The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), the largest Greek-American organization in the United States, denounced an attack in Athens by a Communist-led mob that tried to bring down a statue of the late President Harry Truman.

“AHEPA respects and encourages freedom of speech and the rights of individuals to gather and demonstrate peacefully,” the association’s Supreme President Carl R. Hollister said in a statement.
“However, there are certainly more productive and effective ways to express dissent or opposition than to resort to senseless acts of vandalism,” he said, praising riot police who tried to prevent yet more vandalism on the statue that has been a lighting rod target of Leftists for years and has been bombed, painted and toppled previously since being erected in 1963.

AHEPA donated the statue to honor the Truman Doctrine, which gave $2 billion in economic and military aid to the Greek government to fight off Communist guerrillas during the country’s civil war between 1946 and 1949.

The assault came as part of Communist-led protests against the US-led air strikes on Syria for using chemical weapons on civilians, including women and children, which the Communists insisted never happened and was faked, despite independent verification of the videos and photos and the scene.

The assault made headlines around the world with Communists furious that while Truman’s help was essential for Greece that it was aimed at them for trying to take control of the country during the 1946-49 Greek Civil War.

Truman provided critical military and material assistance to Greek nationalists who beat back the Communists who still exist as an irrelevant political party today with around 6 percent of the vote, where they have been hovering for years despite constant recruiting of young people and college students.

Protesters used a metal grinder to try to cut off the statue’s feet and tug it down with ropes before riot police intervened and fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. The statue suffered minor damage. At least three protesters were injured, with blood trickling from their heads, a Reuters witness said.
Several hundred Communist (KKE) supporters joined a march to the U.S. Embassy, a couple of miles from the statue.

“What we did today is a symbolic move against the U.S. and the war (in Syria),” Yorgos Perros, a member of the Communist-affiliated union PAME told the nes agency. “The statue is a symbol of imperialism and the United States in Greece.”

The 12-foot, bronze Truman statue, also not far from the prime minister’s office, has been a regular target of protesters who have vandalised or attacked it with paint against what they keep calling American imperialist policies and those upset the US backed the military junta dictatorship from 1967-74 that oppressed Leftists, also angry America backed the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
The statue had to be removed and restored in 1986 after being bombed. Truman was U.S. President from 1945 to 1953.