Swastikas painted in front of California campus’ Jewish fraternity house
(JTA) — Police in California are investigating after a Jewish fraternity at the California Polytechnic State University reported finding swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti painted outside its house.
The symbols were scrawled in front of the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house in California’s San Luis Obispo County on Friday night, campus authorities said.
“We awoke to multiple swastikas and antisemitic statements spray-painted on and in front of our house,” the fraternity wrote in an Instagram post on Saturday. The post did not show images of the graffiti described in the post.
University President Jeffrey Armstrong and other officials Saturday evening said in a statement that the incident was reported to the San Luis Obispo Police Department and an investigation is underway, according to The Tribune of San Luis Obispo County, which is located about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“Let us be perfectly clear: behavior that promotes any form of hate and seeks to make members of our community feel unsafe and unwelcome – especially in their own home – has absolutely no place in our community,” the university president’s message said.
In 2018, Cal Poly made the news because of a push to increase funding to all student groups except those with a “Zionist ideology.”
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