Michigan State University Student Has His Mouth Stapled in Vicious Campus Hate Crime

UPDATE BELOW: College kids are well known for doing more-or-less innocuous, dumb pranks.  A little vending machine swap-out here, a little roommate’s revenge there (and there and there).  This is not one of those. 

This is serious. And it’s despicable. A 19-year-old Jewish college student at Michigan State was brutally beaten, his jaw broken and his gums stapled yesterday while at a party. And apparently it wasn’t just becomes some foolish frat boy was drunk. It was because he was Jewish. Apparently they asked him first:

Two men at a party early Sunday attacked Zachary Tennen, a journalism sophomore at MSU, after asking whether he was Jewish, his mother and father, Tina and Bruce Tennen, said today.

They raised their arms in a Nazi salute, chanting “Heil Hitler” and then knocked Tennen unconscious, she said.

What can we do when we see something like this happen?  Well, for one, we can take the attitude of Zach’s father, Bruce. According to the Detroit Free Press he responded by saying that he hopes “that we can live in a non-prejudicial, non-anti-Semitic society where somebody's not attacked based on their race, creed, nationality, religion, lifestyle."  For another, we can remind ourselves how fluidly hate is taught, and how haltingly trust is restored.

UPDATE: New reports on this incident inidcate that our story was innaccurate. Click here for more information.