Antisemitic flyers spread in Boise North End on Saturday; police ask public for help
Residents of Boise’s North End neighborhood woke up Sunday morning to antisemitic messages on doorsteps, fences and sidewalks.
“Never thought I’d see the day when my neighborhood would be peppered with anti-Semitic litter, along with a flyer proclaiming Santa’s elves are Satanic, all packaged in a bag full of pellet gun ammo,” one resident tweeted.
Plastic bags were filled with paper flyers that included messages saying “the Covid agenda is Jewish” and claiming people who were in favor of government restrictions related to the pandemic were “carrying out the will of the Jews.” The flyers also included a list of health care leaders who the distributor believes are Jewish. The bags contained pellet gun ammunition and a second piece of paper with a message misquoting a Bible verse by replacing Jewish-related words with Santa-related words.
“Targeting our Jewish neighbors with such words and symbols should alarm us all,” Dan Prinzing, the executive director of the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights, told the Idaho Statesman in an email. “In this moment the community must decide, do we accept these acts and become complicit in the hate — or do we stand together and condemn, denounce and prosecute the perpetrators? When such acts target one among us, they target all of us. It is time for state leaders to stand up, speak out and set a course for Idaho that does not coddle extremism, feed conspiracy theories, nor encourage a national perception that Idaho is a haven for hate.”
The Boise Police Department says just before midnight on Saturday officers responded to “a report of anti-Jewish literature distributed around property in the North End.” Officers say they collected as much of the material as they could find in the dark and began an investigation. Police say they believe no one was a target and the papers were distributed randomly.
The flyers contained advertising related to the Goyim Defense League. The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism and hate groups, describes the Goyim Defense League as “a loose network of individuals connected by their virulent antisemitism” that “includes five or six primary organizers/public figures, dozens of supporters and thousands of online followers.” The group espouses antisemitic and “white supremacist themes via the internet, through propaganda distributions and in street actions,” according to the ADL website.
The flyer distribution follows other recent acts of antisemitism in Boise. Within the last month, residents have found swastikas and other antisemitic messages spray-painted on a downtown building and in tunnels along the Boise Greenbelt near the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial. In September, a sign in front of St. Luke’s McCall Medical Center was defaced with a spray-painted swastika, and the Idaho Anne Frank Memorial was vandalized with Nazi stickers last December.
“The frequency and repetition of this filth has become both calculated and deliberate — and requires that the citizenry also become deliberate in response,” Prinzing said.
He asked “city and faith leaders, civic and community organizers, and law enforcement to come together in a unified message” against such acts.
According to news reports, similar flyers were distributed in North Carolina and California over the last month.
Police are asking anyone with information or video footage from the area to contact them through one of several options. People can call dispatch at 208-377-6790, call Crime Stoppers at 208-343-COPS (2677), reach out through 343cops.com or leave a tip using the P3 Tips app from a mobile device.
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