The FBI is offering a $5,000 reward for anyone who can provide information about a man seen on a surveillance video wrapping bacon around the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque. The vandal was also seen on video popping a piece of raw bacon into his mouth as he worked, so perhaps they ought to be looking around for an asshole with trichinosis?
The suspect, a white guy with glasses and dark sideburns, was caught on video wrapping bacon around the handles of Masjid-e-Tawheed around 3 a.m. on Sunday, December 27. The incident is now being investigated as a hate crime. At one point, as ABC noted, “he puts a strip of bacon in his mouth as he opens the package.”
Muslims don’t touch or eat bacon; a member of the mosque reportedly removed the pork with a napkin before calling police. A general contracting firm next door was also baconed, perhaps out of a mistaken idea that it was affiliated with the mosque.
The incident failed to bring the worshippers to their knees, the masjid leadership told the Las Vegas Sun:
“To us, it’s not as offensive as he might think,” said Fayyaz Raja, the vice president of the Islamic Association of Las Vegas at Masjid Tawheed. “According to our religion, yes, we can’t touch it, we can’t eat it. That I understand. But to me, it’s comical.”
The Daily Caller finds themselves predictably outraged that the incident is being investigated as a hate crime, calling it a “prank” committed by someone with an “impish sense of humor,” and arguing that the Council on American Islamic Relations is rushing to politicize it. But vandalism of places of worship are often treated as hate crimes by the FBI, including when someone spray-painted three churches in Nevada and California.
Here’s hoping a sideburned man in the Las Vegas area is ringing in the New Year with diarrhea and a gut full of parasitic worms.
Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
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