Three people have been arrested on hate crime charges for blanketing a small upstate New York city with white supremacist pamphlets, authorities said.
The racist, antisemitic literature was left at locations including a synagogue and a largely Black church in Hornell, in New York’s Southern Tier, Police Chief T.J. Murray said Monday in a Facebook statement.
The May 14 shooting that killed 10 Black people about 70 miles away at a supermarket in Buffalo has underscored racist attitudes in the largely white Southern Tier region, near the Pennsylvania border. Authorities say the white gunman in that shooting drove to Buffalo from his home in the Southern Tier village of Conklin.
In Hornell, the first flyer was discovered stuck to the door of Rehoboth Deliverance Ministries as people began arriving for Sunday morning services, church member Marseena Harmonson told the Evening Tribune of Hornell. The flyer promoted the “Aryan National Army” and included a skull positioned inside a swastika.
Harmonson said church members were alarmed, especially given the recent Buffalo shooting. “And when you have children, young people, older people, they don’t know what to think,” she said. “A lot of them never experienced anything like this.”
Officers found similar material attached to the front of the Temple Beth-El synagogue and in other locations including driveways, doorways and a park, Murray said.
Then on Monday, police spotted two men distributing the literature, authorities said. After the officers searched their home, the two men and a woman were arrested on 115 counts each of aggravated harassment, a felony hate crime. It wasn’t clear if they had attorneys who could comment on the charges.
Mayor John Buckley called the racist flyers an aberration for the close-knit community. “These are three misguided individuals who have hate in their hearts,” Buckley told The New York Times. “This is something that is not reflective of Hornell.”
(AP)
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3 Responses
“Aggravated harassment” for simply distributing literature?! Sounds like a clear violation of the first amendment. These nazis should get large damages from the police who arrested them, both individually (no qualified immunity for a clear constitutional violation) and from the department.
You’re wrong, the first ammendment protects hate speech against individuals not against a group
Dirty jew is protected, Dirty jews is not
Kishmech, where did you get such stupid garbage? Seriously, where could you possibly have heard it? Not only is it completely untrue, but it’s the exact opposite of the truth.
The first amendment protects ALL speech, both against individuals and against groups. But one of the exceptions is defamation. If you make false statements of fact (not opinion) against an individual, that is not protected, and he can sue you.
But there is no such thing as GROUP defamation. If you make false statements of fact about a group that is larger than about 25, no member of the group can sue you. So if you say Ploni ben Ploni is a thief, and he can prove that it’s not true, he can sue you and win, and you will have to pay him damages. But if you say Jews are thieves, you’re free and clear. There are more than 25 Jews in the world, and therefore saying that they’re thieves is not defamation. So you see that the distinction between individuals and groups is the exact opposite of what you claimed it to be.