UNITED NATIONS – United Nations officials are investigating a recent spate of anti-Semitic incidents against staff, including the scrawling of Nazi swastikas in an official log book which was deliberately intended to upset an Israeli security officer.

The victim, who has declined to be interviewed for this article for fear of retaliation by superiors, has tried to get the organization to punish the perpetrators but has not so far been satisfied with the results, according to sources familiar with the case.

“These unfortunate incidents are well-known to us and are being investigated internally,” the United Nations spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told The New York Sun.

He confirmed that late last summer an Israeli national who works for the United Nations’ security force came across swastikas drawn by a fellow guard in a book they shared as part of their job, and that following the incident there were two cases in which guards performed a straight-armed Nazi salute.

The Israeli guard declined to be interviewed by the Sun, which has decided to keep his name confidential in order to protect him.

“The drawing of a swastika represents hate and anti-Semitism, and it is specifically reprehensible in a year that the General Assembly for the first time passed a resolution on the Holocaust,” Israel’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Carmon, told the Sun. “It is also important to look at the way the internal U.N. system handled the case, and we expect that it will find the correct way to deal with it.”

The ambassador said that under normal circumstances the Israeli mission would not get involved in the relationship between an employee and the United Nations, but because the complaint involved such a potent symbol of anti-Semitism, a the mission had urged the United Nations to take prompt and effective action.

As a result of the swastika incident, a letter of reprimand was entered into the offending guard’s personnel file, and, along with some of his superiors, he was ordered to undergo sensitivity training, Mr. Dujarric said, without naming either the guard or the superiors. “We want to create an environment in which every employee, regardless of race or religion, feels comfortable,” Mr. Dujarric said.

A separate incident in Vienna, in which a female Israeli U.N. employee has been assaulted, is also being investigated, although it is not clear whether the motivation in that case is anti-Semitism or sexually-related.

Although the United Nations has recently tried to adopt a policy of “zero tolerance” toward abuses conducted by staff members, several top officials, staff members, and diplomats who are familiar with the anti-Semitic cases said the incidents displayed a pattern of racial discrimination and that, far from being confronted head-on, were ignored by the Israeli officer’s superiors.

Had a swastika-drawing incident happened a mere two hundred yards from U.N. headquarters, in the New York Police Department’s jurisdiction, the hate crime unit would immediately have been dispatched, an NYPD source, who asked for anonymity because of reluctance to compare the two jurisdictions, told the Sun.

The NYPD unit, which is dedicated to offenses with a religious, ethnic, racial, or sexual-orientation back ground, was formed in 1985 after the case of an African-American man who was chased into a busy intersection by a racist mob and died.

Similarly, American corporations frown on and routinely fire offenders in cases of discrimination, racism, and bias.

The U.N. incident, as was pieced together by the Sun after talking to four sources who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, began last September at a guard post inside Turtle Bay, where entry permits are inspected and the identities of visitors are recorded in an official log book.

The Israeli guard has just taken a scheduled break and his post was manned by a fellow guard, who is from Haiti. Upon returning to his post, the Israeli guard discovered that two swastikas had been drawn in the log book.

As a descendent of Holocaust victims, the guard decided he could not overlook the drawings, which he felt were left as a message to him. He complained to his superiors. In the investigation that ensued, the Haitian guard denied he had meant any offense, saying instead that the symbols were nothing but “innocent doodles,” according to an official familiar with the investigation.

The U.N. security chief, Bruno Henn, tried to draw the investigation to an end within his department. The Israeli guard, however, demanded a more extensive investigation and that the guard who had offended him be given a severe reprimand. It was then that the Israeli was met by Nazi salutes in the guards’ quarters. Mr. Henn declined to comment to the Sun. The matter was brought to the attention of other officials, but they too wanted to leave the offense as a “category 2” case, a misdemeanor that is deemed best investigated within the department.

By late December, three months after the swastikas were scrawled into the guard’s log, the matter reached the undersecretary general for management, Christopher Burnham, who was angry to hear of the incident and the Nazi salutes that followed.

Mr. Burnham, a former State Department official who has attempted to change the culture of non-accountability inside the United Nations, wrote a memorandum on December 22 in which he warned that the anti-Semitic incidents were part of a “pattern,” and should not be swept under the rug, according to two sources familiar with the memo.

The U.N. security service is known for racial tensions between groups from different ethnicities and backgrounds. A group of Afro-Caribbeans often clashes with a group of Americans who are mostly of Irish background. A handful of Israelis were recruited recently in an attempt to alter Turtle Bay’s anti-Israeli image.

The Department of Safety and Security is currently headed by a former Scotland Yard official, David Veness, who has tried to deal with the ethnic tensions. Like fellow Briton Malloch Brown, the U.N. chief of staff, Mr Veness has encountered deeply ingrained patterns of behavior that make fundamental change difficult.

Mr. Burnham recently enacted a new whistleblower protection system, which his aides say has already yielded a crop of complaints by employees who had previously feared retaliation if they made a complaint.

Nevertheless, at least two of the sources interviewed for this story told the Sun that the Israeli guard offended by the swastikas still fears retaliation from his direct superiors for having brought the matter out in the open.