The statue commemorating Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti for the second time on Sunday.
The statue is located in Merwedeplein, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
According to images published on X, the base of the statue was spray-painted with the slogan “Free Gaza” while the girl’s hands were painted with the same red color, AFP reported.
Ah yes, the notoriously pro-Israel Ann Frank. What with Israel existing before 1948.
How the fuck does this help anything?
Perhaps the GRU (Russian military intelligence) paid some petty criminals to do it, as they did with pro-Palestine graffiti on a Jewish cemetery in France a few months ago
Could be. But it could just as easily be some stupid bigots taking advantage of a bad situation.
For example, I doubt this was Russians: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/us/cincinnati-jewish-cemeteries-vandalism/index.html
But I do look forward for a demand that Alfred Dreyfus be exhumed so we can conduct a Cadaver Synod and re-try him for Israeli genocide in Gaza.
I do recall an instance where they paid someone to spray paint a swastika and “Azov” on some mosque in MI, back in the early days of the war.
So, they are active with these sorts of tactics in the US. But yes, this is all just speculation at this point.
I got banned from r/worldnews for suggesting same.
This is why lemmy deservers to remain underground.
I’ve been on Reddit for 17 years. One of the first things that drew me to it was that I found an appreciable number of people who actually gave a fuck about the Palestinians and had their eyes open about Israel. It varies by sub but in this case I found myself asking “what happened to this place?”
Hey, I was banned from that subreddit too! 😁🙂
They are ban happy. Weaksauce moderating if you ask me.
How the fuck does this help anything?
It helps conflate Palestinian opposition to the war in Gaza with German Fascism and the Holocaust. That’s to the benefit of Israeli Zionists.
I think Israelis doing this is the least likely of the scenarios suggested, the others being bigots and Russian operatives.
Israelis doing this
Plenty of possible culprits beyond the actual literal Israeli government. Could very well have been a troll with no political affiliation at all.
But the media coverage, the fixation on Palestinians as scary, violent, genocidal invaders, and the way this gets used to justify continued bombing in Gaza? That’s 100% right wing media.
The Gazans are in the same position as Ann Frank. Wtf.
The statue is located in Merwedeplein, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
The Gazans aren’t the ones doing the defacement.
It only takes 1% idiots to give enough anecdotal ammunition for the other side. It’s not the hard numbers that were ever in their favour anyway.
Exactly. Things like this happened many times in the past. And it could be that this was done by Zionists or Nazis to pin on pro-Palestinian activitists. Not saying that this is the case, but it is a possibility.
Yeah, but if you even mention false-flag conspiracies, you make it sound like you need them to have a point. We don’t, that’s just not what our larger movement is about regardless of who did it. There are Jews, like technically me, in it; it’s not anti-Jewish.
Do you apply this same standard to the January 6th morons, or do you conveniently use their actions to paint everyone on the right as fascists and lunatics?
Don’t be ridiculous, it’s all their other actions that make me think conservatives are either fascists or morons.
The majority of Republicans, both voters and lawmakers, held the same beliefs as the rioters about the credibility of the election. I doubt the majority of people who are pro Palestine have much against Anne Frank, but you’re free to do some of your own polling.
Personally, I don’t think everyone on the (American) right are fascists and lunatics. It seems to be the dominant strain, but perhaps you can change my mind.
What percentage or Republicans would you say support the efforts of January 6th? I seem to remember that polling says the majority believe Trump won the election.
Exactly.
The news is portraying it like wow how could someone defile such a respectful thing
It is to make the message clear I dunno Anne Frank but I doubt she’d be cool with bombing Palestinians
I doubt she’d be cool with bombing Palestinians
i used to think any sane person would be; but i’m learning from this election cycle that they’re minimize it as being a “single issue voter.”
Just idiots, everyone involved. 🤦♂️
Hey! As an idiot, I resent that! I’m at least smarter than THAT!
This is more the work of the morons.
Kinda shows the stark contrast of how each are treated, especially with regards to the children.
