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GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- People in the Jewish community are reacting negatively to the man spotted wearing a swastika on his arm.

They are saying the symbol itself could be hate speech. The man seen on UF campus said he is exercising his first amendment right.

"Nazi's are an extremely organized, focused, distinguished organization that saved the world," said Michael Dewitz, who was spotted riding his bike through Gainesville wearing the homemade armband with a swastika on it.

"The swastika is to invoke fear, to invoke hate, it's the symbol of the Nazi's. Students are scared, people are scared," said Rabbi Goldman at UF's Lubavitch-Chabad Jewish Student Center. "How could you not be concerned?"

Dewitz said he did it as a social experiment. "It was partially performance art, just to see people's reaction, like a social study of some sort, a sociological study."

Dewitz also questions whether the Holocaust happened. "Disinformation was huge in World War II, so how can we know that any of that stuff can be verified? You don't know that your grandparents were necessarily in a concentration camp and if the Nazi's were evil how can they remember being in one because they're not dead. Actually all that genetic nonsense, and Aryan stuff. That's ridiculous. That's disinformation," Dewitz said.

Gainesville Police said they cannot do anything about it because Dewitz has not committed a crime, but Rabbi Goldman thinks this could escalate into something further. "God forbid that this shouldn't trigger an actual incident of violence or anything else," he said.

Dewitz said he was the victim of assault. "Everyone was filming me like it was illegal to have free speech. I was being yelled at, called names, criticized, and I wasn't doing anything to these people cause I was part of the experiment," he said.

Rabbi Goldman said he is advising his students not to engage people like Dewitz, who was surprised to see so much backlash in the community. Dewitz said he is not sure if he will do something like this again.

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Man spotted wearing swastika defends 1st Amendment - WCJB