Montgomery County police are investigating anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian graffiti discovered Friday morning on an outside wall of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda.
Whitman Principal Gregory Miller notified the school community about the graffiti in a letter Friday. “This morning we discovered the words, “F*** Muslims, Nuke Palestine,” with a star of David symbol graffitied on the school building,” he wrote. “This profoundly offensive, threatening, anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobic hate speech is completely unacceptable, hurtful, and will not be tolerated at Walt Whitman High School or any school in Montgomery County.”
Miller said the school immediately contacted police and will collaborate with their investigation by reviewing security camera video and meeting with students as appropriate. In a statement Saturday afternoon, police said that surveillance video “shows several suspects running away from the school toward the football field at approximately 2:31 a.m. There is no suspect description available at this time.”
The graffiti has been covered over, Miller said, and will be removed. But its appearance Friday sparked anger and fear from many in the county’s Muslim and Palestinian communities.
“Language that calls for the obliteration of a population victimized by over two years of genocide and decades-long oppression is an expression of abject, pathological cruelty,” Zainab Chaudry, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Maryland director, said in a statement. “Promoting hate and violence against any community is never acceptable in our institutions and communities. Muslim students deserve to feel safe, valued and protected.”
On Facebook, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) wrote, “Grateful that MCPS, Whitman Principal Gregory Miller and our whole community have moved swiftly to denounce intolerable hate speech scrawled against Palestinians and Muslims at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. We stand together in Montgomery County against campaigns to demonize and vilify anyone based on race, religion or ethnicity.”
County politicians have also denounced the graffiti. County Executive Marc Elrich said in a statement that he was “deeply disturbed” by the graffiti and that “it will not be tolerated.”
“Montgomery County is home to people of many faiths, cultures, and backgrounds, and that diversity is one of our greatest strengths,” Elrich said. “Acts of hate — whether directed at Muslims, Jews, Christians, or any other community — undermine the safety and dignity of our neighbors and have no place here.”
Council member Andrew Friedson, whose district includes Whitman, said in a statement that he hopes those responsible will be held accountable. “It is on each of us in Montgomery County to ensure that hate has no place here,” he said.
The spray-painted slurs have shaken Muslim students and residents of the county, said Aiman, a Palestinian American who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name because of safety concerns. A father of two sons who have graduated from Whitman and another who is a senior at the school, Aiman said he was speaking “as a loving father deeply concerned about my child’s safety, his dignity, his mental well-being.”
“Generally speaking we have an extremely well integrated community and it’s those outliers that really frighten us,” he said. “Outliers on all sides, not just the anti-Muslim side but the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish side.”
Aiman said that after the initial shock of seeing the hateful words painted on the school, members of the local Muslim community connected on Zoom calls Friday to explore how to respond in a concrete way.
“One of the biggest concerns that we have is a more balanced curricula to educate people on the broader picture of the region,” he said. “Most of the messaging that comes out in our community and the media are very focused on the anti-Semitic issues and the Holocaust, but there’s rarely curricula driven around the Middle East as a whole.”
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