The district office of Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss in Sherman Oaks was defaced early Thursday morning with three swastikas and two incoherent messages, glued to the glass entrance door with epoxy.
At a noon press conference outside the vandalized office, LAPD Capt. Jim Miller of the Van Nuys district said that a citizen had witnessed the hate crime at around 6 a.m. and that a suspect had been identified, but was still at large.
Weiss, a Jewish legislator representing a heavily Jewish district, declared that the perpetrator sought to convey “a message of intimidation and hate, but neither my staff nor I will be intimidated.”
The two printed messages were interspersed with “Mein Fuehrer,” “Heil Weiss” and incorrect German words and expressed such sentiments as “We’ll have a homoerotic cop feeling up your Jewish ass.”
Miller declined to speculate whether the perpetrator might be mentally unstable.
Weiss said that he was in an early morning meeting at the Israeli consulate, when he took a call on his cell phone from LAPD Chief William Bratton.
Bratton informed Weiss of the incident and promised his department’s full support for the investigation.
Representatives of such Jewish organizations as the Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, American Jewish Congress and The Israel Institute participated in the news conference and expressed the outrage of the Jewish community.
ADL circulated a statement that while anti-Semitic incidents in the United States and California declined in 2006 over 2005, their level was “Still disturbingly high.”
