Man charged with ethnic intimidation after allegedly damaging Israeli flag outside home
Pittsburgh police have arrested one of the people allegedly connected to multiple incidents of harassment and ethnic intimidation on the North Side in recent weeks.
Mario Ashkar, 36, of Perry South, was arrested on Thursday and faces charges of ethnic intimidation, criminal mischief, theft by unlawful taking and disorderly conduct.
The incidents — including defacing an Israeli flag and vandalizing property — happened over several weeks at a home in the Mexican War Streets.
As of now, Mr. Ashkar has been tied to only one of those incidents — surveillance footage from April 19 shows Mr. Ashkar ripping an Israeli flag from outside the home while an unidentified man watches on, according to a criminal complaint.
“You are going to get in trouble,” the man told Mr. Ashkar, who threw the flag and its holder into a nearby garbage can and walked away.
“It is well known that there is an abundance of antisemitic instances happening worldwide due to the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel,” officers wrote in the complaint. “This act was clearly done to intimidate, harass and annoy the victim.”
Earlier in the month, there were two occasions where the woman who lives in the home received “antisemitic and pro-Palestinian literature, photos, and a handwritten message in her mailbox,” Public Safety spokesperson Cara Cruz said.
The woman who lives in the home — who asked that she be identified only by the initials D.B. out of fear of escalating attacks — told the Post-Gazette last month that she put the small garden flag in her flower bed as support for Israeli hostages.
She said a few days after she put the flag out, it was torn down and tossed into an alley. Two days later, after she had put the flag back on its small stand, someone wrote, “We demand blood” on the blue and white fabric. Other times, she said, photos of dead children were hung on her front door with the message “Glory to the child martyrs of Gaza.”
Two days after Mr. Ashkar allegedly ripped the Israeli flag down, D.B.’s home security cameras had also captured a man spray painting the words “for blood and soil” on the brick walkway in front of her home.
The term “blood and soil” was a slogan that predates the Nazi regime but was used by Nazis to evoke the idea of a pure “Aryan” race and the territory they wanted to conquer, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It was also a tool to justify land seizures in eastern Europe and the forced expulsion of local populations in favor of ethnic Germans.
There’s been an increased number of threats against both Muslim and Jewish communities nationwide since Oct. 7, when Hamas, a designated terrorist group, took around 240 hostages and killed 1,200 Israelis.
Israel’s counter- attack has subjected the people of Gaza to one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history. An estimated 34,700 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military response — more than 14,000 of those being children.