A yard sign with “Fake News,” “#MAGA” and an arrow pointing to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in San Antonio was found by groundskeepers Tuesday hear the museum.
The homemade, spray-painted sign was removed shortly after it was found in the early morning hours, The San Antonio Express-News reported.
{mosads}“It’s clearly a statement of Holocaust denial,” Ronit Sherwin, CEO of the Jewish Federation of San Antonio, told the newspaper.
She said the vandalism was reported to the police. The Hill has reached out to the San Antonio Police Department for comment.
The yard sign in San Antonio follows a rise of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, which increased by 57 percent in 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Just two months ago, a gunman killed 11 people inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in the worst attack on Jewish people in U.S. history.
Trump condemned the attack in October, saying “this evil anti-Semitic attack is an attack on all of us, it is an assault on humanity.”
Sherwin’s group operates the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio, which has educated the community on the Holocaust for free at that location since 2000.
The federation’s board chair, Harry Levy, said in a statement was the vandalism was “doubly harmful in that it laughs at the memory of all the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust and is harmful to the precious few Holocaust survivors who witnessed the horrors of the Shoah first hand.”
“The ignorance expressed by the perpetrators can only be countered by shining the light of truth upon our shared history,” Levy said.
Aaron Delwiche, a professor of communication at Trinity University, told the newspaper that including President Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again” or MAGA, as well as “fake news,” should offend the president’s supporters.
“The term ‘fake news’ originally referred to completely fabricated news stories appearing in phony publications that don’t actually exist,” he told The Express-News. “During the past two years, President Trump has used this phrase as a name-calling device designed to discredit news coverage that he considers to be unfairly critical of his administration.”
“This anti-Semitic incident is a reminder that this sort of rhetoric has consequences,” Delwiche added. “The Holocaust was not fake news. It is time for all of us, on all sides of the political spectrum, to insist on facts, evidence, and logic when talking about politics.”
The Rivard Report noted that the yard sign also came two days after swastikas were spray-painted on the welcome sign of Converse, a city 15 miles northeast of downtown San Antonio.