Antisemitic Flyers Distributed in South Atlanta
The Goyim Defense League has garnered attention by hanging antisemitic banners and randomly distributing flyers.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
David Goldstein was “absolutely horrified” to discover antisemitic flyers on his car on April 8 when he emerged from shopping in a neighborhood south of downtown Atlanta.
One flyer declared that “Every Single Aspect of the Media is Jewish” and displayed the names and photographs of prominent Jews in the news and entertainment business, some of whom no longer are living. The other declared that “Every Single Aspect of the Ukraine-Russia War is Jewish,” pasting together newspaper headlines, some unrelated to the current conflict.
The bottom of the flyers read: “These Flyers Were Distributed Randomly Without Malicious Intent.”
Goldstein certainly found the flyers malicious. A 69-year-old, retired Atlanta native, Goldstein said that his car was parked on a public street in the Lakewood Heights neighborhood. He also saw that flyers had been placed on several other vehicles.
“My family members are Holocaust survivors and I wanted to report this incident of antisemitism,” Goldstein said, adding that his grandparents had escaped Germany for Ukraine during the Holocaust.
“I was absolutely horrified that we are reliving Nazism all over again in America. These antisemitic tropes have no place in a multi-racial democracy. Upon further research, this group is responsible for spreading their anti-Jewish hate and vitriol nationwide,” Goldstein said.
That group is Goyim TV, a video sharing website that displays antisemitic conspiracy theories and related content and sells antisemitic merchandise.
[Note: Goyim is a Yiddish word for a gentile or non-Jew and often is used in a demeaning fashion.]
Goyim TV is associated with the Goyim Defense League, which the ADL says was responsible for 74 antisemitic propaganda incidents nationally in 2021 and has continued its activities in at least 17 states this year. The GDL is led by Jon Minadeo Jr. of Petaluma, Calif. After being booted off other websites, in 2020 Minadeo and Dominic Di Giorgio, of Port St. Lucie, Fla., created Goyim TV.
This appears to be the first time that this group’s flyers have appeared in the Atlanta area, though the Southeast regional office of the Anti-Defamation League reports that flyers have been found in Cartersville and Savannah.
Allison Padilla-Goodman, vice president of the Southern Division of the ADL, termed the GDL “a loose group. They encourage antisemitic messaging but basically anybody can follow and participate in the activity.”
The GDL (whose name plays off the Jewish Defense League founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane) garnered publicity by hanging a banner the read “Vax the Jews” on an Austin, Texas, overpass last December.
In February, hundreds of flyers blaming Jews for the COVID-19 pandemic were found in Berkeley, Calif., and others elsewhere in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Marin County, Calif. In one weekend in January, flyers appeared in six states: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Texas, California and Maryland.
According to the ADL website: “GDL’s overarching goal is to cast aspersions on Jews and spread antisemitic myths and conspiracy theories. This includes frequent references to Jews having undue power through their ‘control’ of major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government, or disparaging Jews as degenerates who molest children and advocate for pornography, abortion and LGBTQ+ communities.
GDL maintains that the Holocaust is a Jewish lie, and accounts of the Holocaust are merely propaganda or lies generated by Jews for their own benefit. Similarly, the GDL says that Jews were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York and Israel intentionally targeted a U.S. warship during the height of the 1967 Six-Day War.”
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