Police are now searching for a man who can be seen on a security camera video setting them alight. He and several patrons ran out to find the two rainbow pride flags hung by the door on fire, he said.
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and spotted something burning in the middle of a rainstorm. So he was shocked when he looked outside his glass door on Friday at around 12:15 a.m. In Harlem, Alexi Minko said he had always felt welcome as the owner of the Alibi Lounge, the only gay bar in the neighborhood around 139th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. But Evan Bernstein, the director of the Anti-Defamation League for New York and New Jersey, said that while he had heard from community leaders about dozens of incidents of anti-Semitic harassment involving measles, very few have been formally reported. Jewish groups have been concerned that an ongoing measles outbreak, centered in the ultra-Orthodox community, might be contributing to an atmosphere of anti-Semitism. In some of New York’s Orthodox Jewish enclaves, anti-Semitic assaults, slurs and swastika graffiti have grown so common that people are at risk of becoming numb to them, community leaders said. There have been 110 anti-Semitic crimes reported so far this year, compared to 58 at the same time last year. de Blasio said, is “an unacceptable reality and we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got.”
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He said New York has “a different reality in some ways” but the national backdrop has “put everyone on edge and it’s created a lot of division.”Ĭity officials on Tuesday vowed to increase their efforts to reverse the trend, including by opening a new Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes within the mayor’s office this summer.Ĭreated by a law passed by the City Council in January, the new office will be charged with coordinating responses to hate crimes across city agencies, developing prevention strategies and fostering healing for victims. “I think what we’re seeing, unquestionably, is an unleashing of the forces of hate all over this country,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference on Tuesday.