Latest fliers blaming Jews for COVID show up at Illini
Students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are the latest to report finding anti-Semitic fliers seeking to tie the Jewish community to the coronavirus pandemic. The papers were found around campus on Sunday.
“This weekend has brought multiple reports of anti-Semitic and hateful fliers being dropped in different locations on and around campus inside plastic bags filled with small rocks. These messages are offensive, outrageous and they represent unacceptable attacks on members of our Jewish community,” the university’s chancellor, Robert Jones, wrote in a statement to students, faculty and staff.
He went on to say the fliers are “antithetical to our university values of inclusion and tolerance, and they are another disheartening example of the kind of anti-Semitic acts and expressions that are too common in our nation and right here in the community where we all live, learn and work. Sneaking around and delivering hateful, hurtful and racist messages in little plastic sandwich bags filled with gravel is a cowardly and craven way to spew hate and division in our community.”
Rabbi Dovid Teichtel, director of Chabad Illini, Chabad Jewish Center for Jewish Life at the university, said in a letter to his community that was posted on Facebook: “I prefer to only discuss positive subjects, and it’s with deep sadness that I write this post, but over the past 24 hours, tens of students have reached out to Illini Chabad for support and asked us to speak out, and I cannot ignore that request.”
Read More: JNS