As part of their celebration of the Day of the Dead, Balboa Park’s Centro Cultural de la Raza put up an ofrenda (altar) honoring, among others, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 massacre that killed over 1,200 Israelis, and Qasem Soleimani, the deceased leader of the Iranian Quds Force responsible for hundreds of American and coalition deaths in Iraq.
The ofrenda also, at first, featured the flags for Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis. The Houthi flag calls for death to America and to Israel along with the slogans “Curse upon the Jews” and “Victory to Islam.” Hovering over the ofrenda is an inverted red triangle, a symbol Hamas uses in their combat videos to mark Israeli targets and now generally represents terrorist violence against Jews.
Hamas, we should remember, has been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan and the UK. Even before 10/7, Sinwar was known for his brutality, with a particular emphasis on hunting down gays.
It should be obvious that glorifying terrorism alongside the flag of a nation—Iran—that has massacred thousands of protestors does not align with the mission statement of the park’s cultural cottages, which is to “promote multicultural goodwill and understanding through educational and cultural programs.”
Instead, this ofrenda promotes hate.
Two local state representatives, Assemblymember Chris Ward and State Senator Steve Padilla, properly horrified by this abuse of the ofrenda and public property to celebrate terrorism and violence, posted on Instagram their disgust: Hamas and Hezbollah are “responsible for the mass murder of civilians and honoring their leaders in what is a sacred tradition in the Latino culture is wrong.” While everyone has the right to memorialize one’s deceased friends and family, memorializing “terrorists who plotted deliberately to murder and kidnap women and children in their beds” is deeply offensive and dangerous.
So Ward and Padilla called for the ofrenda to be removed “immediately.”
But the organizers decided to double down. They began their response by affirming “the right of all people to mourn their dead,” yet strangely conflate the people memorialized in the ofrenda, Palestinians, Iranians and Lebanese, with “Chicana/o, Mexican, Indigenous and Latinx peoples.”
The response gets much worse. They deny that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist groups. Instead, they accuse Ward and Padilla of “parroting local political lobbying groups” (they don’t say who they mean) and claim that the pair really wants “to wipe away the crimes of, and complicity with, Israel – a rogue state that has acted with impunity in its ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
Accusing Israel of genocide may be popular, but it is simply not true. The Gaza Ministry of Health (which is run by Hamas) deliberately fudges the distinction between fighters and civilians, but according to their numbers, the death rate for this is approximately 3% of the population. In a real genocide, the numbers are vastly higher—90% of Poland’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and 70-80% of the Tutsi population in Rwanda were slaughtered in 1994. The civilian casualties in Gaza are largely caused by Hamas using civilians as human shields and denying them entry into their vast array of tunnels for protection.
In other words, the Centro is in the grip of a fantasy, and the fact that the fantasy is widely shared does not make it any less of a fantasy.
The response goes on to proclaim: “We stand firm in the right to mourn all loss of life,” but that’s not true. Neither the ofrenda or the response mention the innocent Jewish lives lost on 10/7. According to the Centro, Israeli lives are not, as they say, “grievable.”
The Centro’s response claims that Ward and Padilla are “trampling on our first amendment protections.” But freedom of speech is never absolute, and it does not mean freedom from consequence. There are always limits on what one can say, and using a cultural tradition to endorse terrorism clearly goes way over the line, especially when the offending speech takes place on public property.
Mayor Todd Gloria has an extensive record supporting the Jewish community, and so, I call for him to once more stand with San Diego’s Jews and join Ward and Padilla in denouncing the ofrenda’s celebration of hatred and violence.
Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Salon, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His latest book is “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature” (Routledge).