Graffiti artists are often not well read
These days, Gaza is probably safer and more comfortable than a typical Nazi death camp.
Based on what? I’m in doubt.
wp:Auschwitz concentration camp#Death toll
At least 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and at least 1.1 million died.[7]
Death toll is one thing. You could be housed at a luxury hotel as a death row inmate.
But the safety and living conditions is another thing.
Kids are starving and ridden with septic diseases in Gaza as well, and everyone is slowly dying with nobody coming to help. On paper it seems pretty close IMO. Sadly.
But who knows except those in the actual situation.
I can understand the anger at Israel. But of all people, Anne Frank has the least to do with all the genocide of Palestinians.
One angry kid with a spray bottle. That’s all it takes for this to happen. Let’s not be crazy about the implications perhaps?
I like how people are assuming if Anne Frank were alive she would be doing anything other than shouting to the world about ending the genocide in Gaza because genocides are the most terrible crime humanity can enact upon itself.
A statue is just some rock you paid somebody to carve.
Nonsense, let’s drum it up into a big stupid story with actual geopolitical ramifications.
In Canada we don’t blame Palestinians for all the hate crimes against Jews
We blame Canadians for trying to bring those issues over here
“Let’s deface a memorial, dedicated to a young girl who was murdered by Nazis. NOW, people will have to listen to what I have to say!”
- surprised Pikachu face * “Why didn’t that work?”
I doubt there was that much thought put into it.
Not the best place for that.
It does help Israel with the, “Everyone who disagrees with our actions is antisemitic” angle.
Yes. That is Israel’s only PR card only and they’ve been playing it over and over.
As an actual pro-Palestine act of protest, this is pure idiocy. It is plainly antisemitic and there is no grounds to hold Anne Frank accountable for the state of Israel. If a pro-Palestine protestor did this then they are an absolute moron and a bigot.
However. As a pro-Israel false flag, this is brilliant. It draws a tight connection between supporting Palestine and being anti-Semitic. It makes protestors look exactly like the bigots Israel wants them all to be.
So given that someone just ran up and did this under cover of night, we’re left with a decision: was it done by someone incredibly stupid or very smart? There are plenty of both in the world.
Pro-Palestinian idiots or Bad Actor/False Flag idiots?
People are scoffing at this, but in the UK you’ve got full blown fascist riots over the purely fictitious claim that a knife attack was perpetrated by a Muslim immigrant. The British far-right are burning mosques and storefronts in response to a social media slander.
It’s easier to blame a ghost than accept the shitheels on your side
Having some shitheels doesn’t invalidate that Israel is doing a genocide.
Israel. Israel. That’s the point, what the fuck does Anne Frank have to do with Israel?
What makes you think that anybody here knows the answer to that question?
Impossible to tell. The former is the Occam’s and Hanlon’s razor answer, though.
Both are equally stupid. Both requires the same minimum effort to commit.
There’s also the issue that if you immediately suspect false flags when your people do bad stuff, but not when the other side does, that’s not very intellectually honest. Do that and you will rightfully look full of shit.
It doesn’t represent what we’re about, stick with that.
It also doesn’t matter which “side” did it. It’s a low effort type of attack. One person with a can of spray paint can do. It should not and can not be allowed to represent either group until the perpetrator is caught and investigated.
It honestly could be either.
And both options are depressing.
Yeah we had russians painting anti semitic crap here in France to stir shit up.
No shortage of home grown antisemitism in France.
You French? Spend a lot of time there?
This is how people confuse Jews with Zionists and Israelis. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they are only one of the options, but they are not synonyms.
How wildly misguided and disrespectful. That is assuming this was even done in earnest. Accusations of anti semitism are levied at anti-zionist action all the time and it’s hard to dismiss those accusations when legitimate anti-semitism frequently tries to associate itself with anti-zionism.
