A touching display of camaraderie went viral on social media over the weekend, after a group of commuters on a New York subway car came together to erase neo-Nazi graffiti by hand.
In a Facebook post published Saturday, New York resident Gregory Locke said he boarded the subway in Manhattan only to find a swastika drawn on every advertisement and window in the subway car.
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The train was silent as everyone stared at each other, uncomfortable and unsure what to do. “One guy got up and said, ‘Hand sanitizer gets rid of Sharpie. We need alcohol.’ He found some tissues and got to work,” Locke said.
“I’ve never seen so many people simultaneously reach into their bags and pockets looking for tissues and Purel.”
According to Locke’s post, the hateful graffiti was gone within minutes thanks to the combined efforts of the passengers on the train.
“‘I guess this is Trump’s America,’ said one passenger. No sir, it’s not. Not tonight and not ever. Not as long as stubborn New Yorkers have anything to say about it,” he wrote in the post, which has since been shared over 400,000 times.
There have been several reports of hate crimes across the United States over the last few months, which some believe may be in light of rhetoric used in President Donald Trump’s election campaign. Over the same weekend, the front window of a Chicago-area synagogue was smashed and swastika stickers were left on the building’s front doors.
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But incidents of hate crimes aren’t limited to the U.S. Just last week, Montreal police reported 14 cases of hate crimes against Muslims in the days following a deadly shooting at a Quebec City mosque. Across the province, Sûreté du Québec (SQ) officials estimate that about 250 cases have been reported since the attack.
In January, KKK flyers were sent to more than 70 homes in Abbotsford, B.C., which police believe were timed to coincide with Martin Luther King Day in the U.S.
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The incident on the New York subway has been reported to the NYPD, which is investigating it as a possible hate crime, according to a spokesperson.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said a similar incident happened in recent days, when a passenger on a different train spotted a swastika scrawled over an image of an American flag. The passenger, whom Cuomo did not name, used a marker to turn the symbol into a box with four quadrants and wrote in the letters L-O-V-E.
“This is what New Yorkers do — we turn hate into love,” Cuomo tweeted Sunday.
— With a file from Reuters