Norwalk PD: Parking lot littered with anti-Muslim flyers

<p>Norwalk police say someone blanketed a parking lot with anti-Muslim flyers urging women and children to stay home at night because &quot;the immigrants and their children have arrived.&quot;</p>

News 12 Staff

Aug 30, 2017, 4:23 PM

Updated 2,428 days ago

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Norwalk PD: Parking lot littered with anti-Muslim flyers
Norwalk police say someone blanketed a parking lot with anti-Muslim flyers urging women and children to stay home at night because "the immigrants and their children have arrived."
News 12 Connecticut obtained a copy from the Norwalk Hour. The writer goes on to claim that Muslims are rapists and call for a ban on all immigrants.
Whoever placed them left them on windshields at a city-owned parking lot Saturday night in South Norwalk, police say.
Distributing the flyers is not necessarily a crime, according to Lt. Terry Blake, of the Norwalk Police Department.
"If there's threats or harm or any type of behavior such as that toward an individual based on their race or their religion, their sexual orientation -- that's when it crosses that line," Blake says. 
But the messages were placed on unoccupied cars, which is likely not a crime.
"However, we are in contact with the state's attorney's office, and they are reviewing the documents as well," he says.
Earlier this year, someone left anti-Jewish flyers in driveways along Newtown Avenue in Norwalk. Police still haven't identified whoever left them.
Other targets of hateful threats this year include an Islamic center in Orange and the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge.
Farhan Memon, of the Connecticut Council on Islamic Relations, says the spike in hate crimes began after President Donald Trump took office. Memon says Trump's rhetoric after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia fueled the fire.
"We have, after all, a president in the White House who is an Islamophobe, who sympathizes with white nationalists," he says.


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