An Israeli high school student was arrested and questioned by police for doing a Nazi salute during a school trip to Auschwitz, Israeli media reported on Sunday.
The teenager from Kiryat Bialik was on his school’s field trip to Poland when he did the gesture under the entrance sign to the camp.
He was questioned for two hours by Polish police and was fined approximately NIS 1,500 after security guards observed him performing the salute. The museum also captured the incident on its security cameras; the footage was handed over to the police.
Polish police charged him with promoting Nazism, local media reported. Performing a seig heil is illegal in Poland, and carries a potential sentence of up to two years in prison.
eh, yeah. I guess I am loathe to excuse a teens misbehavior when it just reinforces the criminality of his government, but broadly speaking I do agree that teens arent capable of understanding their own actions like adults should be. I get the feeling theres a lot of apologists here saying One teen doesnt represent much, and how do we know the teen is even jewish, to try to make the issue go away, and I see a lot of disenganuous arguing by the zionists so I get an itchy finger on that. Anyway, my apologies, your reasoning is sound, if inconvenient.
My point is that a teen’s behaviour doesn’t reinforce the criminality of his government, but is mostly orthogonal to it. I can see perhaps there’s a monkey-see monkey-do argument that does link a teen’s behaviour to his society’s, but Israelis are not fond of literal Nazi iconography, so I don’t think that applies here.
If you try to use sketchy arguments like this to reinforce your opinions about Zionism, it only opens you to attack. Please, try to keep a level head, or we’ll all look stupid. Rather than trying to guess if somebody is an apologist based on the consequence of their argument, maybe check if the premise is sound instead like a rational person.
(Aside: I also disagree with you about teens and self-understanding – I do think a lot of teenagers are mature and self-aware; my point is that it’s a high-variance distribution really.)