Attorney General investigation of possible hate crime sought

The wife of Paterson mayoral candidate Andre Sayegh is asking the state Attorney General to investigate a flyer that was distributed early Sunday morning as a possible hate crime.

“The language on the flyer contains racial epithets to describe African Americans and Latinos, and includes shameful and hateful attacks against both our Muslim and LGBT communities. It is divisive and vile, and this hate mail was designed to falsely insinuate to voters that this language was coming from Andre,” Farhanna Balgahoom Sayegh wrote in a letter to Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.

The flyer claimed to have been sent by the Progressives Values Committee, but the chairman of that group, Joe Waks, supports Sayegh for mayor.  Walks told the New Jersey Globe that he was filing a complaint with the Passaic County Prosecutor’s office.

“It is very disturbing that these tactics are becoming more commonplace, as we saw in similar incidents in Hoboken and Edison during last November’s elections,” Balgahoom Sayegh said.  “These types of hate crimes negatively impact the very fiber of our communities, and as a community, we should explore all recourse available to us under the law to condemn and discourage this behavior.”