A church in the San Fernando Valley has been vandalized with spray-painted Bible verses, one of which references the killing of 185,000 Assyrians.

Police from the city of San Fernando said Friday they are investigating the vandalism that took place last week at the Mar Shaleeta Ancient Church of the East, an Assyrian church that has been in the area since 1997. The words “Jehovah Lives!” and “2 Kings 19:35” were painted in blue on four areas on and around the building, including on a sidewalk near a fountain decorated with a cross. A big “X” was scrawled across plaques that feature the Nicene Creed, a prayer widely used in Christian liturgy.

The graffiti refers to an Old Testament passage that reads: “Then it happened that night that the angel of the Lord went out and struck 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men rose early in the morning, behold, all of them were dead.”

The vandal also referred to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew 19:26: “And looking at them Jesus said to them, ‘With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’”

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Cor-Bishop Father Athanasis Toma, the parish priest, said he was notified about the vandalism the morning of Nov. 25.

“When I read the verse, I realized it’s really not just graffiti,” he said. “It’s aimed toward a specific nation. It’s hatred toward a nation. The meaning of that verse struck me hard. That’s someone who knew what they were talking about.”

Assyrians are among the first Christians in the world, and the indigenous people of Mesopotamia, presently Iraq, where the last and largest concentration of those who speak Aramaic have lived for thousands of years.

In the past two years, Assyrians saw their churches in Iraq burned by ISIS, their people kidnapped and held for ransom and their villages in Syria pillaged. Since the takeover in 2014 of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, ISIS had targeted the Christian population whose faith has been present for almost 2,000 years in that region. Many Assyrians were forced to flee.

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“In a civil society, things like this should not be happening,” Toma said. “It doesn’t matter what ethnicity.”

The incident follows a spike of reported hate crimes and incidents locally and nationwide against immigrant communities and minority groups in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory last month.

Local leaders say Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail as well as his stance on illegal immigration has fueled hate speech and acts.

Members of the local Assyrian American Association of Southern California called the vandalism a hate crime against them.

“The AAASC condemns this hate crime that was perpetrated against the Ancient Church of the East,” the organization said in a statement. “We as Assyrians have faced many struggles in the past that has made us more united and rigourous here in the United States and our ancestral lands. We have been the subject to many accounts of bigotry, hate and discrimination.”

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