Napa has joined a number of cities around the Bay Area and across the country to discover antisemitic flyers that falsely claim the U.S. COVID-19 response and President Joe Biden's agenda a part of a sweeping Jewish conspiracy.
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Hundreds of Napa residents living near Congregation Beth Shalom, a synagogue in the city, found the leaflets, packed in sandwich bags and weighed down by rice, at their homes on Thursday morning,
The flyers listed Jewish members of the Biden administration and highlighted the religious backgrounds of dozens of high-ranking government employees and financial executives in an effort to link Jews to the national COVID response.
"This is part of a concerted, organized campaign in the Bay Area and across the country in several other states," Niles Goldstein, Congregation Beth Shalom's rabbi, told KCBS Radio in an interview.
The flyers, which have been discovered in Marin County, Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Francisco over the last month, are the work of the GDL, a group of white supremacists the Anti-Defamation League has labeled "a small network of virulently antisemitic provocateurs."
Petaluma resident Jon Minadeo, who operates online under the username "Handsome Truth" and has organized a number of antisemitic stunts, is the group's leader.
"And they drive around – it's not a huge group of people – the country creating mischief and putting this antisemitic propaganda all over the place," Goldstein said.
Just this week, the GDL flyers have been discovered in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Texas, according to the Anti-Defamation League's tracker of antisemitic incidents in the U.S.
Law enforcement in cities where the flyers were discovered have vowed to investigate them, but it's unclear how much they can do to punish their distributors.
Marin County District Attorney Lori Frugoli said in a joint statement with the county's police officers association earlier this week that the material had been "intentionally designed and distributed in a manner that is protected as free speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution." Frugoli added there might be "limited exceptions when an individual could be prosecuted."
Goldstein said it was "very unsettling" to see the flyers like Napa, a "small town" he said wasn't "used to this kind of thing."
"This is not typical, but it's not unusual for antisemitic hate speech to be part of the fabric of American life, sadly," Goldstein said.
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