Officials at two universities are seeking help from the FBI after photos of hundreds of Jewish students and staff appeared on an anti-Semitic and racist website.
Journalists from student newspapers at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and Yeshiva University in New York discovered the thread of photos on the message board VNN Forum. Past senior members on the site include Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., who attacked two Jewish community centers near Kansas City five years ago and killed three people.
A user by the name of Stewart Meadows, also listed as a “senior member,” started the photo thread in June 2018 and has since uploaded at least 175 photos of Yeshiva University students and staff. The Brandeis student newspaper discovered “photographs and names of nearly a dozen current and former Brandeis students, faculty and staff.”
Meadows additionally posted at least 70 photos of students from the Yeshiva University High School for Girls in Queens, N.Y.
Brandeis University officials contacted the FBI, whose field office in New York also received a complaint from Yeshiva University. The latter complaint was passed to the FBI division in St. Louis, which has jurisdiction over any criminal investigation involving Alex Linder, a Missouri resident who runs the forum’s namesake, Vanguard News Network.
Linder, a white nationalist, regularly endorses the killing of Jewish people and praised the deadly shooting at the Tree Life Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018.
The FBI declined to comment on the controversy, but the thread of photos was deleted from the forum by Tuesday.
