Mayor Adams donates $5,000 of his own money to reward memorial vandals: ‘We can’t stay silent’

Metro

By Kate Sheehy

On Tuesday, furious Mayor Eric Adams contributed $5,000 of his own money to the reward offered for information leading to the arrest of anti-Israel “cowards” who defaced a local war memorial.

“Despite this unpopular idea, I’m going to say it: ‘I love America,'” Adams said at a news conference in front of the historic World War I monument in Central Park — which a crowd attended. spray painted and plastered. with anti-Israeli stickers the night before.

“We cannot remain silent when our symbols of freedom are desecrated by individuals who clearly hate our country and our way of life,” he said. “I’m not going to stay silent because our silence makes it seem like everything is okay.

“The same rights they are demanding – they are desecrating the lives of the people who fought for them,” he said of the protesters. “I want to show all New Yorkers that our city will not tolerate chaos and disorder.

“I don’t just walk the talk. I’m going to put my money where my heart is.

The mayor said he donated the money in honor of his 19-year-old “Uncle Joe” who died in the Vietnam War.

The money was added to $10,000 from Crime Stoppers, for a total of $15,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for this heinous vandalism, which included the burning of an American flag.

The mayor, accompanied by some of his top police officers and municipal commissioners, said flyers were being distributed in the area with images of the criminals, who were participating in a massive violent protest against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The crowd was isolated by cops before they could reach the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art and disrupt the Met Gala being held there. So she turned to the 107th Infantry Memorial and another Civil War statue in the park. Park workers cleaned up the graffiti Tuesday.

Zach Iscol, a former Navy, Iraq War veteran and current city emergency management commissioner, spoke movingly about his son’s arrival in Normandy, France last year for the 79th birthday of the capture of its beaches during the Second World War.

Iscol said that on his way to Tuesday’s press conference, he printed out some of the names of the young men who died in the First World War.

“I thought of my battalion. … We lost 33 Marines in combat, more than half of our battalion, 576 Marines, were injured. … I think about what we owe them,” he said.

City Veterans Services Commissioner Lt. Col. James Hendon added: “The bitter irony is that everyone who sacrificed and everyone who died would sacrifice and die again in order to protect the rights and freedoms of the very people who burned this flag and vandalized this monument.

Additional reporting by Tina Moore and Craig McCarthy