SAN DIEGO — Some College Area residents found anti-Semitic flyers distributed around their neighborhood Sunday. They found the flyers in Ziploc bags on their driveways.
"It was an immediate flashback to my childhood," said a resident who found a flyer in front of her home.
She says the pamphlets reminded her of conversations she had with her grandparents who were immigrants from Europe. She called the police and officers came out to make a report.
"In World War II my grandfather very carefully explained how they degraded people and equated them to rats and vermin so that they weren't human they dehumanized them," she said.
She, and some of her neighbors on Falls View Drive, found the pamphlets Sunday, which was one day before Holocaust Remembrance Day. That is a day that honors the six million Jews who were murdered by Nazi Germany.
"The police said down the street there was about 10 of these packets thrown and there are Jewish families," she said.
The packet talks about AB 3024, which new California legislation to stop hate littering or distributing flyers, posters, or symbols with hateful messaging. San Diego leaders announced the new legislation in March. It’s a response to flyers, which have appeared in many San Diego neighborhoods over the past year.
"What they label as hate speech, it needs to be free speech because how are we going to identify who has those ideas if we don't allow them to speak. And if they speak, we can talk them to death and hopefully change their minds," she said.
The Anti-Defamation League says the U.S. saw more than 3,600 anti-Semitic acts of assault, vandalism and harassment just last year.
"Hopefully if we can change some hearts and minds that's what we need to do," she said.
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