Outside the Bagel Time Cafe on Miami Beach, there are more flags in support of Israel now more than ever. And it’s by design.
Cafe owner Josh Nodel is loud when it comes to his love for Israel. So when he heard police arrested a Pennsylvania woman for tearing down two of his flags, he had harsh words.
“This lady, she is the lowest,” Nodel said. "Intentionally, she knew what she was doing, she knew what she was coming to do, she did it with hate,” he said.
Bagel Time Cafe on Alton Road has been vandalized three times since the Israel-Hamas war broke out. In one of the incidents, surveillance video caught a woman assessing the flags — one Israeli-American flag and then a second American flag — then she rips them down and drags them to the middle of the road where she stomps on them.
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The woman caught in the video has now been identified as Yasmeen Hasan Al-Akhras.
Al-Akhras was arrested on a warrant in Pennsylvania and later turned herself in to the Miami Beach Police Department.
Her attorney stated in court that there is no evidence that proves Al-Akhras knew that the owner of the store was Jewish.
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"I believe that there is no evidence, nothing there to suggest that my client was where the owner of the store was in fact Jewish," said her lawyer while arguing that the accusation that this act would have been a hate crime by his client was false. "It was more of a political statement than anything else."
Court records go into detail as to how investigators with the Miami Beach Police Department used fingerprints lifted from one of the discarded flags, license plate readers and surveillance video to identify the defendant, then locate her in Philadelphia.
Al-Akhras faces two charges of petty theft, with the prosecutor saying in court that the charges are enhanced to felonies because of prejudice.
The judge set her bond at $2,000.
This isn't the first time somebody has desecrated Nodel’s restaurant, which caters to an orthodox Jewish clientele.
The signs and flags went up shortly after the Israel-Hamas war broke out. In one incident, a man took a knife and slashed his sign outside reading how the restaurant stands with Israel.
The man who slashed the sign has also been arrested and charged.
