Amity Must Hide as Hate Proselytizes

It’s a sign of something--but not a good one--that the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t identify itself or provide a suite number in its upscale Costa Mesa office building directory.

“We can’t,” says office manager Susan Molk. “Dangerous.”

Nor is it a flattering commentary on modern life that you have to pass through two sets of doors to get to the ADL’s suite of offices. Or that the receptionist sits behind bulletproof glass in the anteroom between the doors.

Or that the organization, which has been combating anti-Semitism since 1913, has been schooled by local police in anti-terrorism techniques, including such seemingly innocuous decisions as how to respond when an unfamiliar FedEx man shows up with a package.

Paranoia, you say?

Something out of “Three Days of the Condor”?

You might think so until you remember that hate is back in the news these days.

As if it ever left.

Two weeks ago, the weed that never dies sprung up again. In Illinois and Indiana, a gunman killed an African American and a Korean American and injured six Orthodox Jews walking home from temple services. That came on the heels of an arson spree in Sacramento in which three synagogues were torched in the predawn hours, injuring no one but doing $1 million in damage.

The synagogue arsons were the “worst anti-Semitic incident in California since World War II,” says ADL regional director Joyce Greenspan. “The good news is that it doesn’t happen often. The bad news is it happened.”

The mini-burst of hate crimes got the phone lines jangling at the Orange County ADL office, Greenspan says. Knowing that the ADL monitors hate groups around the nation, the local office provided a number of callers--including some local police departments--with information about the so-called World Church of the Creator, the organization to which the gunman who did the shootings in Indiana and Illinois once belonged.

The organization’s leader has disavowed the violence.

The World Church is no stranger to ADL trackers. Even before the Indiana-Illinois shootings and subsequent indications that the Sacramento arsonists may be tied to the group, the ADL had distributed memos on the organization.

Six days after the Midwest shooting spree, the national ADL office sent regional offices another memo on the World Church. It said it has more than 35 post office box addresses in the United States.

One of them is in Seal Beach, Greenspan says, prompting that Police Department to bone up on the organization. Fliers promulgating the church’s views have appeared in the Huntington Beach-Seal Beach area for at least the last 18 months, but Greenspan says she doesn’t know if the P.O. box represents a single person or a group.

The fliers have caught the attention of R. K. Miller, a Huntington Beach police sergeant and who Greenspan says is a recognized expert on skinheads and their white supremacist philosophy.

Miller already knew about the World Church of the Creator but contacted the ADL last week to get their latest updates to pass on to Seal Beach police.

Miller’s antipathy to racial crimes crested in 1994 when he investigated two young men for the murder of 44-year-old Vernon Flournoy. “His only crime, quote unquote, was that he was black,” Miller says. “They confronted him on Beach Boulevard, initiated a racial confrontation, then shot him and he bled out on the floor of a McDonald’s.”

“Dealing with his wife and looking at his life in the investigation and seeing how it was totally wasted because of skinhead ideology and their willingness to use violence, it was something I took great offense at,” Miller says. “I told his wife we’d do everything we could to see that those folks never would be on the street to do something like that again.”

The two men convicted of killing Flournoy received sentences in the 20-years-to-life range.

In my more glum moments, I lament that ethnic, religious and racial hatreds will always be with us. It’s helpful, at least, to hear Miller and Greenspan say that the extreme violent manifestations are rare.

Maybe this stuff, like some diseases, will be vanquished.

Someday (this lifetime maybe?), wouldn’t it be nice if the ADL could at least feel safe enough to put its office number on the building directory?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com