Hoax Alert: A Lone Swastika in Philadelphia (2024)
If you are a prolific consumer of jewish news like me then you will no doubt have heard that… golly gosh… there’s been a major ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ in the centre of Philadelphia on 14th January 2024.
Let’s go to Jack Tomczuk at ‘Metro Philadelphia’ for more detail on this emerging story:
‘Police are investigating after someone spray-painted a swastika Sunday at a Holocaust memorial on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City.
The Nazi symbol was found on the east side of the Verizon building, on a wall that serves as the backdrop for Horwitz-Wasserman Holocaust Memorial Plaza, located on the parkway at 16th Street.
Officers were called to the site just before 2:30 p.m. Sunday, though investigators say the vandal defaced the wall at around 1:30 a.m.
Eszter Kutas, executive director of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation, which manages the memorial, said she began receiving emails and phone calls about the vandalism late Sunday morning. She went to the plaza and contacted authorities. Later Sunday, a Verizon employee came out and cleaned the wall, Kutas said.
“I can’t say that I was shocked,” she said Monday. “We, as Jewish people, are dealing with a new reality. Our sense of safety and security is gone, and we experience these kinds of incidents as a community all the time.”’ (1)
Yes, you read that right.
A single swastika was spray-painted near a ‘Holocaust memorial’ in the centre of Philadelphia, and we’ve got a full-scale police and state government response to this ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’. This single swastika – which is rather oddly dark green – has triggered significant coverage at Fox, (2) NBC (3) and CNN. (4)
Associated Press tried to invoke the ‘Holocaust memorial’s’ heritage status to get more sympathy for the disproportionate police and state government reaction writing how:
‘The memorial, perhaps the oldest public Holocaust monument in the United States, was commissioned in the 1950s by Holocaust survivors and other Jewish community members. The monument was erected in 1964 and the site was redesigned in 2018 with new educational installations and artifacts added.’ (5)
Apparently ‘Holocaust Memorials’ are part of ‘America’s heritage’ now for some bizarre reason, but anyway.
Danny Freeman at CNN decided to jazz up his story on the green swastika of eternal doom by rather predictably screeching about ‘rising anti-Semitism’ using the Anti-Defamation League as his only source:
‘In a Facebook post, the foundation said the swastika would be removed “in short order” and called out a spike in acts of anti-Jewish hatred across Philadelphia and the nation.
In the three months since the October 7 attack by Hamas, antisemitic events in the US “skyrocketed,” reaching 3,283 incidents by January 7, the Anti-Defamation League said in a news release earlier this month. That number represented roughly a 360% increase in reported antisemitic incidents compared to the same time frame a year earlier, the ADL said.
The reported incidents included more than 1,300 rallies with antisemitic rhetoric, more than 1,300 incidents of verbal or written harassment, more than 550 cases of vandalism and 60 incidents of physical assault, the ADL said. It’s unclear whether rallies were tracked last year.’ (6)
Aside from the fact that using the ADL as an authoritative source on anti-Semitism is rather like asking Stalin how many people he murdered – which ironically got people executed in the 1930s in the Soviet Union – the statistics provided are clearly extremely vague because what is ‘anti-Semitic rhetoric’ (presumably ‘From the Rivers to the Sea’ or calling Israel an Apartheid state rather telling jews to go die [the latter would be anti-Semitic the former two aren’t anti-Semitic]), what counts as ‘physical assault’ (pushing a jew blocking an aisle in Walmart maybe?) and more importantly what counts as ‘anti-Semitic vandalism’?
This is a good example of that since while Stephen Lepore delivered an unhinged rant about Hamas rape gangs in his article on the green swastika of eternal doom for Britain’s extremely philo-Semitic ‘Daily Mail’ since – as Bishop Williamson once observed in a talk – the new religion is the ‘Holocaust’ and its temples are ‘Holocaust memorials’ and to make a ‘Holocaust memorial’ ritually unclean is a modern mortal sin. (7)
The truth I think is rather more pedestrian and far less unhinged which the title of the AP article indicates and is clearly left over from a more sober editor at some point:
‘Vandalism probe opened after swastika painted on Philadelphia wall adjacent to Holocaust memorial’ (8)
It is clear that the green swastika of eternal doom wasn’t just normal graffiti that is true; since unlike many other cases of ‘swastikas interpreted as hate crimes’ (when they almost certainly aren’t intended that way at all) it isn’t accompanied by other graffiti, but the fact that it was on a wall adjacent to the ‘Holocaust memorial’ and not on the ‘Holocaust memorial’ itself suggests an awful lot of respect for the ‘Holocaust memorial’.
Far more so than any ‘anti-Semite’ would show.
It suggests that this is likely the work of someone protesting Israel’s conduct in Gaza by referring to how the jews are ‘behaving like Nazis’ or it is a jew or pro-Israel fanatic trying to create outrage against ‘rising anti-Semitism’ in America by ‘creative artistic expression’ of pretending to ‘Nazis desecrating Holocaust memorials’.
It is almost certainly one of those two scenarios, and both are equally plausible but yet neither is an ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ and more importantly the ludicrously disproportionate response from the media, police and the state government of Pennsylvania tells you all you need to know about who really rules America.
Don’t you think?
References
(1) https://metrophiladelphia.com/swastika-holocaust-memorial-philadelphia/
(2) https://www.fox29.com/news/holocaust-memorial-plaza-in-philadelphia-vandalized-with-swastika
(3) https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/holocaust-memorial-vandalized-with-swastika-in-act-of-antisemitism-in-center-city/3746386/
(4) https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/14/us/philadelphia-holocaust-memorial-defaced/index.html
(5) https://apnews.com/article/holocaust-memorial-swastika-philadelphia-a6ce8d914ef66cd4b8cb64090ceb31f8
(6) https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/14/us/philadelphia-holocaust-memorial-defaced/index.html
(7) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12963553/anti-semitic-swastika-philadelphia-holocaust-memorial-october-7-attack.html
(8) https://apnews.com/article/holocaust-memorial-swastika-philadelphia-a6ce8d914ef66cd4b8cb64090ceb31f8