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Home-grown terrorism appears to have reached epidemic proportions after last summer's spate of church burnings.

Since then, armed separatists in Texas disputed the state's U.S. annexation, and the Timothy McVeigh trial continues to remind Americans of the worst terrorist act on U.S. soil, the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that claimed 168 lives.

But despite such events, historical author Melissa Fay Greene says widespread speculation that neo-Nazi and other violent hate groups are on the rise is simply flawed thinking.

"The percentage of the population attracted to [hate crimes] has remained constant," claims Greene, author of "The Temple Bombing," a true-life mystery about the 1958 attack on an Atlanta synagogue.

"Their tactics are getting more outrageous. And the media feeds the perception that their numbers are growing.

"The polls [show] that anti-Semitism is dropping in the psyche," she said. "When you get groups of anxious Jewish leaders together, they are not wringing their hands over anti-Semitism but intermarriage."

Greene became a kind of insider to the American brand of racist, anti-Semitic, right-wing thinking when she investigated the temple bombing 33 years after the fact.

In 1958, just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, Greene says the Southern way of life was collapsing, its economy stagnating and the civil rights movement escalating. She believes segregationists who resented Jewish support of the growing civil rights movement bombed Atlanta's oldest and largest Reform synagogue, the Hebrew Benevolent Society.

Surviving suspects in the crime granted interviews to Greene, though one of them refused to meet with her in person after he found out she was Jewish. The other suspect, George Bright, didn't know she was Jewish and pointed her toward classic hate literature, such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

"Bright gave me insight into the whole world of the violent racist in the 1950s…I believe that what I saw of racism of the 1950s is the root" of today's racism and anti-Semitism, she said.

Greene also gained access to many files of testimony from Ku Klux Klan wizards and other comrades of the cause.

With the re-release of her widely acclaimed 1996 book in paperback, Greene is once again on tour. She's sharing her perspectives on the 1958 bombing and its parallels to modern hate crimes at noon today at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club.

Greene sees no distinction between the racist mindset described in the book and that of contemporary separatists, except perhaps that "the message [of today's racist] is kind of garbled. I don't know what the church burnings are supposed to stop."

Further obscuring a possible motive for the suspected arsons is that no group has claimed responsibility.

However, she speculates that the burnings might be a way for low-income rural whites to repudiate the rural black community, which has allegedly cheated them out of their "birthright" to the land.

"The little country churches on their lonely sandy lots are vulnerable as a place to strike at the hub of the black community," she said.

The author adds that the Internet also fuels today's hate crimes. Online hate rhetoric is only a mouse-click away. While 1950s hate groups expended much of their energy printing and distributing leaflets and fliers, the Internet now frees up the groups' time for action, she said.

Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman, director of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University, has noticed a concurrent rise of anti-government groups on the Internet, maintaining that anti-Semitism goes hand-in-hand with anti-government rhetoric.

But while Greene disputes an increase of such groups, the Jewish studies teacher isn't so sure.

"The rise of viciously anti-government rhetoric on the Internet is quite profound," said Zoloth-Dorfman. "These are militant right-wing neo-Nazi factions who are more often seizing entire parts of a state. And I can't imagine any militant group being friendly to Jews."

The Anti-Defamation League in its 1997 report of militia groups found that membership has expanded in five states and remained stable in 20 others, including California.

"The ideologies driving these groups are complicated, often fanciful, sometimes anti-Semitic and racist, and almost always paranoid," the report stated.

Despite the apparent increase in hate crimes, Greene says these actually are good times for blacks and Jews because the economy is strengthening. Consequently, there's less fuel for a racist, anti-Semitic backlash paralleling that of the '50s and early '60s.

Nonetheless, she's concerned that racists who are also disgruntled by the increase of government regulation on abortion, environmentalism and gun control are continuing to target Jews and blacks.

"Somehow they find that blacks and Jews still somehow are a workable explanation for the [government] funnel moving through the landscape."