Jewish group denounces video on Auschwitz
Posted on Wed, Aug. 10, 2005
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/12350153.htm
JOCELYN GECKER
Associated Press
PARIS – An Internet video that depicts the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a rave party drew sharp criticism Wednesday from a Jewish rights group, which urged authorities to have it removed from European Web sites.
The three-minute video titled “Housewitz” – a pun on house music and Auschwitz – casts Nazi soldiers as DJs. It alternates black-and-white still photos of Holocaust atrocities with color images of youths at an outdoor party. And it advertises a “Free taxi ride home,” showing a wheelbarrow full of corpses.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s European office denounced the video as “outrageous,” saying it goes “beyond the bounds of freedom of expression to an unprecedented level of obscenity.”
The center asked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to call on countries where Web sites have posted the video to “immediately stop the spread of this pernicious nihilism.”
Jaroslaw Mensfeld, a spokesman for the museum at the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland, said he was “absolutely shocked.” Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Nazi camp during World War II. “I don’t understand how a person can make such a movie,” he said.
The film is featured on one Dutch and two Polish Web sites, the Wiesenthal Center said.
The Dutch Web site, Geenstijl, says it’s doing nothing wrong in posting the video. The site, whose name means “no style,” says it mixes news with “light subjects and pleasantly twisted nonsense.” It has published a disclaimer saying it copied the video after learning it was being talked about in Internet chat rooms.
“We didn’t make the video, but it is an integral part of the discussion by our viewers. It’s not illegal and we don’t intend to remove it from the site,” said Oscar van Wijland, one of the Web site’s writers.
According to the Dutch Complaints Bureau for Discrimination on the Internet, the video’s maker is a 22-year-old Dutch student. Six weeks ago, the bureau received a complaint about the video and had it pulled from three Web sites.
Later, when the Geenstijl site posted the film, the complaints bureau went to the Amsterdam Public Prosecutor but was told the video was “not illegal enough” to prosecute, the bureau said. It plans to appeal.
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Associated Press Writer Arthur Max in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