I’m not even saying this couldn’t have been done by a legitimate anti-zionist who is also antisemitic. It just continually weakens the cause of anti colonialism when other forms of bigotry crop up around us. Anti semitism in all it’s forms is completely abhorrent and unacceptable. Advocating for the liberation of Palestinians should never invoke anti-Semitic ideology.
Edit: if you’re curious how antisemitism could come to exist in leftist movements, read the comments below. Giving no thought to the impact our actions have is unacceptable. Pissing people off is not a worthy trade for making Jewish leftists feel unsafe in our movements.
Hate begets hate, not calm and rational responses.
If this changes your opinion on Gaza-Israel; you are a fucking moron.
If Hamas’ fighters being hateful and commiting war crimes changes your opinion on the conflict; you are a fucking moron.
If you think no hamas fighter is hateful and has committed atrocities; you are a naive moron.
If you are wondering why Israel is wrong and Palestinians in the right despite both sides’ soldiers (and “soldiers”) committing war crimes, it’s because Israel created this situation by occupying Palestine and trying to ethnically cleanse it.
People in the West are way naive and sheltered from the realities of war, in part due to propaganda and how western war efforts have been portrayed as unrealistically “clean” and sanitized.
Good take. Except maybe missing the part where the west is complicit in the suffering of palestinians, and where the Arab nations starting a war vs. Israel taught Israel to be aggressive preemptively. And this is not an excuse, just an (incomplete) analysis how this clusterfuck came about.
I’d argue that currently, as Israel has existed for long enough for generations to be born, we cannot solve the issue by just removing it from the map. This really is a homeland for these people, and historic arguments are not valid, or else we have to rebuild an entire world map.
But we can absolutely condemn both Israeli and Palestinian governments when they’ve gone too far.
October attacks carried out by Hamas were a mistake; but that doesn’t excuse Israeli armed forces razing Gaza to the ground. War crimes, civilian deaths, mass destruction and leaving no ways to escape is not an appropriate response.
Also, apartheid and blatant disrespect for Palestinian sovereignty, people and territory, as well as trying to dehumanize people living there are big reasons why this conflict happens in the first place, and that’s heavily on Israel.
Would Hamas do the same if they had the power to do so? Absolutely. They are not known for respecting international law and being good at peace regulations. But this is not just Hamas vs. Israeli armed forces. Thousands upon thousands of innocent people are murdered without mercy. And it’s Israeli soldiers who perpetrate it.
Can’t remove Israel from the map? Maybe, maybe not. The important thing is that Jewish people can exist in a one state Palestine, with equal rights and dignity, but Israel can’t deprive the Palestinians from their rights any longer. The state of Israel has no right to exist, because its only justification has ever been the subjugation of other people living there. It needs to be a majority Jewish state per its theocratic charter, and they achieve this by removing non-Jewish people from their land, ie genocide
It would be odd to expect one state Palestine to give full rights and dignity to Jews, just as much as we can’t expect Israel to be fair and just to Palestinians.
The state of Israel, along with trying to subjugate Palestinians, tries to protect the rights of Jews - something that will vanish instantly inside Palestine. Similarly, the state of Palestine not only tries to protect Palestinian Arabs, but also to subjugate Jews, it just doesn’t have equal power to do so.
Brave anti-imperialists at it again!
Appalling but antisemitism is becoming increasingly mainstream in Europe unfortunately
Which makes the idea of a Zionist state all the more justified. Happy, or more aptly less sad, the European Jews who spent the years between 1935 to 1945 in Palestine, and not the antisemitic shithole that was Europe (and by “Europe” I also mean United Kingdom and Russia/the USSR).
Haviv Rettig Gur put it very accurately and concisely, if brutally, in a lecture he gave recently:
For Jews In the 21st century, you either learned English or Hebrew or you were killed.
As a Brit myself (English, Catholic, English as far back as Ancestry can tell etc.) I’m really ashamed of this country since October 7th. It’s as if we felt that we had been impervious to the very deep, ancient cancer of antisemitism due to WW2. And that seems to have left us even more defenceless than many other European states which have at least tried at points to contain this.
