James Polite was a Democrat activist who worked on the Obama Campaign. His foster parents were Jewish. And he was profiled in The New York Times.
Polite wrote, “Die Jew Rats” on the Union Temple of Brooklyn after the Pittsburgh massacre at a Jewish synagogue.
The Daily Caller reported:
The suspect in the vandalism of a New York synagogue was a Democratic activist and former City Hall intern who worked on anti-hate crime issues, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
He is a “queer” black man informally adopted by a Jewish couple, and The New York Times’ charity, the Neediest Cases, helped pay for him to go to college where his focus was African American studies, according to a 2017 New York Times profile.
A political event with two Democratic candidates at the Union Temple of Brooklyn was canceled Friday after attendees found graffiti saying “Die Jew Rats” and “Hitler,” which one of the candidates said highlighted the need to vote out “hate.” Police arrested 26-year old James Polite later that night based on surveillance footage.
A year ago, The New York Times profiled Polite, noting that he was an LGBT foster youth who “could defy the statistics” after becoming the “adopted child of the Quinn administration,” as Christine Quinn, then the speaker of the New York city council, put it. “And it wasn’t just me. It was the entire City Council staff.”
The New York Times ran a big story on Polite in December 2017.