An as-yet unidentified disgruntled activist has vandalized the statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam with red paint, to express support of Hamas in Gaza. This is the second time this summer that the statue has been defaced.
Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from RTL Nederland:
Second time in one month
Anne Frank statue in Amsterdam again defaced, municipality files report
August 4, 2024
A statue of Anne Frank on Merwede Square in Amsterdam South is once again defaced. In a photo, it can be seen that “Free Gaza” is written in red paint on the base of the statue. The hands on the image of Anne Frank are also painted red.
A passerby reportedly discovered the defacement this morning. The police have opened an investigation, a spokesperson reports. The municipality has had the statue cleaned. The statue was also defaced on July 9.
“It has happened again. It is disrespectful,” says the spokesperson for [communist] Mayor Femke Halsema to RTL News. “The municipality will make a report. Whether there will be measures taken regarding the statue, we cannot yet say.”
Disgust
The Anne Frank Foundation is taking note of the defacement with “disgust”. The Foundation says in response: “This defacement once again hits us in the heart. The statue memorializes of a young girl with ambitions and dreams. A girl who was murdered simply because she was Jewish. Today’s defacement is extra painful, on the day that Anne Frank was arrested exactly 80 years ago today.”
The Anne Frank Foundation, just as last time, is making a report to the police.
The statue stands on Merwede Square in Amsterdam because she lived there with her parents and sister from 1933 to 1942. After that, the family had to go into hiding in the annex on Prinsengracht.
The Resistance Monument on Apollo Avenue and the image of Mahatma Gandhi also are covered in red paint, AT5 news writes.
Multiple defacements
Last month, the Palace on Dam Square in Amsterdam was defaced with red paint by a group of Palestinian activists. The group, Palestine Action, claimed responsibility for the action and claimed that the action was directed at the Dutch government. They made the place “blood red to symbolize the blood of the Palestinians, which at this moment is running through the streets of Gaza.”
In addition, the facade of the Rotterdam City Hall was defaced with red paint last month. Whether Palestine Action is behind the defacement of the Anne Frank statue is not yet clear.
The Dutch authorities are not overly bothered.
Anne Frank has been attacked not only as a Jew recently, but for many years now by the so called holocaust deniers. I looked into their claims about 20 years ago, and concluded that their points about inflated numbers of Jews murdered by the Nazis are probably correct (6 million vs 4 million, does that really change anything?), their attack on little Anne seemed to me particularly scurrilous. Her father did censor her diaries somewhat, which I understand has since been corrected. But they heaped filth and opprobrium on her, and I found that unforgivable.
Our world has been overtaken by dirty-minded, personality-disordered scumbags.
The whole Anne Frank story was a fake and till this day people are fooled by it. Many reasons were found to discount it as authentic. One being that the originals were written in ball point pen which at the time was NOT yet in use. Many of the supposed Jewish stories of the second world war turned out to be fake, and when challenged about it their excuse was that that is what they believed at the time. Not to mention, a handful turned out to be non Jewish but had adopted a Jewish name.
My grandfather , a Citroen of the Citroen automobile and diamond dealing family, was arrested as a double agent and sent to Auschwitz for the last 6 months of the war. He confirmed it to me in 1985.
Oh stop the [material that I deprecate]. The originals were not written in ballpoint. The changes made by her father after the war were. If I recall correctly, she wrote in pencil… which would make sense, given her circumstances.
Some Jewish stories may have been fake. So were some of the Resistance stories in France. People do cheat some of the time. That does not mean that Anne’s story is fake. Or the stories of untold Jews and others who perished, or made it out and still were mistreated. [I request that you refrain from posting falsehoods].
Baron, you censored the word “nonsense.” Huh? That makes no sense. 🙂
To tell someone they are speaking nonsense is equivalent to saying they are stupid or crazy, hence it is a form of insult. That’s why I redacted it.
Alternative non-insulting expressions of the same sentiment might be “I think you’re mistaken” or “that doesn’t make sense”. The latter must, of course, be followed by an explanation of why it doesn’t make sense.
Um. That does not make sense. Because voicing one’s unfavorable opinion of — or even insulting — other people’s ideas is not the same as insulting the person. At all. Ideas are dime a dozen and the stupid/harmful ones do not deserve respect. Only people do.
My impression is that you’ve crossed into insisting we walk on eggshells.
I admit, it’s a fine line. Perhaps I’ve seen so much uncivil discourse that it’s made me hypersensitive.
Yeah. I always try to remember to attack arguments, not people. Things seem to sort itself out, with that one guiding principle.
And… I think we are both pretty much on the same wavelength on this one. 🙂
history is written by the victors: the “allies” (capitalists & communists both together) had to clear their conscience of all the murderous crimes they committed with impunity, like hiroshima and nagasaki, dresden and many other war crimes, which are much more despicable than what the axis did. SO they invented the story of “liberation” of the poor oppressed people. The jews simply took advantage of this hysteria and scaled the narrative by claiming they were the greatest sufferers, which is unproven and unreal. Who want to learn can by its own personal research, of course the official narrative fake.
Greetings, Michael!
I worked in John Lewis’ department store, Oxford St, London in 1971-9, including a spell in the linens department.
One of my colleagues (in his 60s perhaps, so no longer with us) was a Jewish chap called Mike Citroen; he said his grandfather’s cousin had founded the motor manufacturer.
You are wrong. There WERE Ballpoint pens when Precious Anne was alive. the Story is not fake. It is a precious and truthful story written when Anne was in her hiding place.
Anne wrote with a fountain pen and pencil.
[personal insults redacted]
Practical ballpoint pens were patented in Britain in 1938 by a Hungarian Jew, called Laszlo Biro; they were issued to RAF crews because they didn’t leak at reduced pressure. Biro and his brother fled Germany for Argentina in 1941.
It seems unlikely that they were available in continental Europe till after WW2.
What an unbelievable argument about pens when 6 million unarmed civilians were put in concentration camps, hunted down, tortured and gassed to death because of their ethnicity!
Any story, even partly true, that highlights humanity in spite of fear and suffering is valuable.