Death to Islam.
That’s the message on three signs at “The Other Place,” a bar in West York. One of the signs, posted in a window, is visible from the sidewalk.
Jeff Seitz, who has owned and operated The Other Place for 17 years, said the sign in the window has been there for about a year. One of the signs inside the bar has been up since late 2001, he said.
“All my customers agree with me,” Seitz said. “Everybody says, ‘I love your sign.’”
Everybody— except for one man who recently moved to York Township from Baltimore, who walked into the bar while exploring West York.
The man declined to provide his name, citing fears of retribution, but has posted about the sign on social media and has reached out to media outlets.
Seitz said he put the signs up to protest the presence of Muslims in the U.S.
“These people blew up the World Trade Centers,” Seitz said, also mentioning Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim U.S. Army major who fatally shot 13 people and wounded more than 30 people at Fort Hood, an Army base in Texas.
West York Police Chief Jason Seibel said no complaints have been filed about the sign. Anti Defamation-League Regional Director Nancy Baron-Baer said the signs’ message would have to be more specific for it to be considered a threat.
“However, if someone said, I don’t like green people, and I’m getting my gun and going to kill them, then it has crossed the line — it’s a threat, something for law enforcement, and secondly not protected by First Amendment,” Baron-Baer said.
Ibrahim Hooper, Council on American-Islamic Relations spokesman, said the sign is no different than anti-Semitic or racist comments.
“It’s Islamophobia, a similar type of hatred to all these other forms of intolerance,” he said.
Hooper’s biggest worry was that messages like this encourage violence against the more than 6 million Muslims in the U.S.
He pointed to a recent road rage shooting in Houston, Texas, where alleged shooter Robert Craig Klimek made anti-Muslim statements before allegedly shooting Ziad Abu Naim, according to the Houston Chronicle.
Hooper also cited the February, 2015 shooting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina of three young Muslim university students by Craig Stephen Hicks.
“As we’ve seen through history, hatred of any minority group has a way of getting out of hand,” Hooper said.
Seitz said there was no connection between his signs and those incidents.
“You’re just taking it too far,” he said.