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Beverly Hills police say they are investigating anti-Semitic leaflets distributed the night before the start of Hanukkah.
The flyers may have been distributed overnight in what police called “a hate incident”, according to a statement from Beverly Hills Police Department. Police said they received a call from a resident who reported a flyer in their front yard at 6 a.m. Sunday. Hanukkah begins on Sunday night.
The flyer features “propaganda-style hate speech regarding the COVID pandemic and the Jewish people,” the department said in a statement.
A portion of residents received leaflets that said, “Every aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish,” according to CNN branch KABC.
“Police surveyed the area and discovered that leaflets, packed in plastic bags of rice (for weighing), were distributed to households in several housing complexes in the northeast region. of the City,” the police statement said.
NS Anti-Defamation League previously called for the use of anti-Semitic language to promote conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. For this Hanukkah, ADL came up with #ShineALight to raise awareness of anti-Semitism and how the community might react.
Hate crime in the US hit a 12-year high in 2020, with more than 7,700 criminal hate crime cases reported to the FBI, according to the FBI’s annual hate crime statistics report. There are 683 anti-Semitic attacks last year, according to FBI data, down from 963 in 2019.
Police said officers conducted extra patrols in Beverly Hills on Sunday “to ensure a safe holiday break”.
Anyone with information or video related to the flyer is encouraged to contact the police department.
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