By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

When a member of Dayton’s Jewish community posted a photo on Facebook Sept. 16 of an antisemitic sticker pasted on the rear of a strip club’s van, her friends could see the sticker really was on the van’s rear.

Rachel Haug Gilbert and her family were picking up pizza for dinner in Washington Township that evening when she noticed the sticker on the Diamonds Cabaret van, parked in front of the private club at 960 Miamisburg-Centerville Rd., on the other side of the outdoor mall.

The sticker showed an illustration of Jesus giving the middle finger with the message, “F— Jews.”

Diamonds’ van, wrapped with images of scantily-clad females, features a woman’s rear on the back of the vehicle. And that’s where a vandal affixed the antisemitic sticker.

Gilbert also posted that she “immediately parked her car and ripped off the offensive slur,” the word Jew, and posted a photo of the sticker after she had scraped off the word.

Diamonds Cabaret owner Luke Liakos told The Observer he wasn’t at the club at the time, but learned of the hate vandalism that evening on social media.

“Then I immediately called my managers to go out and see what was going on and they immediately removed it,” Liakos said. “It was disturbing and upsetting to say the least.”

After his managers removed the rest of the sticker — by then missing the word Jews — Liakos said he called the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office that night. The sheriff’s office report made no mention of the sticker’s anti-Jewish content, though after Liakos later received a copy of it, he emailed the sheriff’s department the original photo of the sticker from Gilbert’s Facebook post.

“It was not documented because the deputy that responded out there had no idea what the sticker said,” Maj. Matt Haines of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office told The Observer. “The person that called, who was an employee of Diamond’s, never saw the sticker, just the aftermath of the sticker being ripped off by somebody. So he didn’t know what it said when he called us.”

Haines added that he was providing the FBI with the image Liakos emailed to the sheriff’s office. Liakos, who isn’t Jewish, is convinced the hate sticker was put on his van by one of the religious protesters who show up in front of his business on the weekends.

“I have a feeling they were behind it,” he said. “I can’t prove it, because we don’t have video of it — we went through all the video and we couldn’t find it,” he said. “It’s just frustrating. I’m so sick of the hate and antisemitism.”

He said protesters usually show up at Diamonds on Friday or Saturday nights.

“They sit out front on the sidewalk with their bullhorns and do their thing,” Liakos said. “They have a van and the whole van is wrapped with ‘Abortion Kills.’”

Since Diamonds doesn’t have a liquor license — it’s bring your own — it legally stays open until early morning.

“I don’t want anybody to even remotely think that I would have anything to do with something like this,” Liakos said.

“I get it — certain people don’t like my business. And that’s fine. I completely understand it. What I do at Diamonds is not for everyone. But when they start putting up hate stickers, that more than crosses the lines in my world and I take action. Will we probably catch the people that did this? Probably not, unless they keep doing it.”

To read the complete November 2020 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.