Canadian neo-Nazi Robert Wilson (l) with “Goyim Defense League” founder Jon Minadeo at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Photo: Screenshot

The American neo-Nazi group responsible for  distributing virulently antisemitic flyers in residential neighborhoods across the country is increasingly active over the border in Canada, police in Ontario reported over the weekend.

Police in the city of Peterborough are investigating after 19 residents reported receiving flyers promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and white supremacist propaganda, marking the third time in three months that such flyers were distributed to various neighborhoods in the city, the Toronto Star reported.

The flyers are produced by a US-based organization calling itself the “Goyim Defense League (GDL)”, which claims to be alerting white people — whom it describes using the pejorative Hebrew term “goyim” — to a sinister Jewish conspiracy. Leaflets distributed by the group to homes in California, Texas, North Carolina, Idaho, Vermont, Alabama, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida and other states have blamed Jews for the COVID-19 pandemic and denied the Holocaust.

Peterborough Mayor Jeff Leal condemned the flyers. “It’s just not acceptable that our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community have been targeted for this kind of vile hatred,” he said.

“For some reason, Peterborough seems to have become somewhat of a hotbed of extremist right-wing sentiment,” Ron Molnar, a spokesperson for the Jewish Community Centre of Peterborough, said in a statement shared with Canadian media outlets.

“But the Jewish community itself has not been specifically targeted, just tarred with the same brush, or by inference, a slightly larger brush,” he added.

The incident comes one week after racist and antisemitic epithets were daubed earlier this month on a high school in Peterborough.

The GDL has been boosting its propaganda activities in Canada this year. In January, police in Saskatoon investigated a spate of flyers that accused Jews of controlling the media and blamed them for continuing mass immigration as well as the availability of abortion.

The group is led by Jon Minadeo, a high school dropout and failed actor and rapper who reinvented himself as an antisemitic provocateur after he was fired from his family-owned restaurant business. The 40-year-old Minadeo was arrested during an antisemitic demonstration staged outside a synagogue in Bibb County, Georgia last month.

In a March 2022 interview with The Press Democrat, a news outlet based in California, Minadeo whined that the journalist who interviewed him was “ruining my life”, adding that he was also “scared for my life” as “those people can be dangerous.” Minadeo subsequently left his home in California, moving to Florida last December.

In August 2022, Minadeo’s Canadian sidekick, neo-Nazi Robert Wilson, was arrested in Poland at the behest of the Dutch authorities for projecting an antisemitic message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam four months previously.