Report: String of neo Nazi posters posted at UW
Feb 17, 2017, 1:30 PM | Updated: 2:17 pm
(KIRO 7)
A University of Washington theater group reported that their door was plastered with neo Nazi posters this week. It is the latest in a handful of similar incidents on the college campus.
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The Seattle PI reports that students were performing Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” on Wednesday night. At one point, the theater crew smelled what they thought was spray paint. Upon further inspection, the smell turned out to be spray adhesive used to post neo Nazi posters all over the front door of the Glenn Hughes Theatre on campus.
The Stranger further reports that the student actors were startled — all the leads are people of color, and the audience was diverse as well.
It’s not the first such incident. The Stranger has also reported about other sightings of neo Nazi posters on the UW campus in recent months. The posters ask people to “join your local Nazis” which are “congregating near you.” They promote that a race war will soon begin, causing the world to burn.
More and more neo Nazi posters
According to the PI, the neo Nazi posters have been popping up all over campus in recent weeks. UW Police Commander Steve Rittereiser told the PI that the posters are “not all that unusual” to see around UW. He notes that they seem to have considerably increased in frequency since Inauguration Day. The commander said they have commonly been spotted in Red Square. The square is where numerous demonstrations take place, and where a man was shot by a Milo Yiannopoulos supporter outside an event where Yiannopoulos was speaking. Yiannopoulos is known as an alt-right speaker and is considered highly controversial.
The purpose of the posters appear to be for recruitment by The Atomwaffen Division. The group’s Twitter page has bragged about reports of its posters being found at UW. It also tweets pictures of its group’s flag hanging at various UW campus locations. Their rhetoric targets the LGBTQ community, Jewish people and other minorities.
Other tweets post battle images from WWII, or photos of Atomwaffen members holding firearms — their faces covered with a skull and crossbones image. The group appears to have a connection to Iron March, an online forum for white supremacists, promoting fascism. Attomwaffen also links to a website called Rope Culture, again, a white supremacist site.