If you were asleep late Wednesday night, you might have missed the covert drop of a company of Nazi paratroopers into McKees Rocks. Gathering up their parachutes and sledgehammers, they set out for the Beth Hamedrish Hagadol-Beth Jacob Congregation cemetery. There, the elite unit engaged in an orgy of destruction the likes of which our region hadn't seen since, well, since the last time a local cemetery was vandalized. Which turns out to be several times each year. In most instances where graves are vandalized, bored, drunk teen-agers are to blame. The McKees Rocks incident was different in only two ways: The main perpetrator was not a teen-ager, but a 12-year-old, according to police. He was caught at Sto-Rox Middle School on Thursday. And this particular cemetery happens to be the final resting place of several thousand Jewish Pittsburghers. This means that Jewish rights groups and the city's other daily paper wasted no time in sounding the major-league alarm bells. As a result, the United Jewish Federation issued an alert to local Jewish organizations, urging vigilance against further attacks. So instead of denouncing this act as yet another unfortunate collision of puberty and Pabst Blue Ribbon, it was described, with a straight face, by a local metropolitan daily newspaper as an "enormous ... very deliberate, very serious," act. And, according to Bettysue Feuer of the Anti-Defamation League, it was "not kids" who were responsible. No doubt, knocking over 100 grave markers, some of them weighing more than half a ton, seems a challenge for the average pre-teen, most of whom can't be persuaded to lift two pounds of dirty laundry from a bedroom floor. Those involved also burned American flags that were removed from the grave sites, which in today's nervous-nationalist climate, made the crime appear that more ominous. But to recklessly equate disorganized vandalism by children with a well-organized anti-Semitic cabal is about as silly as hauling a crew of Fayette County cow-tippers before the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. That the Anti-Defamation League and local FBI agents can't tell the difference between a particularly awful neighborhood prank and a hate crime, is pretty scary in itself. In the mad rush to attribute the attack to a hate group, the alarm-ringers forget to perform any detective work. If they had, they might have noticed that Devil's Night, the annual festival of broken windows and decorative Charmin two-ply, does happen to be upon us. And where was the racist graffiti• Were these just an especially hapless group of hate-mongers• More likely, they were children who were turned away when they tried to buy paint from a hardware store. It's easy to understand why the FBI investigated Wednesday's incident as a possible hate crime. They were simply providing the public service they've been budgeted to perform. But when most of the country already is nervous about the possibility of attacks from within, a tiny measure of restraint would go a long way. Next time, instead of conjuring up the usual bogeymen, maybe we should find out what the neighborhood children have been doing. This time of year, they're often the ones to blame for things that go bump in the night.

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