It was just days before the unprecedented terrorist attack that Hamas staged against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when U.S. federal officials returned an indictment against 67-year-old Indiana resident Andrzej Boryga.
The crimes Boryga was charged with: four counts of interstate communication of threat to injure.
According to prosecutors, the self-proclaimed “Nazi” went on a hate spree from July–October of 2022 calling various Anti-Defamation League offices in Indiana, New York, Houston, Las Vegas and here in Denver, lobbing vicious, graphic threats of violence against the ADL and Jews en masse.
Some of the threats he reportedly left via voicemail at the offices that were enumerated in the indictment include:
- “I can’t wait to motherfucking cut your fucking head off and put around display on 3rd Avenue.”
- “I will kill you motherfuckers with pleasure.”
- “…Cut your fucking head off you filthy fucking kikes… it is my duty, all our– to kill you motherfuckers, to slaughter you.”
“My grandfather [unintelligble] SS officer… her personally shoot (sic) 120 Jews for target practice… I will kill more than that… you all have to die, you motherfuckers.” - “Your days are numbered. We’ll take care of your ass, cut your fucking head off… you filthy fucking animals.”
According to the indictment, the messages he left at the Denver ADL offices were no less horrific:
- “You’re going to suck my dick, Nazi cock, you motherfucker, Jewish bitches, before I cut your fucking throat.”
- “I can’t wait to graduate as a Nazi, I am ready for you motherfuckers. Cut your fucking head off. I will kill you motherfucker the pleasure.”
- “Pretty soon we’re gonna have an oven party, filthy fucking kikes. I’m gonna bake your fucking ass.”
Upon receiving the messages, local ADL officials reacted promptly.
“The ADL Mountain States Region reported the threatening and antisemitic phone calls to local and federal law enforcement,” said Regional ADL Director Scott Levin via email to me. “We provided recordings of the voicemail messages to law enforcement.”
Over the last few years, incidents of antisemitic activity have been skyrocketing, impacting Jews across the nation at their homes, schools, synagogues, and institutions. “We continue to receive hundreds of incident reports of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and physical assault in out three-state region of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming,” Levin said. “We have received 588 incident reports so far in 2024 compared to 233 incident reports year-to-date in 2023. The vast majority of the reports are of antisemitic incidents.”
Last week, after pleading guilty, Borgya was sentenced to two years in federal prison, to be followed by two years of supervised release, according to a press release issued on July 24 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office from the Southern District of Indiana.
“Hate-fueled threats of violence seek to fracture our society and isolate communities from one another,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in the release. “This defendant made heinous, repeated violent threats targeting Jewish people and organizations. His actions were not just heinous, they were unlawful. This case represents the latest effort by the Justice Department to combat the disturbing increase in threats against Jews and Jewish institutions across the United States that we have seen in the wake of October 7th. We will continue to aggressively investigate and prosecute threats and acts of violence motivated by antisemitism and by hatred of any kind.” Garland himself is also Jewish.
Levin shared his gratitude for the support and focus provided by first reponders and the justice system: “The ADL Mountain States Region thanks local and federal law enforcement officials for taking the situation seriously when our office was targeted with nearly two dozen threatening messages. We extend our gratitude to the Department of Justice for prosecuting the perpetrator of the violent threats against ADL and thank the department for its commitment to protecting Jewish people and organizations in the face of rising antisemitism both locally and nationwide.”
Meanwhile, the roiling surge of antisemitism all over the world just continues unabated as the far-left and the far-right have found one particular piece of common ground to stand shoulder-to-shoulder upon: hatred of Jews.
It’s been nearly 10 months since Hamas terrorists staged their assault on more than 1,200 Israelis, raping and murdering babies, women, children, men, and the elderly, and kidnapping more than 230 to take hostage into Gaza. In the following days, a groundswell of anti-Israel rhetoric fomented across the United States that took very little time to spiral into unabashed antisemitism, often thinly veiled as “anti-Zionism.” However, the charade of “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism!” has all but crumbled as time has marched on, while scores of hostages remain captive in Gaza — including eight American citizens.
You need look no further for an example than the 2024 Olympics, where Israeli athletes are under heavy guard for their own safety, and where antisemitic sentiment has been very loud and clear. At the Israel-Paraguay soccer match on July 27, Parisian authorities have opened an investigation into “protestors” holding up Palestinian flags while displaying the Nazi salute and allegedly chanting “Heil Hitler.” Olympics officials issued a statement “strongly condemning the acts.”
Antisemitism is particularly prolific and virulent in France, where street attacks and harassment of Jews have become de rigueur since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror incursion.
“French Jews are likely to continue to experience a hundred antisemitic incidents each month, in a ‘new routine,’” said the head of the France-based Jewish Community Protection Service (members of the service remain anonymous for security reasons) in an interview with the Jerusalem Post on July 31. “The organization, which has protected France’s Jews since the 1980s, had hoped that the tide of antisemitism has begun to recede with a dip in incidents in December. After the 1000% increase in recorded incidents in 2023 compared to the previous year, a new normal baseline of antisemitism continued in 2024.”
France is far from an anomaly, as it’s clear that antisemitism has become normalized at a breakneck pace since Oct. 7. In just the last few weeks:
- In Toronto, windows were broken out of Leo Baeck Jewish Day School, and it was set ablaze early in the morning of July 30. Also in Toronto, a bus used by a school for the Bobov Hassidic sect in Toronto was destroyed in an arson attack a day earlier.
- In Squirrel Hill — the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where Robert Bowers orchestrated a mass murder of Jews at the L’Simcha Synagogue in 2018 — several homes and Jewish institutions were vandalized with antisemitic graffiti early in the morning of July 29.
- On July 25, Canadian Police released their data on last year’s hate crimes, revealing that antisemitism leads all other types of hate crimes, surging 71% above the previous year — and despite the fact that Jews only make up 1% of the Canadian population.
- On July 25, the U.S. Dept of Education ruled that, “repeated swastika graffiti and other antisemitic incidents at a Carmel Unified School District school created a hostile environment for Jewish students,” during the last two school years.
- On July 23, Dion Marsh was sentenced to 40 years in prison, after he pleded guilty to trying to run down Orthodox Jews while driving a stolen car in five separate attacks in April, 2022.
- On July 23, the ADL filed a civil rights complaint against the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). “The 49-page complaint, filed with the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), recounts dozens of incidents that have occurred at SDP since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Teachers allegedly propagandized in the classroom, students chanted ‘kill the Jews,’ and swastika graffiti emerged across the district, the complaint says, adding that parents’ concerns have gone unheeded and that Jewish teachers, beleaguered by acts of retaliation, are retiring in droves.”
- On June 30, Jew-hating groups came together for an entire conference in Somerset, Kentucky called the JP (Jewish Problem) Conference. It’s perhaps the most clear and compelling evidence for the horseshoe theory of politics as applied to antisemitism, as the conference featured radical hate groups from across the political spectrum, from former Democrat congressperson Cynthia McKinney, to members of the so-called Goyim Defense League, to far-right infuencer Lucas Gage and Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf.
This punchlist is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the monolith of Jewish hate rising far above the roiling seas of bigotry.
And it’s only growing.
