced the actions.

“It’s cowardly,” said Jack Clement, principal of Lake Forest’s El Toro High School, one of the campuses hit Wednesday. “These are random acts, and we were the unlucky recipients.”

About 500 fliers were strewn at El Toro High before dawn Wednesday, and nearly 100 more littered Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate School, said Elaine Carter, spokeswoman for Saddleback Valley Unified School District, which includes both campuses.

The head custodian at El Toro High found heaps of index-card-size leaflets in parking lots and on tennis and basketball courts at 5:30 a.m. At Rancho Santa Margarita Intermediate, the plant foreman found mini-posters vilifying African Americans scattered across the school’s athletic field and parking lot.

“It seemed as though someone drove through the parking lots and threw the leaflets out of the car window,” Carter said.

Campus staffs worked quickly to collect and discard the materials before the start of school, Carter said. But a few students saw the fliers. They described the materials as disturbing.

“They were awful,” said Nicholas Mokhlessin, a junior at El Toro High. “I found it disgusting.”

The leaflets featured a disparaging cartoon depicting a Jewish man. Attached were stickers promoting a Fallbrook address for an Aryan group.

Mokhlessin said one of his teachers brought a leaflet to class and used it to prompt a discussion on freedom of speech and hate crimes.

“The entire class got really silent when we saw it,” said Mokhlessin, 16. “We were all pretty astonished that this stuff was being distributed on our campus.”

Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, said hate literature is discovered locally once or twice a month. For 1997, about 14% of the reported hate-related incidents involved distribution of materials containing racial slurs, he said.

Such fliers have been inserted into newspapers, tucked into food items at grocery stores, and distributed on school property. But such incidents are less common on campuses like Rancho Santa Margarita that have younger students, Kennedy said.

“It’s not rare, but infrequent that we see these occurrences at the intermediate level,” he said. “I think it’s sad that our children have to be subjected to this.”

Wednesday’s incidents were reported to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and were being investigated.

Experts say that schools may be targeted because they represent a central location where the literature can be seen by a large number of people.

The anti-Semitic electronic letters sent Oct. 22 were mailed apparently at random to 400 Irvine Valley College faculty and staff members.

The sender apparently used a free e-mail account from a Colorado-based account provider. He or she then acquired a college code to send the same message to each recipient. Irvine Valley College officials are still investigating the incident.