State Department officials revealed Tuesday they discovered a swastika carved into a wooden panel in an elevator at the department's headquarters the day before.
The elevator sits near the department's special task force devoted to monitoring anti-semitism, Axios first reported. All of the elevators in the State Department's Washington, D.C. headquarters are beyond a secure perimeter with tight access restrictions.
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In a tweet late Tuesday, President Joe Biden condemned the symbol and called on Americans to come together to stomp out hatred.
"Let me be clear: Anti-Semitism has no place in the State Department, in my Administration, or anywhere in the world," the president tweeted. "It's up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor and stand up to bigotry wherever we find it."
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, traveling abroad, said the department had removed the "hateful graffiti," and that leadership would investigate the incident.
"As this painfully reminds us, anti-Semitism isn't a relic of the past," Blinken wrote in an email to State Department employees. "It's still a force in the world, including close to home. And it's abhorrent. It has no place in the United States, at the State Department or anywhere else. And we must be relentless in standing up and rejecting it."
The secretary thanked his Jewish colleagues for their service.
Attacks on Jewish people in the U.S. have increased, including deadly attacks on synagogues. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish people reported more than 2,000 threatening incidents in 2020, the third-highest amount on record since the late 1970s.
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