College student from York County charged with antisemitic hate crimes
YORK COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) — The 23-year-old woman charged with spitting on flags commemorating the Holocaust and going on an “antisemitic tirade” is from York County, abc27 News has learned.
Jenna Kandeel — charged with three misdemeanors, including hate crime, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct — is from Stewartstown, York County, confirmed Mat Marshall, a spokesman for Delaware’s Department of Justice. The University of Delaware, in an email to students, didn’t name Kandeel but told other students the student who damaged a Holocaust memorial display and “was yelling antisemitic slurs” had been “banned from campus.”
Kandeel told police she vandalized the display because she was “frustrated and triggered,” according to police charging documents. The documents say she was caught on camera and observed by witnesses destroying the flags and saying vulgarities about Jews, in addition to “Jewish people are nasty; free Palestine.”
The display — part of Holocaust Rememberance Week at the school — consisted of color-coded flags representing groups of people who murdered in the Holocaust. During World War II, Nazis murdered 6 million Jewish people and 5 million other people who were members of other racial, ethnic, religious and gender minorities, in concentration camps, primarily in Poland and Germany.
Police found Kandeel May 8 as she was walking away from the scene, according to the charging documents.
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“We have a proud history of protecting free speech in this country, including and especially political dissent,” Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a statement. “But we need to be lucid enough to recognize the daylight — miles of it, in this case — between protest and hate. The Holocaust is not ancient history. 80 years later, the world’s Jewish population still has not recovered; its survivors are still with us; and I fear that we still have not learned its lessons. Seeing this ignorance on display, particularly in an increasingly antisemitic climate, should be a wake-up call. We still have work to do.”
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