The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), a public transit agency, recently accepted money for running ads produced by an anti-Semitic group that promotes Holocaust denial and distortion. The transit agency defended its controversial decision based on the First Amendment rights of the group. This action comes at a time when the number of anti-Semitic incidents has risen rapidly in the United States, especially on college campuses.

Along with hundreds of thousands of commuters who use the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in San Francisco and its suburbs, we are deeply disturbed at BART’s misguided decision to allow advertising on its electronic billboards from a nefarious hate group that masks its denial of history in a veneer of pseudo-scholarship. This California-based group believes that Hitler was a role model, denied that anyone was gassed at Auschwitz and “questions” the historical validity of the Nazi Holocaust.

We wish that BART had contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center to seek its counsel on what would be an appropriate response when first approached by the so-called Institute for Historical Review (IHR).

For starters we would have informed BART, the IHR tried to place its disgusting advertising on the Washington, D.C. METRO system but was turned down by METRO.