It’s looking more and more like the bad old days of the 1930s in Europe: Smoke bomb thrown into Jewish kindergarten in Berlin. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

BERLIN (EJP)—- A tragedy was avoided on Sunday after a smoke bomb, thrown through a window of a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin, failed to ignite.

However, the school, located in a northwest neighbourhood of the German capital, was not spared by the spray painting of swastikas, other Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic phrases, such as “Auschwitz,” “Juden Raus” (Jews, get out) and “Sieg Heil”, on its outer walls, as well as on toys that had been lying around in the school’s playground.

A police spokesman said the attack did not cause serious damage or endanger children or staff at the school.

Berlin’s Interior Minister Ehrhart Körting condemned the attack as a “cowardly act” and called it “a particularly brutal one...one that had taken anti-Semitic acts to a new dimension”.

UPDATE at 2/26/07 6:28:16 pm:

As several readers have pointed out, the swastika scrawled on that white door is backwards. A native German neo-Nazi would probably know the correct orientation for their hate symbol.