Hateful antisemitic messages have been scrawled outside the headquarters of The Free Press — days after founder Bari Weiss labeled the Hamas terror attacks “the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”
Weiss — the author of “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” who famously resigned as the New York Times’ star columnist in 2020 over its bias — tweeted photos Sunday of graffiti including “F–k Jews” and “F–k Israel.”
“If the antisemites who did this think it will intimidate me and the journalists of [The Free Press], they don’t know me, they don’t know us, and they have no idea what we stand for,” Weiss wrote in a message viewed more than 2.4 million times by early Monday.
Her independent news outlet has offices in New York City and Los Angeles. It was not immediately clear from Weiss’ post which of the two locations was defaced.
The incident comes just weeks after Weiss, 39, appeared on Fox News and proclaimed the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists “the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”
Her main objective is now shedding light on the plight of Jews attacked in the slaughter of more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, with more than 200 others also taken hostage, she said.
“That is what I’m focused on,” she said. “Trying to tell their stories and demand that the world wake up. Trying to help the world understand that what’s happening here is not just another war in Israel. It’s a massacre of unspeakable proportions.”
Journalist Geoffrey Cain, who has been covering the war for The Free Press on the ground in Israel, reacted to Weiss’ post Sunday, decrying the act of hate-filled vandalism as “a sad sign of the times in the US.”
In her resignation letter to the Times, Weiss had noted how even then she needed “bravery” to show up at a job where she was attacked for “writing about the Jews again.”
Antisemitic attacks have been on the rise in the US and around the world since Israel began pummeling Gaza with retaliatory airstrikes ahead of its planned ground offensive aimed at eliminating Hamas.
Jewish houses of worship in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have been targeted with bogus bomb threats and swatting calls over the past two weeks.
The US Department of Homeland Security has warned in a new intelligence assessment that hate crimes targeting Jews, Muslims and Arabs were on the rise in light of the intensifying conflict in the Middle East.
In London, two Jewish elementary schools were splashed with red paint, and in Tunisia and a Spanish enclave in North Africa, two synagogues were attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters.