Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday April 13, 2007

Hate fliers left on Berkeley doorsteps

A white supremacist group placed posters on the doorsteps of numerous Berkeley residents this week calling for skinhead “death squads” to take up arms in an “Aryan people’s insurgency.”

The Berkeley Police Department received complaints from six households across the city, but could not gauge precisely how many homes or apartments received the racist and anti-Semitic materials.

“We got calls from quite a geographical range, so it’s hard to discern” the number of recipients, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss.

The material was published by a group in Oroville (Butte County) linked to former KKK leader Tom Metzger, said Anti-Defamation League regional director Jonathan Bernstein.

The ADL assured East Bay Jewish organizations that both they and the police take the handouts seriously.

“We talked to the police chief, who understood why people were upset about it,” Bernstein said. “We talked to them about getting more patrols to Jewish institutions, which they’re doing right now.”

The materials also included a flier saying, “Avenge the Zebra Murders,” referring to the 1973-74 Bay Area killing spree of 14 white victims by what prosecutors described as a black racist cult. Police said the poster’s language is too vague to fall under the city’s hate crime law.

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.