“We do have a lot of faith in the Beverly Hills Police Department, which I know are actively working on the case,” Alaverdian told the Courier. “Apparently, whoever put them up put them up because of the demonstration, and they were enabled by hateful ideologies in plastering hate speech.”

As of press time, the Beverly Hills Police Department was aware of and investigating the incident.

Alaverdian, an undergraduate student who has been involved in pro-Armenian activism since she was 16, said it was important to understand the context behind the ongoing Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict along with Armenian history to understand why the flyers were offensive. Of the four countries named in the flyer, none of them recognize the Ottoman Empire’s genocide against the Armenians in the early-20th century, she said.

“Those four countries, to my knowledge, have not recognized the Armenian genocide of 1915,” Alaverdian said.

The recent rally, she said, was spurred by the current conflict in Artsakh, also known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The disputed region in the South Caucuses is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan and is a source of ongoing violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in that part of the world.

In Los Angeles, home to one of the world’s largest Armenian diasporas, the Armenian community is sensitive to language that could be interpreted as hate speech.

“It was really shocking to find,” Alaverdian said of the flyers.