Hate-crime arrests in Quran desecrations at Pace University
July 27, 2007, 8:33 PM EDT
NEW YORK (AP) _ A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime
charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two
separate occasions, police said.
Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal
mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It
was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the
Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.
The Islamic holy book was found in a toilet at Pace's lower Manhattan
campus by a teacher on Oct. 13. A student discovered another book in a
toilet on Nov. 21, police said.
Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate
crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would
offer sensitivity training to its students.
The school was accused by Muslim students of not taking the incident
seriously enough at first. Pace classified the first desecration of
the holy book as an act of vandalism, but university officials later
reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police
Department's hate crimes unit.
The incidents came amid a spate of vandalism cases with religious or
racial overtones at the school. In an earlier incident on Sept. 21,
the school reported another copy of the Quran was found in a library
toilet, and in October someone scrawled racial slurs on a student's
car at the Westchester County satellite campus and on a bathroom wall
at the campus in lower Manhattan. Police did not connect Shmulevich to
those incidents.
Treatment of the Quran is a sensitive issue for Muslims, who view the
book as a sacred object and mistreating it as an offense against God.
The religion teaches that the Quran is the direct word of God.
In 2005, Newsweek magazine published and later retracted a story
claiming U.S. interrogators at a prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
flushed a copy of the holy book down a toilet. The report sparked
deadly demonstrations in Afghanistan and protests throughout the
Middle East.
Pace University has 14,000 students on its campuses in New York City
and Westchester County.
Messages left for school administrators and for officials with the New
York and national chapters of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations were not immediately returned Friday evening.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the national CAIR office in
Washington, D.C., has said the organization receives frequent reports
of Quran desecrations in the United States, especially postings on
Internet sites, but seldom makes them public.
He said CAIR decided to speak out about the Pace incidents because
Muslim students are impacted by the creation of what could be viewed
as a hostile campus environment.
--
There may come a time when the CO2 police will wander the earth telling
the poor and the dispossed how many dung chips they can put on their
cook fires. -- Captain Compassion.
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not
on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away
with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone
are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices
me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
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