Anti-Semitic flyers cause outrage among students

Anti-Semitic flyers were discovered in university printers and fax machines at the University Park and Health Sciences campuses over the last week, which were printed by hacker and self-defined internet “troll” Andrew Auernheimer.

Students who saw the flyer said they were horrified that both the racist image was printed and that it was being copied.

“I was astonished, and I posted a picture on my Facebook to show my friends what our society still thinks today. For the whole day I felt like there was a big rock in my stomach […] like doing the right wasn’t important,” said Cecilia Baez, a junior majoring in chemical engineering, in an email to the Daily Trojan. “After posting on other USC social climate accounts, I then heard that these flyers were actually being copied randomly and wirelessly.”

The messages explicitly discriminated against people of Jewish descent.

“White man: are you sick and tired of the Jews destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy? Join us in the struggle for global white supremacy at the Daily Stormer,” the flyer stated, as confirmed by student representatives from USC Hillel who witnessed the images.

Many university students and faculty found these flyers in their daily work space printers, including faculty from the Office of Religious Studies and USC Hillel who have been in communication with the Department of Public Safety and Information Technology Services in order to locate and block the sources to better ensure a similar incident cannot occur again.

“We received the fax on Thursday, which is the same day that the other universities received them. DPS and ITS worked with authorities to investigate the incident … DPS posted the message on Friday upon completion of their investigation,” said Varun Soni, dean of Religious Life, in an email to the Daily Trojan.

The Department of Public Safety commented on the incident on their website.

“USC has been made aware of the anonymous delivery of anti-Semitic messages to several networked printers at University Park and Health Sciences campus,” the statement said. “All incidents of bias, hate crimes, and hate incidents are considered a serious breach of USC community expectations and need to be reported allowing for appropriate investigation and response.”

DPS turned over the investigation to Information Technology Services security, who discovered that this was a national incident carried out by an IP address that was out of the country.

Other universities dealing with the results of the massive release include Princeton University, Brown University, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, UC  Berkeley, Smith College, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College, among others.