Keith Ellison calls on AG to investigate cemetery desecration as hate crime

Keith Ellison sends a letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, urging him to investigate the recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in the St. Louis area as a hate crime.

Ellison calls on Sessions to designate the attack on the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, Missouri, in which more than 150 headstones were overturned and damaged, as a hate crime.

Less than a week later, about 100 headstones were toppled at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia.

https://twitter.com/keithellison/status/836637155166400513/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

“We cannot afford to ignore the series of recent threats against the American-Jewish community,” the lawmaker writes in the letter dated February 27. “Anti-Semitism poses a grave threat to our democracy and every American’s Constitutional right to freely practice their religion.”

“While local law enforcement is working hard to identify the perpetrators, it is evident that a federal Hate Crime investigation is warranted due to the dark history of anti-Semitic attacks of this nature, both here and abroad, and the symbolic message it sends to the Jewish community all over the world,” he writes.

— JTA