“It’s just very disheartening that such a thing would take place,” Aaron Mallin, who first discovered the destruction when he went to visit his father’s grave, told ABC. “I’m hoping it was maybe just some drunk kids. But the fact that there’s so many, it leads one to think it could have been targeted.”
Bob Brooks, who reported from the scene for ABC, said that the number of damaged headstones could be over a hundred. “There’s dozens we know for sure, but there could be more than that, because everywhere you look, you see another headstone knocked over.”
The cause of the destruction at the Mt. Carmel Cemetery has not yet been determined.
Last week, multiple Jewish community centers across the country received bomb threats, and over 200 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis were vandalized. President Donald Trump has dragged his feet in condemning such anti-Semitism. He declined to condemn anti-Semitism three times in one week earlier this month, and went so far as to tell a reporter asking about the surge in anti-Semitic incidents to “sit down.”
ThinkProgress tracked incidents of hate in the three months following the election, and found 70 anti-Semitic incidents across the country, which included a significant number of bomb threats and vandalism of Jewish community centers.
Original Article
Source: thinkprogress.org/
Author: Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani
No comments:
Post a Comment