People in Craig on June 4 found antisemitic pamphlets packaged with dry beans inside of clear plastic bags distributed in yards and driveways across town.
Bob Claus, who lives in Craig, said he found four antisemitic flyers while he was out for a walk along Third Street and Beach Road in west Craig.
Claus said the flyers were packaged inside plastic bags that contained “different versions of what looks like professionally produced flyers about different subjects … they'd been thrown in several driveways.”
“One is about Jewish control of the hedge fund industry, one is about feminism, one is about pornography, all of which are tied with the tropes that you see very often about the Jewish community,” Claus said. “They are disturbing to everybody that I’ve talked to that’s run across them.”
Claus said he spoke with one neighbor who discovered and picked up a dozen bags that contained similar flyers while she was walking her dog the same morning. He said another acquaintance found about three or four more pamphlets on the east side of Craig.
The pamphlets are all marked with the logo of a website that provides free downloads of about 20 different antisemitic flyer designs, along with instructions for how to print and package the designs for distribution in residential areas.
In January 2022, plastic bags containing pamphlets marked with the same website logo were spread across multiple major U.S. cities, according to a press release by the Anti-Defamation League Mountain States Region at the time of the incident.
The organization said the “flyers appear to be from a loose network of individuals that engages in antisemitic stunts to harass Jews.”
“Individuals associated with this network include a range of antisemites and white supremacists who are motivated and united by their hatred of Jews,” said the 2022 statement. “The most zealous individuals are in Colorado, California, Florida and New York. They work alone, in small cliques and occasionally travel across the country to work together in larger teams.”
During a June 4 phone call with the Ketchikan Daily News, Craig Police Chief RJ Ely confirmed that the antisemitic flyers “showed up all over town” on June 4. Ely said the police department received reports that a person or multiple people in a late-model pickup truck distributed the flyers overnight.
“It happened probably sometime between 11 o’clock at night and probably four o’clock this morning,” he said. “They’re these little Ziploc baggies with some anti-Jewish verbiage and a bunch of like, baking beans.”
Ely said he has not seen this type of pamphlet distribution in his 19 years with the Craig Police Department.
Claus said he has not found flyers like these in Craig before, but the flyers remind him of an antisemitic incident about 25 years ago. “The mailboxes in Craig were spammed with neo-Nazi literature,” he said. He recalled that literature was associated with a fundamentalist church.
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