Police investigate anti-Israel graffiti on Seattle Holocaust Museum as a hate crime

A Holocaust museum in Seattle was vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti on Monday night, and the case is now being investigated as a hate crime by Seattle police. Staff at the Holocaust Center for Humanity in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood arrived Tuesday morning to find the words, "Genocide in Gaza," written in red over a photo of a Holocaust survivor named Steve Adler.

According to KOMO News, Adler spent his life teaching others about hate and antisemitism during speeches at local schools and at the center until he passed away in 2019. Adler said in his survivor testimony on the center's website, "Never again being silent, and speaking out when it could make a difference."

In a statement, the center’s CEO said they are "saddened that someone would think that they are making a difference by vandalizing a nonprofit. A nonprofit with a mission to educate.” The Seattle Police Department told KOMO News that the incident is being investigated as a hate crime.

Last month, over 2 dozen employees at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle walked off the job following the opening of the museum’s “Confronting Hate Together,” about racism faced by the Asian, black, and Jewish communities and the museum has been closed even since. Antisemitic activists were irked by an exhibit panel from the Jewish Historical Society that read, “Today, antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism,” showed the Herzl Ner Tamid Synagogue on Mercer Island after it had been vandalized by anti-Israel activists.

The panel continued that the phrase graffitied on the synagogue, “Stop the killing," was in spirit to the idea that “the Jews of Mercer Island could control the actions of the Israeli government.” Antisemitism has been rampant in Washington since the Palestinian terror attacks of October 7, 2023, with barely a word from local Democratic officials. Last month, a masked man in a keffiyeh, which has become the symbol of anti-Israel sentiment, was caught on surveillance footage throwing rocks in broad daylight through the window of a Jewish home that had a sign reading "Seattle stands with Israel."

The father told The Ari Hoffman Show on Talk Radio 570 KVI, “I think about exactly what we just saw on the campus of the University of Washington. There were graffiti tags that quite literally said, ‘Kill your local Zionist.’ You replace the word ‘Zionist’ with any other minority, and for those out there that say there's a distinction between a ‘Zionist’ and a ‘Jew,’ it is one and the same and that is just a way to get around saying Jew in this world that we live in. You replace that word Zionist with any other minority or protected class, it is front-page news. And it is something that's being talked about and, as you said, being condemned.”