The Missouri family home of an American IDF lone soldier was spray-painted, and the family's vehicles were torched in a suspected hate crime on Tuesday, the Clayton Police Department reported.
Just after 3 a.m., officers discovered that a fire damaged three vehicles. The working estimate is that this was a deliberate act of arson. Police also found the driveway had been spray-painted with the words: “Death to the IDF.”
No one was harmed, but the incident is being investigated as a hate crime, and the FBI and the St. Louis Regional Bomb and Arson Unit have been requested to assist with the investigation.
In a second statement on Tuesday, the Clayton PD said that it has dedicated extensive resources and brought in regional law enforcement partners, as well as the FBI, in order to find those responsible for this “repulsive, offensive, and violent act of arson.”
“We will not tolerate harassment, intimidation, or violence based on someone’s nationality, race, religion, or ideology,” the police added.
“I am outraged: antisemitic violence has no place in America – not in St. Louis, not anywhere,” the chair of the US Justice Department’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, Leo Terrell, said in a post on X/Twitter on Wednesday.
Terrell added that he had alerted US Attorney-General Pam Bondi regarding the incident and contacted the family and the FBI.
“We will pursue every avenue to bring the perpetrators to justice. If you commit antisemitic hate crimes, you will be caught, and you will be held accountable,” he wrote.
'Latest example of what happens when antisemitic, anti-Israel rhetoric normalized'
Several Jewish organizations issued a joint statement saying that the attack was “a hateful act of intimidation and only the latest example of what happens when antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric are normalized.”
This statement was signed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) – St. Louis; the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – Heartland; the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of St. Louis; the Jewish Federation of St. Louis; the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) St. Louis; and the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum.
The incident came on the same day as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 2024 Hate Crime Report revealed Jews to be the most targeted religious group in the US.
One thousand nine hundred thirty-eight anti‑Jewish, single-bias hate crimes against 2,237 victims were recorded in 2024, representing 69% of all religiously-motivated incidents in the country.
This was a 2% increase from 2023, when anti-Jewish hate crimes made up 67% of the total (1,832 incidents overall).