Sandwich bags bearing hateful, antisemitic writing and small rocks were found in the front yards of residents of the Riverside Terrace in Houston area Sunday morning.
It’s another example in a pattern of hate groups littering Houston-area neighborhoods with antisemitic flyers.
“I kind of freaked out about it,” said Richard Elbein, a longtime Riverside Terrace resident, who saw the flyers in the Ziploc bags while walking his husky Great Pyrenees on Sunday morning. As a Jew, he believed he had been personally attacked but later saw that other houses had the same bags out front.
He picked up dozens of the bags, which contained five different antisemitic, hateful messages until he realized there were too many to collect.
“From 288 to MacGregor Park, basically every house had one in their driveway,” he said, estimating there were about 800 homes with the bags.
NGO StopAntisemitism has identified the antisemitic flyers belonging to the white supremacist group, the Goyim Defense League (GDL). The GDL is a group of neo-nazi members led by Jon Minadeo II who travels the nation distributing antisemitic propaganda and enticing others to do the same. Minadeo’s dangerous rhetoric has inspired many to commit violence against the Jewish communities, like Jaime Tran, who shot two Jewish individuals in LA this past week.
Jon Minadeo & his hate group ‘GDL’ poison minds with their antisemitic flyers and cause real world violence against Jewish people
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) February 18, 2023
Jaime Tran, the LA man who shot 2 Jews walking out of Synagogue, was expelled from dental school after distributing GDL flyers blaming COVID on Jews! pic.twitter.com/pvGkH9OSQh
The repeated dissemination of anti-Jewish messages in Houston neighborhoods is also part of a larger trend.
In Riverside Terrace, a historically black and Jewish neighborhood, the messages were spread overnight by someone who threw them out of their vehicle, according to a spokesman for Harris County Constable Precinct 7. According to ring camera footage from neighbors, the person delivering the hateful messages began around 1:30 a.m. Sunday. The spokesman also advised against picking up suspicious items and recommended taking photos of them to share with authorities.
A Houston Police Department spokesman said they are investigating the incident within their Criminal Intelligence Division.