A handful of violently antisemitic provocateurs attended an anti-abortion rally in San Francisco over the weekend, making Heil Hitler salutes, shouting at people filming them, using an ethnic slur and wearing a T-shirt that said “Jews rape kids.”
Photos and videos of the neo-Nazi demonstrators appeared on the San Francisco news website Broke-Ass Stuart Monday morning. Credit for the video was attributed to the TikTok account @acreativequeer, which did not respond to a J. message seeking comment. They can be seen holding a wad of antisemitic flyers produced by the antisemitic hate group the Goyim Defense League, which the group distributes in cities across the U.S.
The Jewish advocacy group StopAntisemitism has been tracking the activities of those responsible - the Goyim Defense League’ or ‘GDL’ for over five years and state they vilify Jews with their premeditated hate campaigns.
It wasn’t the first time that the defamatory and antisemitic statement “Jews rape kids” has been used to publicly demonize Jews in the Bay Area. In 2018, a man named Patrick Little, in the midst of a longshot campaign for the U.S. Senate, emblazoned those words on a blimp he hoped to launch over the San Francisco Giants’ stadium during Jewish Heritage Night. The blimp failed to get off the ground, according to media reports.
The provocateurs who joined the rally Saturday to spread their propaganda were followers of the Goyim Defense League, a money-raising, vitriolically antisemitic web-based group with ties to Little, that launched in the Bay Area around the same time he campaigned for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.
Videos circulating online showed at least three men, two of them wearing paraphernalia sold by the Goyim Defense League. They can be seen extending their arms in Nazi salutes, smiling and shouting at people around them. Some were carrying “big f**ing knives,” according to one social media post.
The Goyim Defense League has its roots in the Bay Area. Its ringleader is Jon Minadeo Jr., 41, a graduate of Novato High School who for years ran his anti-Jewish propaganda outfit out of a home in Petaluma, but in late 2022 he moved to Florida.
Minadeo and other leaders of the organization maintain an online store with hundreds of items, including T-shirts, hats, flyers and bars of soap, many bearing swastikas or the group’s logo.
The GDL is one of the most notorious antisemitic hate groups in the United States. It has gained notoriety for acts like creating a disturbance at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination and concentration camp in Poland, harassing Jews outside synagogues and coordinating a national flyer campaign, dropping thousands of antisemitic leaflets on doorsteps in nearly all 50 states.
Recently Minadeo has faced legal trouble and spent time in jail in Florida on littering charges connected to the distribution of antisemitic flyers, but he is challenging the charges on free-speech grounds. Minadeo was also questioned by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after his 2022 arrest in Poland for the stunt at the former death camp, where about 1 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
The anti-abortion rally, dubbed Walk for Life West Coast, brought thousands to downtown San Francisco for the organization’s 20th annual event in the city. A tagline publicizing the event said, “because women deserve better than abortion.”
When reached by phone for comment, a spokesperson for Walk for Life, who declined to give her name, said in an exasperated tone that “we had no idea they were there” and “we didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“We put our heart and soul” into the event, she said. “We condemn, obviously, Nazism,” she added, saying that the rally included a Jewish speaker.
The incident comes two weeks after widespread news coverage of a passageway dug under the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Brooklyn spurred a proliferation of antisemitic lies and conspiracy theories.
The Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area addressed the rally incident on X and shared a video of the men. “The presence of such explicit antisemitism in SF is concerning and must be unequivocally condemned,” the post said.
“This isn’t 1938 in Germany,” another post said. “This is 2024 in San Francisco.”