{"id":225869,"date":"2026-05-09T19:52:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T19:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/225869\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T19:52:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T19:52:07","slug":"manhattans-doors-are-covered-in-a-hamas-targeting-symbol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/225869\/","title":{"rendered":"Manhattan’s doors are covered in a Hamas targeting symbol"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walking through Midtown Manhattan<\/a>, I stopped at a set of construction doors plastered with large posters from a campaign called\u00a0Laboris.art<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a\u00a0Service Employees International Union<\/a>\u00a0project. It is paid for by SEIU\u2019s Committee on Political Education, the union\u2019s federal political action committee, and tied to its\u00a0\u201cBall Without Billionaires<\/a>\u201d counter\u2011programming for this year\u2019s Met Gala. The slogans read\u00a0\u201cBillionaires Can\u2019t Buy Power\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cLabor Is Power.\u201d\u00a0Standard left\u2011populist messaging, until you notice the logo at the bottom of the poster: a crisp inverted red triangle.<\/p>\n

That symbol is antisemitic<\/a>, and it carries two hate\u2011filled histories \u2014 both histories of murder.<\/p>\n

The first is the\u00a0Nazi concentration camp badge system<\/a>. Beginning in 1937, the SS sewed color\u2011coded inverted triangles onto prisoner uniforms to mark inmates by the alleged grounds for incarceration. Red designated political prisoners. Pink marked gay men. Green marked criminals. Black marked \u201casocials,\u201d including Roma and other marginalized groups. Jews<\/a> were forced to wear a yellow Star of David, often combined with a colored triangle for those assigned a second category. The triangle was the bureaucratic tag of industrialized cruelty: the small piece of cloth that signaled who could be beaten, starved, or sent to die.<\/p>\n

The second history is more recent. Since October 2023, the\u00a0inverted red triangle<\/a>\u00a0has appeared at protests, encampments, posters, and stickers, often alongside open support for Hamas<\/a>. It has been used to target Jewish organizations and public figures. It was lifted directly from Hamas propaganda videos, where the symbol marked Israeli soldiers and civilians for attack. In current usage, it functions as a target marker.<\/p>\n

The Nazi version classified Jews for death. The Hamas version marks Jews for death. The same shape, the same color, the same purpose \u2014 separated by 80 years. Now, a clear derivative is pasted across construction doors in Manhattan as if it were a corporate logo.<\/p>\n

\"Hamas(Washington Examiner illustration; Getty Images)<\/p>\n

When the German American Bund filled\u00a0Madison Square Garden<\/a>\u00a0on Feb. 20, 1939, under a portrait of President George Washington flanked by swastikas, roughly 100,000 New Yorkers met them in the streets to say no. That is the American answer to rampant religious discrimination.<\/p>\n

Today, that answer is wobbling, and the silence is coming from the top. The Laboris.art posters are not anonymous fly\u2011posting. They are paid for by SEIU COPE, the PAC of the second\u2011largest union in the country, as part of a coordinated counter\u2011event to the Met Gala. The campaign and its accompanying \u201cBall Without Billionaires\u201d fashion show have been favorably covered by\u00a0Fast Company<\/a>,\u00a0CNN<\/a>,\u00a0Business of Fashion<\/a>, and\u00a0Sourcing Journal<\/a>. None of that coverage has remarked on the logo.<\/p>\n

New York City has seen this exact symbol before, and it knew what it was. In June 2024, vandals\u00a0painted inverted red triangles<\/a>\u00a0on the Brooklyn Heights home of Anne Pasternak, the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum, alongside a banner reading \u201cWhite Supremacist Zionist.\u201d <\/p>\n

Then\u2011Mayor Eric Adams went on X with the photographs and\u00a0called it\u00a0\u201ca crime, and \u2026 overt, unacceptable antisemitism.\u201d Gov. Kathy Hochul\u00a0(D-NY) described it\u00a0as\u00a0\u201can abhorrent act of antisemitism.\u201d Then-Comptroller Brad Lander said the perpetrators were \u201cway over the line into antisemitism.\u201d The NYPD investigated the incident as a hate crime; a\u00a0woman was later arrested and charged<\/a>. Two months later, when the same symbol appeared on the Brooklyn Heights co\u2011op of Columbia University\u2019s chief operating officer, the\u00a0NYPD again investigated<\/a>,\u00a0and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York described the act as \u201cstraight out of the 1930s Nazi playbook.\u201d That was the baseline: when the symbol appeared on a Jewish New Yorker\u2019s door, the city named it.<\/p>\n

Today, the same symbol functions as a corporate logo for a major union\u2019s political campaign, plastered across Midtown construction doors. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/a> spent Met Gala day promoting\u00a0\u201cWork of Art<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0a portrait series profiling six garment, retail, and warehouse workers,\u00a0released through i\u2011D magazine<\/a>\u00a0by his office on the same theme, on the same day as the SEIU campaign whose posters carry the triangle. The mayor has said nothing about the symbol. Neither has SEIU. When the city stops naming the symbol, the street keeps printing it. The construction doors are downstream of the doorway at Gracie Mansion.<\/p>\n

New York City has the authority to act.\u00a0NYC Construction Code \u00a73307.4.6<\/a>\u00a0prohibits any sign, pictorial representation, or advertising message on a construction protective structure unless required by law; the Department of Buildings enforces it.\u00a0Administrative Code \u00a710\u2011119<\/a>\u00a0covers lampposts and mailboxes, with fines from $75 to $300 plus removal costs. A printed website on the poster makes enforcement straightforward.<\/p>\n

There are three steps the city could take to make clear that religious discrimination and antisemitism are entirely unacceptable. First, DOB and the Department of Sanitation should establish a coordinated enforcement detail focused on illegal postings on scaffolding, sidewalk sheds, and construction fencing \u2014 a natural extension of the city\u2019s own\u00a0\u201cGet Sheds Down<\/a>\u201d\u00a0initiative, the program launched in 2023 to remove the long-standing sidewalk sheds that have come to define New York\u2019s streetscapes.<\/p>\n

Second, the City Council should amend \u00a710\u2011121 to escalate penalties when illegal postings incorporate symbols tied to designated terrorist organizations or Nazi<\/a>\u2011era atrocity iconography. The First Amendment protects speech; it does not require the city to tolerate vandalism that carries it. Third, DOB should require general contractors \u2014 already responsible for maintaining sidewalk sheds \u2014 to remove unauthorized postings within 24 hours and report repeat offenders.<\/p>\n

RESTORING AMERICA \u2014 THE WORLD MUST CHOOSE: STAND WITH AMERICA OR YIELD TO IRAN<\/a><\/p>\n

Construction doors wrapped in a death symbol tell us something about what we are willing to accept. No American should have to walk past them on the way to work.<\/p>\n

Not in this country. Not on our streets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walking through Midtown Manhattan, I stopped at a set of construction doors plastered with large posters from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[3862,21539,59,7423,7702,75,84,83,30738,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-225869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-antisemitism","tag-cultural-issues","tag-hamas","tag-in-focus","tag-judaism","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-nazis","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}