(IsraelNN.com) A Saudi Arabian graduate student murdered a Middle Eastern Studies professor on Friday in the latter’s Binghamton University office in New York State. The victim, Richard T. Antoun, 77, was stabbed four times by 46-year-old Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani, a Muslim cultural anthropology student working on his dissertation.
Prof. Antoun’s widow, Roz, is an employee of the Jewish Federation. Al-Zahranis’ two apartment-mates said he was “argumentative, confrontational and threatened one of them in the three weeks they” lived in the same home, IthacaJournal.com reported.
A few hours after the murder, and further to the south in the same state (New York), three vandals were caught on video knocking down an 11-foot Chanukah menorah (candelabrum). The anti-Semitic attack occurred shortly before midnight on Friday outside a pharmacy in Suffolk County, Long Island.
About a dozen such menorahs are “protected” by cameras around the county, as they have frequently been targeted by anti-Semitic vandals in recent years.
Some nine weeks ago, three anti-Semitic attacks hit New Jersey. A youth was charged with juvenile delinquency for calling out “Heil Hitler” and giving a Nazi salute to three Jewish citizens on their way home from Yom Kippur prayers in Highland Park. The same week, three large swastikas were painted on the Congregation Beth-El synagogue building in Edison.
Days earlier in the same city, a 19-year-old Jewish male was beaten near the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva by a 16-year-old youth.
