Hate Crimes In The US Under Trump: Swastikas Among Other Anti-Semitic Messages Discovered On New York City Subway

RTX2ZC92 — A swastika and text in Hebrew reading "Israeli police" are seen on a wall of a synagogue after it was evacuated during the second day of an operation by Israeli forces to evict the illegal outpost of Amona in the occupied West Bank, Feb. 2, 2017. Reuters

Anti-Semitic messages that included exhortations to kill Jews were discovered on a New York City subway train, the New York Daily News reported Monday.

A subway goer told a motorman Saturday about images of swastikas appearing alongside messages saying, “Kill all the Jews” and “Cut the heads off Jews.”

The New York Police Department Hate Crime Task Force is investigating the graffiti that was been drawn with a black marker as a hate crime. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo created a state police unit, the Hate Crime Task Force, dedicated to protecting civil rights Nov. 20, following the discovery of a swastika spray painted in a park in Brooklyn and pictures of lynchings and racial slurs sent to a black freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.

When a similar incident involving a swastika appearing on a subway car occurred Feb. 5, a passenger converted it into a box and inscribed the word “love.”

“This is what New Yorkers do — we turn hate into love. That is our message to the nation and to the world. And we won't back down. Not now, not ever,” Cuomo said in a statement on the Feb. 5 incident.

Hate crimes in New York City rose 115 percent between the Nov. 8 election and Dec. 4, with the NYPD reporting 43 cases compared to 20 in the same time period in 2015. From Election Day until the end of the year, at least 41 of the 82 bias-related incidents in New York City were directed toward Jews. That number represents a 38 percent increase from the 60 hate crimes against Jews that took place during the same period the previous year.

New York subway riders came together to rub out swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs inside a train using hand sanitizer. pic.twitter.com/Hx8gmAo8OP
— DoSomething (@dosomething) February 6, 2017

"We've had an uptick in hate crimes, actually a little bit more than an uptick," NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill told a New York radio station in November. "We're up 31 percent from last year. We had at this time last year 250. This year we have 328, specifically against the Muslim population in New York City — we went up from 12 to 25, and anti-Semitic is up, too, by 9 percent from 102 to 111."

Racism