Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Anti-Semitic Flyers Distributed to Jewish Homes in Australia

Residents of a predominantly Jewish street in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney, Australia were “disgusted” to awake to anti-Semitic flyers slipped under their doors on Monday morning, The Algemeiner has learned.

The pamphlets were hand delivered in mail boxes and included classic tropes about Jews controlling the media and being responsible for “race mixing” and “drug abuse.”

“Jews have been kicked out of countries 109 times through history,” the flyer claimed, “Could it be that having them in a European country is harmful to the host?”

The mail concluded with an invitation to join Squadron 88, a local white power group. The ‘About’ section on the hate group’s Facebook page reads: “squadron 88 is a NSW based group , the …… man was the tiller of the soil, this is our land. FIGHT FOR YOUR KINSMEN AND NATION”.

The message also included a reference to Stormfront.org a renowned neo-Nazi community website.

Abraham Blasenstein, a Jewish resident of Bodi who received the flyer, told The Algemeiner: “It is part of an increase in anti-Semitism that such low people as the ones who issued these flyers feel comfortable coming out of the woodwork.”

“At first disgusted,” Blasenstein said of his reaction to receiving the mail, “It is not a pleasant thought that there are some people that would like to do the worst to you for no reason other than their cruel character. It was the smallest touch of what it must have felt like for Jews in Europe before WWII. There, there was no hope and no support, at least now in Australia it is reasonable to believe that most decent people will find this type of leaflet appalling.”

Blasenstein said that he did not notify police of the incident but that some of his neighbors passed the flyers onto members of Australia’s Jewish Board of Deputies, who, he said, may “pursue this to the extent possible.”

Asked to estimate how many of the offending pamphlets were handed out, he said, “Typically these sort of things are done in the thousands if not tens of thousands.”

“Everyone in my street received these,” he said.

Earlier this month five teenagers were arrested in Sydney after storming a private school bus and taunting Jewish children with anti-Semitic slurs and threatening to slit their throats.