Escalating interfaith tension in Orange County thanks to hate rhetoric during the Feb. 13 battle of Yorba Linda? The on-line news agency Voice of OC raises the possibility in coverage of a statement by the county's Human Relations Commission:Most of the controversy has centered on comments made by Deborah Pauly, who is a Villa Park councilwoman and the first vice chair of the Orange County Republican Central Committee. Pauly says in the video: "I know quite a few Marines who would be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise."
Before the [commission] statement was released, Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Human Relations Commission, said community leaders should be careful not to use rhetoric that could stoke the "fringes of our society" into committing hate crimes against people for their ethnic or religious backgrounds.
The protest could have already inspired at least one such hate crime. A few days after the video went viral, Kennedy said, a Muslim woman shopping at a grocery store in Anaheim Hills went back to her car and found a page of the Koran taped to her windshield. The letters "F U" were scrawled on the page. Her car was also keyed.
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