Police in New York City are searching for a man who was captured on video drawing swastikas on a street mural in Harlem.
The vandal also wrote the phrase “Fear Black planet” twice next to multiple swastikas he scrawled on the mural, the NYPD said on Thursday.
The incident was caught on a surveillance video that shows the suspect vandalizing the mural, which is part of a wooden construction fence, with a marker. It occurred on January 25 at approximately 1:15 a.m.
The phrase “Fear Black planet” is thought to be a reference to a 1990 album “Fear of a Black Planet” by rap group Public Enemy. Public Enemy has been criticized in the past for statements and lyrics which the ADL and other groups have accused of being antisemitic. In 1999, the ADL condemned the Public Enemy song “Swindler’s List” for being “suggestive of age-old antisemitic themes and rhetoric” and containing “antisemitic overtones and veiled references to the Holocaust.”
The vandalism is being investigated by the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force.
Police are asking for the public's help in identifying the suspect.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)