No Wonder Israel Wants to Outlaw the Swastika
A week after ultra-Orthodox Jews dressed up like concentration camp victims and compared cops to Third Reich officers, Israel is one step closer to criminalizing the swastika and other Nazi-related speech. The Israeli parliament passed a number of measures on Wednesday that have been pre-approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "The laws call for up to a year in jail and stiff fines for anyone convicted of visually or verbally misusing symbols such as swastikas, the term Nazi or epithets related to the killing of six million Jews before and during World War Two," Allyn Fisher-Ilan explains at Reuters. Though the new laws raise a number of questions about freedom of speech, it's understandable that any Nazi reference would upset the citizens of Israel, where over 200,000 Holocaust survivors still live. That said, the images from last weekends protests aren't exactly easy to look at either.
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Note: The above image shows Nazi propaganda in an exhibition on "Hitler and the German Nation and Crime" at Berlin's German Historical Museum. The swastika and many other Nazi symbols are illegal if misused in Germany.
