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Lincoln Memorial, statue hit by anti-Israel vandals

Anti-Israel protesters were caught writing ‘Free Gaza’ on a Lincoln statue.

By David Swindle, JNS

Anti-Israel vandals painted “Free Gaza” and “Free Palestine” on stairs leading up to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. last week.

The National Park Service posted on Thursday that its “expert conservators” had “removed most of the paint and latex on the Reflecting Pool steps yesterday and finished up with a second treatment this morning.” The U.S. Park Police asked anyone with information about the vandals to contact its tip line.

“These barbarians are not only antisemitic but also anti-American,” wrote Lawrence Muscant, senior vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Over the weekend, footage circulated of anti-Israel protesters writing “Free Gaza” and drawing the hammer and sickle, a communist symbol, on a Lincoln statue in New York.

“At a time when Jews comprised less than one-half of 1% of the American population, and with the country rampant with prejudice, Lincoln’s positive and meaningful personal relationships with Jewish individuals not only arguably changed him but also had an important and lasting impact on the status of American Jews,” according to the New-York Historical Society, which hosted a 2015 exhibit on “Lincoln and the Jews.”

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“Lincoln stood up to his antisemitic generals even as he depended upon them to win the war, and became an advocate for Jewish equality and acceptance,” the museum added.

Per a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, 62% of registered voters say the country is on the wrong track. Of those ages 18 to 24, 79% support the ideology that “white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment.”

More than half (51%) of younger voters said that Israel should cease to exist and be “given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”