Antisemitic flyers found in mail
Residents in a Peterborough neighbourhood are shocked after flyers with antisemitic messages were left in the mailboxes of homes.
“That’s really serious and that’s really, really disappointing. I think it just speaks to the political moment we are in,” said Jessica Fredrickson, a Peterborough resident who said she spoke to police on Monday about the letters.
The night before, a social media post on Reddit said a person living in the Hunter and Downie streets area had received one of the flyers and had reported it to police.
At around 11 a.m. the next morning, police had put out a statement saying they were investigating after “receiving reports of an antisemitic pamphlet being distributed in a Peterborough neighbourhood over the weekend” and asked for anyone with information to contact them.
A copy of what appears to be the flyer contains assertions about Jews with comparisons to Satan.
According to Fredrickson, police came by that morning to ask if she had found one in her driveway. At that point she says she hadn’t been outside yet and didn’t see any flyers, but the police officer had collected some of them.
“He had a handful of them, he had quite a few, if that was the little stack of papers in his hand,” Fredrickson said.
Some others in the neighbourhood said they had not seen the flyers, but did verify police had been by asking questions about them and also expressed displeasure upon hearing about the messages contained in them.
At least one other person claims to have received the flyer, with a comment on the Reddit post saying they had received a similar one at their home on another side of the city.
“If a cop came by I knew it must have been pretty serious if it had been reported to the authorities,” Fredrickson said.
It’s disheartening to see hate like this in the area, she said. There is a lot of bigotry and discrimination going around, and Fredrickson says she’s been counter-protesting outside the Peterborough Public Library for those coming out against Betty Baker’s Drag Queen Story Time readings for children.
While counterprotesters always outnumber the number of protesters, Fredrickson said she’s disappointed in the amount of hate she’s seeing nowadays.
“And then this. This is just another
expression that hate seems to be getting real comfy in a lot of places, and it behooves us as a community to really stand up against it.”
But there are more people standing up against bigotry than for it, taking a stance to protect others, she says.
“I’m glad it’s being taken seriously by the community,” Fredrickson said.
And while she said she’s a police abolitionist, she is pleased to see police in the neighbourhood taking antisemitism seriously.
“It is good to see boots on the ground in response to that, at the very least it sends a serious message,” she said.