BELLINGHAM — A skeleton being used as a display at Bellingham High School was posed giving a fascist salute and decorated with a Nazi swastika in a “hateful and antisemitic” incident last week, school officials said.
It remained in view for a day until school officials were notified, according to a statement from Principal Martin Atkins about the Oct. 2 incident that was emailed to parents, students and staff on Oct. 6.
Details about the antisemitism weren’t explained in Atkins’ email, but were provided by school district spokeswoman Dana Smith.
“Bellingham High School administrators spent several days investigating this incident and selected appropriate responses,” Smith told The Herald in an email.
It was not immediately known how many students were involved or whether they were disciplined. Smith told The Herald that information could not be shared because of federal privacy laws.
School administrators learned of the incident on Tuesday, Oct. 3, and “removed all the images,” Atkins said in the email to parents, which Smith provided to The Bellingham Herald.
“On Monday afternoon this week (Oct. 2), a couple of our students decided to add hateful and antisemitic images and poses to the skeletons in our senior homecoming hallway decoration,” Atkins said in the email.
“In fact, someone must have seen it prior to us learning of it and removed the most offensive bits prior to administration being informed,” he said.
History of hate
Nazi Germany, using an ancient religious icon called the swastika as its emblem, systematically murdered 6 million Jews and 11 million others from 1933-1945 — including gay men, disabled people, Roma, political opponents, ethnic Poles and Soviet citizens.
Because of the Holocaust, the swastika remains the world’s most recognized symbol of hate and white supremacy.
Further, a brutal Nazi paramilitary unit called the SS used a skull and crossbones as its insignia.
Last week’s incident comes amid rising hatred against Jews across the U.S., according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
Antisemitism began to increase during the Trump administration and the pandemic as some critics of vaccine mandates and social-distancing drew a false equivalency to the Holocaust.
Several incidents involving the swastika and Nazi ideology have been reported in Bellingham over the past several years, and police have made no arrests.
Hateful rhetoric against Jews spiked in August 2022 when Hamas, the terror group that controls Gaza, fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians and the Israeli military responded with dozens of airstrikes. That conflict escalated in an extraordinary way on Saturday when Hamas fired missiles and militants crossed into Israel, taking hostages and killing more than 1,000 civilians.
The ADL’s 2023 audit of anti-Jewish hate found increases in every category that it tracks:
- Harassment rose 29 percent compared with 2021
- Vandalism involving antisemitic slogans and hateful symbols jumped 51 percent
- Assaults were up 26 percent
Most U.S. states, including Washington, have statutes with penalties for bias-motivated crimes. Washington is one of 34 states that required data collection on hate crimes. Only three states — Arkansas, South Carolina and Wyoming — do not have a hate crime law.
In his email, Atkins asked students and staff to report hate crimes and bias incidents. He provided links to websites that explain antisemitism, but didn’t address the issue directly.
“While that is a good thing and I recognize that it is hard to report hateful behavior, I invite us all to move past the discomfort of reporting so we can continue developing our school as a safe and inclusive learning environment,” Atkins said.
“The images and poses that were created hurt more than just one people-group and are the opposite of who we strive to be as a school community,” he said.
