Antisemitic propaganda fliers purportedly linking Jews to the anti-vaccine movement were found at Santa Monica, California, public schools on Thursday morning, just weeks after an antisemitic rant by a tech executive attempted to link Jews to the vaccine.
(UPDATE: The flyers may have been satirical, though people were offended by them in any case, as they used a Jewish symbol, the Star of David.)
Contradictory claims leveled against Jews are a classic feature of antisemitic propaganda. Nazism, for example, declared Jews to be both capitalists and socialists, which prompted George Orwell to conclude that antisemitism was fundamentally irrational and therefore impervious to facts and argument: “Obviously the charges made against Jews are not true. They cannot be true, partly because they cancel out, partly because no one people could have such a monopoly of wickedness.”
Earlier this month, a tech executive in Utah was booted off the board of a company he had founded after he ranted in an email about his bizarre theory that the coronavirus vaccines were a plot by “the Jews” to exterminate millions of people.
Now, the Los Angeles Times reports, someone has circulated the opposite theory — that the anti-vaccine movement is run by Jews:
Antisemitic fliers that appear to link Jewish people with the anti-vaccine movement were discovered at several elementary and middle schools in Santa Monica on Thursday morning, the latest in a spate of similar incidents across Los Angeles County, authorities said.
School staffers arriving before 8 a.m. found the posters attached to walls and signage, among other places, said Gail Pinsker, spokesperson for the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. At one school, a flier was attached to a bin for book donations, and another one on an electrical unit, she said.
By Thursday evening, district officials were aware of seven schools where the fliers were left, a number that grew from four earlier in the day. Five were elementary schools and two were middle schools, Pinsker said.
The fliers feature what appears to be a red-and-green Star of David with the phrase “anti-vaxxer” written on it in white block letters.
Officials had not yet called the incident a hate crime, the Times noted, as they had not determined the motive behind them.
Nazi symbols have also featured in protests against coronavirus lockdowns — usually in an effort to attack such policies.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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