ADL ‘shocked and outraged’ by Netanyahu Hitler poster

The Anti-Defamation League on Thursday condemned a student work hung briefly at Shenkar College of Art that depicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a Hitler mustache.

The poster of Netanyahu doctored to make him look like Hitler was briefly exhibited at the art college in Tel Aviv, widening a controversy over free speech and incitement that began earlier this week when a poster featuring Netanyahu with a hangman’s noose, and another one of the prime minister in the nude, were displayed at a Jerusalem art college.

The latest work features a black-and-white photo of the prime minister with the Hebrew word for “incitement” placed under his nose in a way that appears similar to Adolf Hitler’s iconic mustache. It was temporarily put on display in Ramat Gan’s Shenkar College.

Shenkar officials said they did not know who put up the poster, nor who removed it. Students at the school also protested against the perceived crackdown on freedom of speech, by temporarily blocking roads to traffic.

The ADL said that it was “shocked and outraged” over the depiction of Netanyahu as Hitler.

Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (Courtesy of ADL/via JTA)

World ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Carole Nuriel, head of the organization in Israel said in a statement that “the use of Nazi imagery to demonize the Israeli PM denigrates the memory of the Shoah and its victims. Such Holocaust analogies inflame rather than inform and cross the lines of legitimate discourse. Freedom of expression absolutely is essential to Israel’s open society, but the country already has paid a tragic price for similar incitement against its leaders. Today, unfortunately, another norm was violated.”