Hate Fliers Miss the Mark

SHARON, Mass. — A thousand households in this quiet Boston suburb woke up over the weekend to find anti-Semitic and racist leaflets scattered across their front lawns. Police said the vicious propaganda was the work of the National Alliance, a West Virginia hate group. But in targeting Sharon, the organization that is believed to have helped inspire Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh may have picked the wrong town.

Instead of riling up residents, the pamphlets denouncing mixed marriage and blaming Jews for many of the world’s woes “are not going to get a strong negative response here at all,” said David M. Blocker, a businessman who heads the diversity committee in this town of 18,000.

Nothing good can be said about the hate-filled packets, which were wrapped in zippered plastic bags to protect them from moisture, Blocker and others agreed Monday. Except that in this particular upper-middle class community, the experience simply provides another opportunity for education--and hopefully enlightenment.

“People are frightened by this, no doubt,” Blocker said. “But if anything, whoever did this is going to do us a favor.”

This is, after all, a town that started an “affirming diversity/celebrating community” committee two years ago following several episodes of vandalism at local synagogues. Those acts of destruction so rocked Sharon that “when those stones went through the windows of our neighbors, we felt them go through our own windows as well,” said Father Robert Bullock, a Roman Catholic priest here.

Sharon then became one of the first towns in the state to sign on for a pilot program launched by the Anti-Defamation League of New England called “No place to hate.” That collaboration between the ADL and 54 Massachusetts communities encourages dialogue about hate crimes, reasoning that ignoring such incidents does not make them go away. The program has been hailed as a national model for efforts around the country.

Sharon is known for its diversity. A majority of residents is Jewish and a sizable percentage is Asian American and African American. Sharon boasts seven synagogues, an assortment of churches and a mosque.

A small-town setting with big-city awareness, as freelance writer and Sharon resident Deborah Fineblum Raub put it, this town is unlikely to let material that calls Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “a beast, not a saint” cause permanent damage.

“People will take it personally,” Fineblum Raub said. “And there will be repercussions, but good ones, because this is an opportunity for all of us to talk to our children and to strengthen our resolve to be tolerant.”

Fineblum Raub’s 16-year-old daughter, Leah, was among those who picked up the literature hurled on the lawns.

“She said: ‘Mom, the person who folded these things, the person who stapled and taped them, that person hates me,’ ” Fineblum Raub said. “In her young life, she has never been touched with that kind of hate.”

Similar materials have been deposited on doorsteps in neighboring towns in recent months, civil rights director Andrew Tarsy of the Anti-Defamation League of New England said Monday. The group that produced the documents found in Sharon also distributes its own label of racist rock music and is known for recruitment efforts for the white supremacy movement, Tarsy said.

“It’s a pretty sophisticated and well-heeled national organization that has been associated with acts of violence over the last couple of decades, Tarsy said”

A member of the National Alliance from Cape Cod told a Boston-area newspaper that his group often targets towns such as Sharon “just for the fun of it.” Jeff Hackworth said: “I imagine we just like to stick it to them sometimes.”

African American and Jewish residents of Sharon received the weekend hate packets.

Bullock said the incident “should lead us to be a good deal more alert to the hate groups in America and to the hate sites on the Web. There are hundreds of them and we have no idea how frequently they are being used.”

Bullock, coauthor of a book about religion and the Holocaust, volunteered “to go on thin ice about part of what happened here, the speech part.” Sharon police say free speech clauses in the Constitution prevent any prosecution based on the content of the pamphlets, adding that the only crime involved in the weekend leafleting was littering.

“But I wonder if this really is protected speech,” Bullock said. “This is speech used to assault, used to hate. I know that there is a danger of fanning the flames if we talk about this. But the worse danger is bystanding and saying nothing. We’ve learned that lesson.”

At a “No place to hate” meeting scheduled for Wednesday, last weekend’s incident will be high on the agenda for discussion, town selectman Norm Katz said.

“What action do we take? What action can anyone take?” Katz said. “You use it to educate. You use it to show these groups they can’t advance their causes here in this community.”