Hate-crime arrests in Quran desecrations at Pace University

July 27, 2007, 8:33 PM EDT

NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

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The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department's hate crimes unit.

The incidents came amid a spate of vandalism cases with religious or racial overtones at the school. In an earlier incident on Sept. 21, the school reported another copy of the Quran was found in a library toilet, and in October someone scrawled racial slurs on a student's car at the Westchester County satellite campus and on a bathroom wall at the campus in lower Manhattan. Police did not connect Shmulevich to those incidents.

More:
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--vandalismquran0727jul27,0,6882662.story



And Newsday repeats the falsehood that Newsweek "retracted" the Quaran in the toilet story at Gitmo:

In 2005, Newsweek magazine published and later retracted a story claiming U.S. interrogators at a prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, flushed a copy of the holy book down a toilet. The report sparked deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan and protests throughout the Middle East.


What Newsweek did was CLARIFY the story, NOT retract it.

Arrest some for putting a book in a privy? How idiotic. Had it been a bible or any other prayer book would the same action have been taken?

Deestruction of property. I would not call it a hate crime.

In Judiasm, many are familiar with the Orthdox...the men who always wear yamulkas (skull caps)...many are right wingers or chickenhawks (Libermann) and some have formed "common cause" with the fundies due to their "support for Israel" (they ignore how those fundies see the Jews as a means, not an end in their armageddon game). This is the mindset that allows an Alan Dershowitz to defend the perjury of Scooter Libby.

Lubuvitchers are a right wing offshoot of the Orthodox...people who aren't very tolerant of any people...especially those they consider "enemies". Just as Jews have been demonized in the Arab world (a major problem) since the 1930s, some Jews have taken the same approach to "goys"...especially Moslems. They see them as non-human and, dare I say, use similar stereotypes and rhetoric as the Nazis and other racist groups.

A long running joke here is that the New Testament is nothing by a fiction best seller...but I have met my share of Jews...and not all Orthodox or Lubuvitchers...who show a lot of intolerance and hatred...and an arrogance that has pitted a lot of us "secular" or "Americanized" Jews...a vast majority that vote with the Democrats, in a difficult situation and bad light.