If we’re talking about 1940’s Gaza, wouldn’t it have made more sense defacing an Egyptian statue?
The person who did this didn’t really care about which statue if was. They also defaced (among others) a statue of Ghandi.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2531752-beeld-anne-frank-en-andere-monumenten-in-amsterdam-beklad-met-free-gaza (In dutch) has pictures
I keep being told that not a single Palestinian protestor is anti Semitic.
Whatever gave you that impression? I can’t see nazis being on the side of Israel. There’s probably complexity on views but defacing a concentration camp jew is missing the mark by a lot.
Actually plenty of Nazis are pro Israel, it might even be the default position. Israel can be both a place to send Jewish people to get them out of your country and an example to hold up of successful ethno nationalism. On top of that Nazis would revel in the deaths of Palestinians, the bigotry of Nazis extends further than antisemitism.
Do you have a source for that? Because antisemitism seems to be a core tenant of nazism according to everything I can find.
Also nazis, due to this antisemitism, seem to view Muslims as natural allies, see how neonazis celebrated 9-11 around the world (except in the USA) or this quote:
“…we could have emancipated the Moslem countries dominated by France…All Islam vibrated at the news of our victories…created a feeling of malaise among our Islamic friends…” Adolf Hitler. Last will and Testament.
When they were still figuring out what people would publicly accept, the Nazis mostly favored deportation/displacement genocide rather than outright extermination.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
They were, of course, extremely aware that Madagascar could not support the entire Jewish population, but that was most of the point. Anti-semite support of Israel is not about liking Jewish people, it’s about gathering the diaspora into one place so it’s easier to kill them. Toss in a little Revelations-prophecy for Christian fundie flavor depending on the brand of Nazi.
…but the task force sent to evaluate the island’s potential determined that only 5,000 to 7,000 families could be accommodated, or even as few as 500 families by some estimates.
…calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years, with the island being governed as a police state under the SS. They assumed that many Jews would succumb to its harsh conditions
That sounds more like ‘outright extermination’ than ‘displacement’ to me but ok.
I see you’re not the oc but as someone defending their point I’ll ask again, do you have any sources on these ‘plenty of pro-Israel Nazis’?
Who said anything about Nazis? The reality is that anti-semitism is not a uniquely European problem. Especially not with Israel’s actions
I just gave one example, that’s all
I can’t help but think you’re being wilfully ignorant in a contrived attempt at making a nonsense point.
You kids all talk the same. I can picture exactly what you look like. Don’t insist over and over that there’s no anti Semitism mixed into this protest, and then get mad and call people ignorant when they point at it for you. Fix that shit, expel those fucks from your protests, instead of bitching to me online. Do something about it. And if you’re not part of these protests and all you do for the cause is sit online and bitch, shut the fuck up. Cause you’re not part of any of this. My children under 12 have suffered anti Semitism recently for being proud to be half Jewish. And I’m out there with teachers and city councillors trying to make changes so these protest stay on point and don’t veer off into bullshit.
What are you doing?
Why are you treating pro Palestinian people as a monolith? Learn to think critically and realize no protest can somehow rid itself of all shitty people. You’re being unreasonable and weirdly condescending because you’re older and somehow think it’s cool to talk down to folks based on age.
Have I insisted there’s no anti-Semitism among the pro-Palestinian movement? No? Then why are you claiming I’ve insisted there’s no anti-Semitism? If I see or hear an anti-Semite in the pro-Palestinian, I would call that person/those people out, as I have in the past. Is that so hard to understand?
Also very weird that you’re all “I can picture what you look like”. You’re being way too presumptuous and that’s why you feel so confidently incorrect.
You sound like those people who were more upset about the riots and looting than the fact that police were killing unarmed men.
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If you see this as a pro anything move, you got a problem
It’s clearly pro Palestinian. Whether it is antisemitic is an issue of perspective but I can see that I am on the minority here and I don’t really feel the need to convince you so Ill just accept that you disagree and leave it there
Netenyahoo should be responsible for cleaning it