Members of Occupy Wall Street are claiming the New York Police Department (NYPD) has destroyed around 5,000 books during their raid of Zuccotti Park. Now the occupiers are demanding the destroyed books be replaced:
fter police raided Occupy Wall Street’s encampment at Zuccotti Park last Tuesday, the reported destruction of as many as 5,000 books in Occupy’s “People’s Library” sparked an outcry by protesters and bibliophiles across the country.
The remains of the People’s Library (Occupy Wall Street) “This breaks my heart. This is [expletive] 1984,” an Occupy Philadelphia protester said at the time. “[Expletive] Nazis,” Occupy protester Dylan Bozlee said. Even Salman Rushdie joined the furor: “Nazis destroyed books to ‘purify’ German culture. Bigots do it in the name of God, or Allah. What’s Bloomberg’s excuse? ‘Hygiene?’ ”
Today, Occupy Wall Street held a news conference about the library, and reported that 79 percent of books were missing or wrecked. The remaining books are reportedly in the condition pictured at left. Occupy’s attorney is demanding that the city replace every missing book.
I consider myself a bibliophile so I’m going to be a bit biased here but if these charges are factual it’s a rather disgusting move by NYPD. Truthfully I doubt the books were destroyed to censor the ideas contained within, it was more likely a case of the police simply not discriminating what they threw in the trash. Yet it is sad that 5,000 titles were destroyed as opposed to being collected and donated to a library or something along those lines.