Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. That seems to be the lesson of the quadrennial fight over political symbols in U.S. presidential elections. Four years ago, an inverted red triangle in some of the Trump campaign’s Facebook ads caused a scandal, and the ads were eventually taken down and replaced with triangle-free versions.

The Nazis had used the inverted red triangle—and triangles of other colors—on prisoners’ uniforms to sort them into categories. Since the Trump ads took aim at the pretend anti-fascist rioters who called themselves Antifa, and the red triangle in German camps represented Communist political prisoners, we were told the symbol was proof of Trump’s Nazi role-playing games.

“If your reaction is, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’” wrote a contributor to Psychology Today, “consider also that the first sentence of the ads contained 14 words, and a total of 88 ads were purchased by the campaign to be run on Facebook.” Fourteen is the number of words in an alt-right slogan, she pointed out, and 88 is shorthand for “Heil Hitler,” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. (Remind me never to watch Sesame Street with this person.)

It was doubtful Trump or Facebook’s moderators understood the full implications of this—the campaign had seen the triangles in Antifa material and assumed the group had adopted it, which some actual anti-fascists did after World War II—but both were scolded for it and the ads were changed.

Contrast that with the chin-stroking over the inverted red triangle used by Hamas to indicate its battlefield targets.

Because its origins (in this context) lie in Hamas’s use of the triangle for one specific purpose, its meaning contains no ambiguity. But in the grand tradition of Western play-radicals who want to have their cake and eat it too, Hamas’s supporters have begun to reverse-engineer the symbol into vague respectability.

To understand the truly demented nature of this, you’d have to be in the unlucky position of having watched some of Hamas’s battlefield propaganda videos. At their tamest, they show the triangle hovering over an Israeli tank in the distance before the tank is shelled. Often these videos are a cross between a snuff video and a horror film, and glorify the execution of people.

The adoption of the red triangle by pro-Palestinian activists is a badge of derangement. This is not the watermelon, which is used as a stand-in for the Palestinian flag because of its similar color scheme. The triangle is a specific marker of vicarious violence.

It is a message. And that message has been spray-painted in some pretty unambiguous places. In late July, a Chabad in Pittsburgh—quite close to the Tree of Life synagogue, the site of a massacre of Jews in 2018 by an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant conspiracy theorist—was tagged with the triangle. A few days earlier, it was painted on the replica of the Liberty Bell in Washington, D.C. by demonstrators protesting a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In June, vandals painted the triangle on the home of Anne Pasternak, the Jewish director of the Brooklyn Museum, as well as the homes of her fellow (non-Jewish) museum directors. The triangle has also been adopted by pro-Hamas university encampments.

The latest dustup over the triangle also concerns the art world. A recent exhibition in Australia featured a massive, three-dimensional LED version of the symbol, described as a “response to the charged events that have erupted over the last nine months in historic Palestine.” Hilariously, the artist apparently intended the piece as an objection to the fact that “So little of the context is appreciated by Western eyes.” Presumably a giant glowing target provides all the context that’s been missing from the discourse.

The most interesting debate on this was, unsurprisingly, in Germany, which has gone to great lengths to banish Nazi and terrorist symbols from public use—both of which include the inverted red triangle now.

Which, in the end, is probably the clearest explanation of the inverted red triangle: From Nazi symbol to Hamas target icon, the red triangle has come full circle.