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Sarasota FL Residents Find Antisemitic Fliers Referencing Ukraine-Russia War

Jewish community members are denouncing antisemitic flyers that were once again distributed in a Sarasota neighborhood last weekend by the same group that targeted the community just weeks ago.

Residents living in the Arlington Park area of Sarasota woke up to antisemitic flyers placed in front of their homes on Saturday morning.

Brian Lipton, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee for the west coast of Florida, said flyers were reported to AJC by a resident who lives on Wisteria Street. Residents on Craft Lane also reported flyers to the Sarasota Police Department.

“Flyers are just the tip of the iceberg, there's a larger problem here,” Lipton said, noting even more troubling antisemitic acts across the nation recently like the hostage situation at a synagogue in Texas in January.

“It's a larger issue,” he said. “Our surveys have shown that one in four American Jews have been personally targeted by antisemitism in the last year alone.”

The watchdog group StopAntisemitism tweeted the white supremacist group ‘Goyim Defense League’ were responsible for the antisemitic fliers.

Saturday's incident is the second time this year Sarasota neighborhoods have been targeted by the same group with flyers blaming Jews for world events. The flyers were in Ziplock bags containing rice, and placed at the foot of each driveway, according to SPD.

Earlier in the year, the flyers blamed the Jewish community for COVID-19.

On Saturday, at least some of the flyers were titled “Every single aspect of the Ukraine-Russia War is Jewish,” although SPD reported that some of them contained the same COVD-19 propaganda as the previous incident.

“They will blame Jews for anything,” Lipton said of the group.