Erasing Hate From Streets Around the World
Hateful graffiti has met its match: Corey Fleischer. Now, the Montreal activist’s Erasing Hate movement has gone global.
Battle against Anti-Semitism
For 5 years, Corey Fleischer has shared videos of himself erasing hateful messages, symbols, and graffiti in Montreal. Through his social media posts and his Erasing Hate movement he’s built a global following. In 2015, the YMCAs of Québec awarded Fleischer a peace medal for his work with Erasing Hate. Survivors of the Holocaust who volunteer at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center were also honored that year. He’s since erased hate symbols with Holocaust survivor Angela Richt, who was born in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the concentration camp where an estimated 1.1 million prisoners were murdered.
“If you watch me in my videos — and you see how enthusiastic I am. That's real deal. That is every time I do it. You're just seeing my emotions; you're seeing my feelings come out in the video. I put out a location on my social media. I put out the tools you'll need. I put the address and you'll literally see people running towards it. I could almost erase hate, you know, on the other side of the world faster than I can here in Montreal. Erasing Hate is the first movement of its kind that targets, locates, and eliminates hate speech anywhere in the world free of charge. I want to be able to show you guys at home how you’re able to make a difference with store-bought products. Here, I have nail polish remover. At that award ceremony, I had all 30 Holocaust survivors come to me and tell me how much it meant to me. That ceremony changed my life and I ended up leaving. And I got in my car and broke down. I was crying in my car for like 15 minutes from the magnitude of what transpired and, you know, it was important that it happened because that's when I started realizing that this was much bigger than myself.”
Fleischer says he’s excited for the next step in the evolution of Erasing Hate — a mobile app launching by early 2020.
Brut.
