Neighborhoods in many Bay Area cities have been receiving antisemitic flyers or messages from a white supremacist group targeting the Jewish community and other minority groups.
Palo Alto and Berkeley have reported incidents this week of individuals receiving flyers and hateful messages putting false blame for the COVID-19 pandemic on the Jewish Community. Last month, San Francisco Police found multiple antisemitic flyers in the Pacific Heights neighborhood.
"We have also seen around the Bay Area, around the country and in fact around the world extremists' groups and people with extremist ideology using Holocaust symbols and Nazi symbols to protest public safety measures, which we find to be abhorrent and completely irresponsible," Teresa Drenick, Deputy Regional Director with the Anti-Defamation League told KCBS Radio.
Cities outside of the Bay Area have also reported antisemitic propaganda flyers circling the neighborhoods in Southern California and other states in the country, Drenick said that antisemitic incidents are on the rise.
"We encourage anybody who has been a recipient of one of these hate-filled flyers or any other hate or antisemitic incident to report to their local police agency because it is really important that the local police force knows about not only hate crimes but also hate-related incidents," she said.
Drenick explained the start of the pandemic caused an explosion of hate.
"We have seen certainly since the beginning of the pandemic the explosion of hate-related messaging and bigotry, antisemitism that is conflated with the COVID-19 pandemic and health-related help and life-saving measures that have gone along with that," she said
The Anti-Defamation League will continue to track hateful incidents and other acts of antisemitism and encourages anyone who is targeted by the group to report the incident to www.adl.org/report, as well as to the local police department.
To learn more about antisemitism and the group behind these acts visit www.adl.org.
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