Price-tag vandals struck again in downtown Jerusalem overnight on Sunday,
defacing a prominent Baptist church. Vandals scrawled “Death to Christians,” “We
will crucify you” and “Jesus son of Mary the whore” on the exterior of the
building.
Three cars, some of which did not belong to the church, were
spray painted and had their tires slashed.
The attack came two weeks
after similar sentences were spray painted on the Valley of the Cross monastery,
and a bilingual Arab-Jewish school in the Pat neighborhood was covered with
anti-Arab graffiti.
Police arrested a 19-yearold man suspected of the
vandalism at the Arab-Jewish school, but have no leads for the attacks against
the Baptist Church or the Valley of the Cross.
Jerusalem spokesman Shmuel
Ben Ruby said police are investigating the possibility of a connection between
the vandalization of the two churches.
This is not the first time that
the Jerusalem Baptist Church, located on Narkis Street, was attacked with
grafitti. In the 1980s, a church building was burned to the ground by arsonists,
and recently, vandals broke into the sanctuary of the hous of worship and set
fire to it in three places, said Chad Knight, an administrator at the
church.
“I was extremely disturbed and upset to see it,” Knight told The
Jerusalem Post on Monday. “Baptists have been in Israel since 1911.”
“One
of the things they spray painted on the wall was ‘Price tag’ and we feel that
we’ve been willing to pay a price for 100 years supporting Israel,” he said. “We
still love and support Israel and the Jewish people, we’re just extremely hurt
and disturbed.”
Knight added that Israelis responded with a “tremendous
outpouring of apologies,” including strangers who brought bouquets of flowers
after seeing the graffiti.
Price-tag attacks are a tool used by Jewish
extremists to protest government and army policies they perceive as
antisettlement.
The use of the phrase comes from their claim that
vandalism against Arab property is the “price” that must be paid for the
evacuation of settlements and the demolition of housing.