A protest outside the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) president’s Los Angeles home is reportedly being investigated as a possible hate crime after social media videos showed demonstrators igniting smoke devices and spattering fake blood.
According to reports by the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets, the home of the Aipac president, Michael Tuchin, in the Brentwood section was vandalized on Thursday on Thanksgiving by protesters who also pounded pots in the driveway and held up a sign that read: “Fuck your holiday, baby killer.”
The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) confirmed it had responded to the block where Tuchin’s house is. The department posted on X – formerly known as Twitter – that protesters “caused a disturbance” weeks after the Israel-Hamas war that erupted in October.
“West LA officers responded [and] took crime reports for vandalism/hate crime [and] assault [with a] deadly weapon,” the department added. “Investigations are ongoing. No arrests have been made at this time.”
The Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, added in a separate post that she had spoken with Tuchin – an attorney by profession – about the “disturbing” case.
Bass wrote: “Hate and violence will not be tolerated in our city. LAPD will continue to work with city and business leaders to keep Angelenos safe.”
Bass later removed Tuchin’s name from the post, saying it was “for the safety of those involved”. Police said they do not identify the victims of possible crimes and declined to formally identify Tuchin as the target of the demonstrators.
Video posted by Sam Yebri, a former Los Angeles city council candidate, showed smoke billowing in the street as people yelled.
Yebri said that “pro-Hamas activists committed a terroristic hate crime in Brentwood, throwing smoke bombs at [and] vandalizing the home of the national president of one of America’s leading Jewish organizations”.
“This is what happened in Nazi Germany before the ovens and [crematoriums],” Yebri said, clearly referring to the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust during the second world war.
A neighbor of Tuchin’s told NBC that when he realized the private property was being attacked by demonstrators he – as a Jew – felt compelled to intervene.
“They put red paint on the car, on the driveway, on the windows,” the neighbor said. “They were terrorizing our neighbor.”
The neighbor, who declined to be identified, said that during the confrontation he was hit from behind with a steel pole. Police officers called to the scene made the demonstrators march back down the street.
On Friday, the police department declared a citywide tactical alert “to ensure sufficient resources to address any incident”. There were more pro-Palestinian protests planned that day.
Groups protesting against the war Israel launched in Gaza in response to Hamas’s deadly 7 October attack against Israel have criticized how authorities and media have addressed the protest at the home of Tuchin, who led a successful bankruptcy-related restructuring of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
“Media is in lockstep with LA elected officials & the LAPD to spin this protest as an ‘antisemitic hate crime’,” J-Town Action と Solidarity – which describes itself as a local grassroots collective – wrote on X. J-Town accused news organizations and officials of downplaying Tuchin’s role with Aipac.
Los Angeles, home to large populations of Jews and Palestinians, has seen increasing tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.
Earlier this month, the parking lot of the iconic Canter’s Deli was defaced with “Free Gaza” and “Israel’s only religion is capitalism”. Similar messages were also scrawled close to a nearby synagogue and condemned by Bass as an “unacceptable rash of hate”.
