Synagogues Vandalized in Manhattan Beach.

Two synagogues were vandalized in Manhattan Beach on May 14th, early in the morning. The two suspects are still at large.

Cops responded to a call that a man was spray painting Congregation Sha’ary Torah at 98 West End Avenue in Manhattan Beach at midnight. Later at 2:45 am a call reported a man spray painting Temple Beth El-Manhattan Beach, across the street, bringing police back to the same intersection.

The NYPD has released the surveillance video over a month after the fact.

In a still a meshuggeneh (a stupid person in Yiddish) is seen wearing a black hoodie and gray pants. He isn’t wearing anything over his face. Perhaps he thought he would not face any harsh consequences if any at all. The video unfortunately doesn’t show what he was spray painting. There is a picture of the other meshuggeneh, who was dressed in all black.

The vandalism of the synagogues in Manhattan Beach constitutes a hate crime.

Apparently this is going to be treated as a hate crime by the New York justice system. A hate crime is a crime that is prejudice-motivated and targets a victim or victims based on the perception of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or other social qualifiers.

It’s a good thing that NYPD is taking the vandalism at these synagogues in Manhattan Beach seriously, even if it’s a bit late.

While that is promising, the idea of hate crimes is dubious. How do you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a crime was committed with the intent of targeting a specific group or in this case religion? These delinquents may have defaced churches or houses in their own neighborhood. Would that be considered a hate crime against your own ethnic group?

Is any crime not already an act of hate?

That is the motivation behind many criminal acts. The point of a hate crime charge however is to make even more of an example of it. Hate crimes receive harsher penalties than ordinarily despicable crimes. Though it is disgusting that these synagogues in Manhattan Beach were vandalized, it seems that punishments should be addressed according to the severity of the crime in question, instead of a label. Hopefully these two meshuggeneh learn their lesson.

Those are my thoughts, but please share yours below.

As always I, and the team at Brooklynites, thank you for reading. Click back soon. <3

Read what defines a hate crime:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime

Read about Brooklyn’s exciting mail technology development:

https://172-234-236-52.ip.linodeusercontent.com/brooklyn-is-co-developing-mail-robots/