COLUSA, CA (MPG) – Israel’s war on the Hamas has coincided with a rise in antisemitic rhetoric in Colusa County and across the country.
Last week, Colusa residents woke up to flyers with antisemitic hate speech dropped on their doorsteps.
Colusa Police Lt. Sara Martin said the department was first contacted about the offensive material late Wednesday, Oct. 11.
“Thursday, we continued to be contacted regarding the flyers which were placed in mailboxes as well as on some vehicles,” Martin said. “Most of the contacts we received were from residents on the west side of town.”
The material distributed in Colusa was like most antisemitic propaganda distributed throughout the country and world, denying the Holocaust, and blaming “Jews” for everything – from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to 9/11 and the COVID-19 virus and vaccine conspiracy. The flyers also depicted photographs of prominent Jewish American individuals with Stars of David plastered on their foreheads.
Martin said the Colusa branch of the U.S. Post Office also called the police since they had received calls about the flyers being placed in mailboxes. The U.S. Postal Service often warns people that, by federal law, a mailbox is intended only for receipt of postage-paid U.S. Mail and placing informational flyers or advertisements in a mailbox is a violation that can be punishable with a $5,000 fine.
“While the information on the flyers is protected under the First Amendment, certainly the spread of information with ill intent isn’t beneficial to the community and only intends to promote divisions,” Martin said.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, 2022 saw a 36% increase in antisemitic harassment, vandalism, and assault in the United States over 2021, making it the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979 – and the third time in the past five years that the year-end total was the highest number ever recorded.
While antisemitic rhetoric, like the flyers scattered about Colusa last week, is most often associated with white supremist groups, the ADL has noted the increase in antisemitic incidents cannot be attributed to any one cause or ideology.
“Significant surges in incidents include high volume increases in organized white supremacist propaganda activity (102% increase), K-12 schools (49% increase), and college campuses (41% increase), as well as deeply troubling percentage increases in attacks on Orthodox Jews (69% increase) and bomb threats toward Jewish institutions (an increase from eight in 2021 to 91 incidents in 2022),” the ADL reported.
The ADL 2023 report indicates the growing hostility toward Jewish students on college campuses is largely driven by student and faculty hostility toward Israel, anti-Zionist views – and related activism.
Vilification of Zionists and expressions of support for terror against Israel defined anti-Israel activity on college and university campuses between June 2022 and May 2023, the ADL report states, but such activity spiked following the deadly rampage by Hamas (Islamic Resistant Movement) fighters on Sothern Israel on Oct. 7.
The U.S. State Department declared Hamas, funded largely by the Islamic Republic of Iran, a terror organization on Oct. 8, 1997.