A Jewish graveyard in East London was vandalised yesterday with 30-40 tombs damaged. Headstones were smashed, railings trashed and a small fire was started up against a wall in Plashet Cemetery, East Ham.
However, this latest incident is small fry compared to the major attack that left 386 gravestones damaged in the very same cemetery, back in 2003.
The desecration of burial grounds is an affront to people of any, or indeed, no faith but compared to the rampaging vandalism of 2003, this latest incident smacks more of drunken, mindless, snogging in a graveyard and dancing round a fire kind of tomfoolery commonly associated with wayward adolescents on Easter holiday than the police's view of it as "religiously motivated crime". But what do we know.
Interestingly, Plashet Cemetery is known as the "Trade Unionists Cemetery" so, more whimsically, perhaps it's a load of disgruntled commuters driving a warning shot across the RMT over imminent tube strike action.
Image of Plashet Cemetery's armoured boundary wall courtesy of pixelhut's Flickrstream.
