Holocaust Center graffiti not a hate crime, Seattle police say

Seattle police said no crime was committed when someone scrawled the words “Genocide in Gaza” in red marker on a front window of the Holocaust Center for Humanity last week.

The Jewish center’s staff reported the graffiti as a potential hate crime after spotting the words on a window near the front entrance the morning of June 18. The words partially covered the photo of a young Holocaust survivor.

A Seattle Police Department bias crime detective investigated and determined there was no crime because the graffiti did not convey an explicit threat and was wiped clean “without causing damage or expense,” the department said in a statement Friday.

Dee Simon, the downtown center’s CEO, did not respond to a request for an interview Tuesday.

On Thursday, Simon said someone’s decision to target a Jewish institution over a conflict happening overseas “feels like antisemitism.”

“This, to us, felt like an act of violence directed to a Jewish organization for something that is happening in Israel,” Simon said. “It’s especially painful when it’s an organization whose mission it is to fight hate.”

Last week marked the first time the center had been tagged thus far during the Israel-Hamas war, which began when Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took some 250 others hostage in a Southern Israel terrorist attack on Oct. 7. Israel’s ground offensives and bombardments have since killed more than 37,600 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry.

The eight-month war and its skyrocketing death toll in Gaza have sparked protests across the world and in Washington, including weekslong encampments at local college and university campuses.

There has also been an “unprecedented” uptick in vandalism at Jewish institutions in and near Seattle since the conflict began, Simon said.

Someone’s decision to write “Genocide in Gaza” on the Holocaust Center for Humanity “blurs the boundaries from legitimate criticism of Israel into antisemitism,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas and Alon Milwicki of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based human rights nonprofit.

“The message combined with the location vandalized appears to thus conflate all Jewish people with Israel,” Rivas and Milwicki said in a statement Friday. “The selection of this particular location means that the individuals who did this are choosing to be disrespectful to a Holocaust museum and denigrating the seriousness of that atrocity.”