A box truck covered with antisemitic slogans and men dressed in Nazi uniforms drove through the Los Angeles area last weekend sparking an investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
The watchdog group, StopAntisemitism, has identified the men as part of an antisemitic hate group called the Goyim Defense League.
On Sunday, the truck was film driving through the LA area and stopping in front of the posh Beverly Hills hotel.
In the video, a man in yellow shorts and a hat with fake sidelocks, mocking the style of a Hasidic person, runs out of the box truck yelling 'The Nazi's. The Nazis are coming.'
Two men in brown shirts with arm bands and helmets with their faces cover by gas masks followed after him and loitered outside the hotel.
Antisemitic slogans like 'Ann Coulter is right about the Jews' and 'Jewish Lives Matter More' and 'Need any more proof that your'e [sic] living in a occupied country,' with the 'o' replaced by a star of David, where written on the truck.
'We are aware of an incident that occurred yesterday involving non-guests outside of The Beverly Hilton,' a hotel spokesperson told the Jerusalem Post.
'Upon being notified of the incident, we contacted local authorities immediately. We take this matter very seriously as our hotel has zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind and we are committed to providing a welcoming, hospitable and safe environment for our guests and team members.'
Beverly Hills and West Hollywood police were also recorded talking to the men asking them to move on.
'A disgusting antisemitic truck spewing vulgar Jew-hatred drove through our streets today. An example of inhumanity,' Beverly Hills Mayor Lili Bosse posted on Twitter. 'As a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, I will always stand up, speak out and fight this hatred.'
No arrests were made, but the West Hollywood Sheriff's station are monitoring the incident as 'in case it raises to the level of a crime,' according to the Patch.
StopAntisemitism said the stunt was perpetuated by the GDL and the letters could be seen printed on the truck, but the police have not reported who was behind the incident.
'We are horrified that innocent bystanders in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, Jewish and otherwise, were subjected to such vile and atrocious hate,' Liora Rez, executive director of StopAntisemitism told the LA Times.
'When white supremacists like the Goyim Defense League are allowed to spread this type of vile bigotry without any pushback, then it normalizes Jew hatred and sends the message that this is tolerable.'
Rez said that Minadeo and his collaborator Robert Frank Wilson can be seen in the videos of the truck.
Minadeo, along with another perpetrator Dominic Di Giorgio, of Port St. Lucie, Florida, posts white supremacist, homophobic and antisemitic videos on the YouTube-like platform, GoyimTV.
Liora Rez, the executive director of StopAntisemitism, said that the Goyim Defense League have violent and disturbing criminal histories. She said that Minadeo pays members to join and uses GoyimTV to post hate-inspired stunts like the one in Beverly Hills.
Minadeo also reportedly started a rash of banner drops along highways across the U.S. in 2020, beginning with in the Bay Area.
'The City of Beverly Hills and BHPD strongly condemns antisemitism in all its forms,' the police department said in a statement.
The truck also had slogans that echoed the same paranoid white supremacist great replacement theory as the Buffalo spree shooter Payton Gedron.
'Resisting Replacement = Greatest Threat,' had been spray painted on the truck.
The Los Angeles area has seen a rash of anti-Jewish hate incidents this year.
In February, flyers espousing Covid-19 conspiracy theories about Jews were strewn around Huntington Beach and Newport and in Beverly Hills on the first night of Hanukkah. These are also believed to be the work of the GDL.
In mid-April, during Passover, the flyers again were left on doorsteps in Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
There has been a rise in anti-Semitic crime across the country.
'Here in Beverly Hills, we do have a large Jewish population and so, unfortunately, we have been the target in the past for hate speech directed against Jews, and so it is something that we care about deeply and something that we won't tolerate,' said Mayor Bob Wunderlich.
Hate crimes against Jews jumped 59 percent from 2020, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.
Hate crimes in the United States shot up to their highest level in 12 years in 2020, according to the FBI's annual hate crime statistics report that was released in October.
More than 7,700 victims reported that they had been subjected to hate crimes because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, religion or disability last year, 450 more people than the agency reported in 2019.