A NAZI swastika sign has been etched on the sign of a politician whose family escaped the horrors of the Holocaust in Germany during World War II.
The vile symbol was scrawled on a billboard of federal Isaacs Labor MP Mark Dreyfus at the Mordialloc Football Club oval late last week.
The father of Mr Dreyfus, award-winning composer and musician George Dreyfus, left Nazi Germany when he was 11 in 1938 amid rising fascism and state-sanctioned attacks on Jewish people under Adolf Hitler’s dictatorial regime.
When contacted about the vandalised sign at Ben Kavanagh Reserve, photos of which The News has decided not to publish, Mr Dreyfus believed “this kind of graffiti could only be done by someone ignorant of history”.
“It is very disappointing that in 2016 there are still people out there who graffiti Nazi symbols on signs at local sporting clubs,” Mr Dreyfus said.
“I hope that whoever decided to graffiti swastikas on these signs will have a good hard look at the devastation caused by the Nazis and reassess whether it’s something they would want to associate themselves with.”
Three of the MP’s great-grandparents died in the Holocaust.
Victoria Police introduced a Prejudice Motivated Crime Strategy in 2011. Anyone, including victims, can report such crimes to police to investigate. There is no legally binding definition of a “race hate crime” in Victoria.
Victoria Police regards a prejudice motivated crime as “a crime motivated by prejudice or hatred towards a person or a group because of a particular characteristic such as sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, race, sex, age, disability or homelessness”.
First published in the Chelsea Mordialloc Mentone News – 26 October 2016
