Loading ...Mini Mart in Salem Vandalized with Anti-Arab Graffiti #HummusHaters
By Dustin Luca
The Salem News
The Friendly Mini Mart on Lafayette Street has a sign alongside its front door, saying, “We appreciate your business.” But a much darker message was scrawled across the convenience store’s front windows Friday morning.
The words “Arab I.E.D. Sleeper Cell” were spray-painted across one window, and “I.E.D. Arab” across the other.
I.E.D. is an acronym for “improvised explosive device,” the kind of roadside bomb frequently used in Iraq.
Two members of the family that owns the business declined to be interviewed Friday afternoon, due to their limited English proficiency, but referred questions to their son, who couldn’t be reached for comment.
The parents, however, confirmed they are Indian, and not of Arabic descent. They also expressed confusion about what the phrase meant.
Neighbors and others in the community expressed disgust over the vandalism.
City Council President Josh Turiel lives across the street from the store and said the business is “what I see when I look out my window in the morning.”
“These guys are neighbors. They’re businessmen. All the neighborhood kids know them,” Turiel said. “They know the customers. They know the people who live around here.”
When asked for his thoughts on the incident, Turiel said that “living in a city, or for that matter a country, where people feel they can do this kind of thing with impunity is just wrong — fundamentally wrong.”
Turiel said he didn’t know what the owners’ ethnic background is and didn’t care.
“I’ve never really cared,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
‘Hate crime’
The spray-painting constitutes a hate crime, according to Jeff Cohen, chairman of the city’s No Place for Hate committee. He also referred to it as a “bias crime” and “hate action” since it isn’t clear exactly what crime has been committed, he explained.
“Bias crimes create fear,” Cohen said. “We don’t necessarily feel it, but you can imagine the people who own the store. I said, ‘Look, I understand it must be tough,’ and they’re already more careful walking around.”
Race-driven vandalism has been in the news of late, with recent incidents in Beverly and Swampscott. That included graffiti at Beverly’s only Jewish synagogue, where the words “Merry Christmas” and a dollar sign were spray-painted on the back walls of Temple B’nai Abraham just a few days ago.
“We have a climate that has gotten worse this year,” Turiel said. “Right now, for a lot of reasons — some of them political, some otherwise — it has become … not so much fashionable, but people who have had these kinds of xenophobic feelings in the past no longer feel like they have to keep it to themselves.”
Cohen said the vandalism creates a perfect opportunity to put the city in a stronger light.
“This is when we know what kind of a community we are,” Cohen said. “It’s really the response to an incident that shows what the community is all about.”
He encouraged people to start shopping at the store en masse, to show their support for the owners and their disgust over the vandalism.
But some have already started doing that.
“I just think it’s horrendous,” said Peabody resident Pam Paine, who read about the graffiti on social media. Paine said she couldn’t read what the graffiti said based on the image she saw, but she knew what it was meant to convey.
It was a message she rejected, she said, as she entered the store for the first time in her life.
Paine left with a small bag containing a tube of toothpaste.
“I’ve got this to wash the bad taste out of my mouth,” she said.
Cohen said the No Place For Hate committee is likely to cover this incident at its next meeting on Tuesday, June 7. But in the meantime, he’s shopping at the Friendly Mini Mart.
“I’ve never been in the store,” he said. “I’m going to go back, not only to introduce myself to the parents, the owners, but I’m going to buy something, too.”