Hoax Alert: A Smashed Window in San Francisco (2024)

According to the ‘Jewish News of Northern California’ an ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ occurred in September 2024 in the city of San Francisco in California when:

‘A Jewish woman who displays an Israeli flag in her front window said her family’s home was vandalized on Tuesday night.

San Francisco resident Yana Rathman told J. she is worried that the Israeli flag in the window led to the vandalism.

On Tuesday night, Rathman said, someone threw a rock at the window of her family’s Victorian home, which displays both an Israeli flag and a Ukrainian flag. The impact cracked the window, but a shatterproof, anti-burglary film prevented the glass from shattering, she said.

The vandalism happened after the first day of a deadly and unusual attack in Lebanon, widely attributed to Israel, in which thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah terrorists exploded.

On Wednesday morning, Rathman filed a police report. A few hours later, she said, someone broke her video-enabled doorbell.

“This is getting serious,” she said.

It wasn’t the first time her home has been vandalized in recent months, Rathman said. Someone also graffitied her house with “Free Palestine” a few months ago.

“We just cleared the graffiti, and that was it,” she said.

Rathman noted that some neighbors have spoken out against the Israeli flag, which has been up for a year, while others have been sympathetic.

Tuesday night’s incident left her rattled, but for now the flag is staying, Rathman and her husband, Vlad Mezhibovsky, have decided.

“I told him a few times, ‘Should we take the flag down?’” Rathman said. “And he said ‘no.’” (1)

Now the problem here is obvious enough in that Mezhibovsky and Rathman displayed both Israeli and Ukrainian flags on their home but yet Mezhibovsky and Rathman assume that the Israeli flag was the ‘reason’ that someone threw a rock at their window and smashed it.

Why couldn’t it have been the Ukrainian rather than the Israeli flag that triggered the rock throwing?

Or more pointedly why is the rock throwing linked to the flags at all?

The simple truth is that they have no evidence of such other than that they claim – without any actual evidence mind you - that ‘Free Palestine’ was graffitied on their house ‘a few months ago’ and there is no evidenced link between the two events just an assumption Mezhibovsky and Rathman that one is linked to the other.

Heck we have no evidence that Mezhibovsky and Rathman didn’t smash their own window for pity’s sake!

References

(1) https://jweekly.com/2024/09/19/two-alleged-hate-incidents-linked-to-displays-of-israeli-flags-in-east-bay-and-s-f/