The epithets accused Rep. Adriano Espaillat of being a “genocide lover” and had a Hamas’ inverted “targeting” triangle painted on the window.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A New York congressman’s office was covered in anti-Israel graffiti Thursday night, with police immediately opening an investigation to find the culprits.
Democrat Adriano Espaillat, who represents the heavily-Jewish neighborhood of Washington Heights in the northern part of the New York City, is a strong Israel supporter.
He has had the posters of many hostages hanging prominently in his office-front window for many months. Small groups of Hamas supporters have regularly picketed the place.
According to surveillance videos the police examined, the crime was committed around 11 pm.
The words “Terrorist,” “F*** Israel,” “genocide lover” and “40K dead” were spraypainted in red across the window and glass door, along with an inverted triangle that Hamas has used in its propaganda to denote that it is targeting the building or person it pictures.
Down the same street and a nearby subway entrance, the vandals had also sprayed the red triangle, “Free Gaza,” “F*** Israel NYPD Cop City,” and “A terrorist in uniform is still a terrorist.”
The protective metal shutter that usually covers the entrance to Espaillat’s district office had been vandalized in November as well, soon after the posters had been hung. The graffiti there had read in black paint, “Espaillat is complicit in genocide,” “No more aid to Israel!” and “Free Palestine!”
The vandalism was committed just hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had addressed the opening of the General Assembly of the UN and defended Israel’s right to destroy both the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups that have been attacking the Jewish state since October 7, 2023.
A group of anti-Israel organizations had held a joint protest before his speech near the United Nations building, carrying signs with such slogans as “End the War Now,” and an effigy of the prime minister with handcuffed, “bloody” red hands.
Espaillat is not the only New York congressman to be targeted in this way.
Also in November, Brooklyn Rep. Dan Goldman’s office was defaced with slogans such as “Blood on ur [sic] hands” and “Let Gaza live.”
On Christmas, employees in the South Bronx office of outspoken Israel defender Rep. Ritchie Torres found a doll outside the door covered with red paint that was called “a Palestinian child messiah.”
Torres immediately called it out on X as an attempt by anti-Israel extremists to scare him off, but said, “I, for one, will not be intimidated.”
That same week, GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of Hudson Valley had such epithets as “Child murderer” written on signs stuck to his office window, as well as calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
He pushed back on X, posting, “I will not be intimidated & I will not waver from supporting our greatest ally as they fight to stop Hamas’ terror once & for all & rescue their people.”