German city enlists rapper who joked about Holocaust for social distancing PSA
Düsseldorf municipality recruits Farid Bang, who in a 2018 song referred to ‘bodies more sculpted than Auschwitz inmates,’ for coronavirus awareness campaign
Cnaan Liphshiz was a Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel
JTA — The city government of the Germany city of Düsseldorf is facing criticism for enlisting a Muslim rapper, whose lyrics mocked Holocaust victims, to promote social distancing.
The Düsseldorf municipality posted a public service announcement featuring Farid Bang on its Facebook page Wednesday. In 2018, Bang and a collaborator released a song in which they rapped about having “bodies more sculpted than Auschwitz inmates,” and included the lyrics “another Holocaust; let’s grab the Molotov” cocktails.
When the two artists won a top music award that year, several other winners returned their awards in protest. German prosecutors investigated the artists but decided the song was merely tasteless, not a violation of laws prohibiting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
The commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia criticized the decision to involve Farid Bang in the social distancing promo.
“The choice of rapper, Farid Bang, for a public project, which is supposed to shed light on the topic of the coronavirus, is hard to bear,” the commissioner, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, told the Rheinische Post newspaper.
Düsseldorf Mayor Thomas Geisel defended the decision to hire Bang as intended to reach a young target audience that has displayed indifference to social distancing rules, Deutsche Welle reported Wednesday.
The Times of Israel Community.