Simi Valley Officials Denounce Racist Flyers

Racist literature targeting blacks and Jews has been distributed in some Simi Valley neighborhoods, provoking angry calls from local residents and a strong denunciation from city officials.

Police Friday were looking into reports that someone in a van threw undated newspapers and flyers published by the White Aryan Resistance, based in Fallbrook, and the Aryan Legion, based in Fort Worth, Tex., onto local driveways. Officers were uncertain how many homes received the material.

A front-page headline in the White Aryan Resistance paper said “Victory in L.A.,” in an apparent reference to the Rodney G. King beating trial verdicts, which were handed up in Simi Valley.

Simi Valley officials were upset that white supremacists seem to view their city as a racist center. “It’s the wrong area to target,” Assistant City Manager Mike Sedell said. “They’ve had the same misconceptions about this community as other people have.”

The appearance of the hate literature was another blow to the city’s recent campaign to restore Simi Valley’s image in the wake of the beating trial. On April 29, a jury in Simi Valley returned not-guilty verdicts against four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating King, a black motorist. Simi Valley officials strongly denied that the city is racist and pointed out that only two jurors were from Simi Valley.

After hearing that white supremacists had distributed materials in the city, Councilman Bill Davis said, “Truly, I believe again this is fallout from the Rodney King thing. They just figured that we’re already being predicated as being white racists (and) that maybe they could build some clientele. I think it will probably backfire on them.”

One Simi Valley city employee said her husband found the hate material in their driveway Thursday and at first believed it was part of a morning newspaper.

“When I looked at it, I couldn’t believe what I saw,” said the employee, who asked that her name not be published. “I was totally repulsed. As I leafed through some of the articles, I was almost sick to my stomach.”

Some copies of the material were attached to the Daily News, but newspaper spokesmen said Friday this was done without authorization after the papers were delivered. Simi Valley police said they had received complaints from at least a half-dozen residents, but they said no criminal violation appears to have occurred.

The 20-page White Aryan Resistance newspaper contains numerous articles about the group’s founder, former Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger, who was convicted of misdemeanor unlawful assembly last October for his role in a 1983 cross-burning in the San Fernando Valley.

The paper also features a cartoon depiction of King, a headline that uses a derogatory word for Jews and an advertisement for an Aryan festival featuring “two hours of racist rock.”

A telephone number for the group published in the newspaper was answered by a long, recorded message from Metzger.

Frederick C. Jones, former president of the Ventura County chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said he was not surprised that hate literature had turned up in Simi Valley “because of the fermentation of what we consider to be racism in that area of the county. This is just a way of exploiting those feelings to the hilt.”

Mayor Greg Stratton issued a written statement, saying, “This type of bigotry and racial intolerance is something this community condemns in the strongest possible sense. The cowards who have anonymously circulated these flyers should know that this city and its people denounce their cause and their message.”

Mary Krasn, assistant director of the Los Angeles office of the Anti Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a watchdog group for anti-Semitism and other hate crimes, said she, like Jones, was not surprised that white supremacists had targeted Simi Valley.

“It’s not unlikely that people from the hate movement would want to exploit the tensions of the Rodney King case verdict to promote their racist viewpoints,” she said.

Krasn said her organization has not detected any significant increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Ventura County in recent months.