The Killians are not Damascus natives. They’re originally from the Charlotte area of North Carolina, McCrady said.

The video was originally posted to Johnston’s Facebook page. He removed it at McCrady’s request.

McCrady said he asked for it to be taken down primarily because he feared for the town’s safety. He cited recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where in August a group of neo-Nazis and white supremacists gathered to protest plans to remove a Confederate statue, a gathering that turned deadly.

However, the video remained online on a streaming video website. On that site, more than 300,000 views were reported by Tuesday evening.

The video’s link was posted to the social media site Reddit, where by Tuesday evening it had received more than 2,500 comments and nearly 11,000 upvotes, which allow Reddit users to vote on whether a piece of content should be listed higher on the site’s ranking system.

Rabbi Arthur Rutberg of the B’Nai Sholom Congregation in Bristol, Tennessee, said he felt “disgust” when he saw the video Tuesday morning. Rutberg has been at the Bristol synagogue for two years and said that, in that time, he hasn’t heard of any similar incidents.