Vandal mars Qns. statue of Columbus

ANOTHER STATUE of Christopher Columbus has been vandalized, this time in Queens and with graffiti, police said.

“Don’t honor genocide. Take this down,” the vandal wrote on the pedestal of the statue at Columbus Triangle on 32nd St. in Astoria. The tag was found at about 7 a.m. Thursday.

The incident comes days after a Columbus bust in Yonkers was knocked off its pedestal and decapitated. Another Columbus statue was damaged by vandals in Baltimore earlier in August, as were monuments to the Italian explorer in Houston and Buffalo.

Monuments to Columbus have been a widespread topic of debate since white supremacists and neo-Nazis violently protested plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 4-5.

Mayor de Blasio has ordered a commission to recommend which, if any, controversial historic markers should be removed from property.

“It’s either a distraction, or he’s using it to try to score political points,” Assemblywoman and Republican mayoral candidate Nicole Malliotakis said of de Blasio. “But what he’s doing is causing more divisiveness against each other.”

Malliotakis said the mayor should provide details about the makeup of the commission.

“I still insist that he should be presenting this list of statues that he believes and the commission believes should be removed prior to re-election,” she said.

“New Yorkers deserve to know what their mayor intends to do in the next term. He’s opened a can of worms now.”

Columbus has been accused of murdering, torturing and mutilating native inhabitants on the island of Hispaniola in the Carribean, where he was governor. The gruesome details were found in a 1502 report unearthed in a Spanish archive in 2006.

The explorer also has been accused of importing a host of diseases that wiped out vast numbers of the indigenous peoples. city