An Israeli high school student was arrested and questioned by police for doing a Nazi salute during a school trip to Auschwitz, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

The teenager from Kiryat Bialik was on his school’s field trip to Poland when he did the gesture under the entrance sign to the camp.

He was questioned for two hours by Polish police and was fined approximately NIS 1,500 after security guards observed him performing the salute. The museum also captured the incident on its security cameras; the footage was handed over to the police.

Polish police charged him with promoting Nazism, local media reported. Performing a seig heil is illegal in Poland, and carries a potential sentence of up to two years in prison.

  • kreskin@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    15 hours ago

    Ben Gvir, Netenyahu, and Smotrich go on tv all the time calling for ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Should that have any bearing on my opinion of Israel?

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      18 hours ago

      Don’t really want to engage with an obvious troll, but yeah when the head of state says something like that, it should tell you all you need to know. I’ve seen idiotic teenagers from all over the world say idiotic things enough to know not to judge a society by their teenagers.

      • kreskin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        15 hours ago

        If you want to ignore the obvious thats on you. And if you want to paint my citations of the facts reported in network news as “trolling” then its reality itself that you have a problem with.

          • kreskin@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            14 hours ago

            eh, yeah. I guess I am loathe to excuse a teens misbehavior when it just reinforces the criminality of his government, but broadly speaking I do agree that teens arent capable of understanding their own actions like adults should be. I get the feeling theres a lot of apologists here saying One teen doesnt represent much, and how do we know the teen is even jewish, to try to make the issue go away, and I see a lot of disenganuous arguing by the zionists so I get an itchy finger on that. Anyway, my apologies, your reasoning is sound, if inconvenient.

            • jsomae@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              13 hours ago

              My point is that a teen’s behaviour doesn’t reinforce the criminality of his government, but is mostly orthogonal to it. I can see perhaps there’s a monkey-see monkey-do argument that does link a teen’s behaviour to his society’s, but Israelis are not fond of literal Nazi iconography, so I don’t think that applies here.

              If you try to use sketchy arguments like this to reinforce your opinions about Zionism, it only opens you to attack. Please, try to keep a level head, or we’ll all look stupid. Rather than trying to guess if somebody is an apologist based on the consequence of their argument, maybe check if the premise is sound instead like a rational person.

              (Aside: I also disagree with you about teens and self-understanding – I do think a lot of teenagers are mature and self-aware; my point is that it’s a high-variance distribution really.)