Four More Arrested for Defacing Subway Ads
Mona El-Tahawy Image by youtube/new york post
Four more activists were arrested for defacing controversial New York subway ads branding Muslims as ‘savage.’
Mona El-Tahawy Image by youtube/new york post
The four were caught trying to cover up an ad on a station in midtown Manhattan, the New York Post reported.
The activists, identified as Leena Widdi, 19, Sherry Wolf, 47, Kenneth Chan, 22, and Emmanuel Pardilla, 21, were given summonses and released.
On Tuesday, Mona El-Tahawy was arrested for spraypainting one of the ads. She was arrested in the Times Square station and held for nearly 24 hours.
Her lawyer, Stanley Cohen, said he was flabbergasted by El-Tahawy’s treatment.
“If the person who did this was named Schwartz and it was a Holocaust-denier poster, they’d get no worse than a summons and a violation,” he told the paper.
The ads, which read in part “Support Israel. Oppose Jihad” and suggest opponents of Israel are “savage,” were paid for by the pro-Israel American Freedom Defense Initiative, run by blogger Pamela Geller.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority initially rejected the ads but was ordered by a federal judge to post them.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
