A banner at a Thailand university that featured Adolph Hitler along with superheroes drew an apology from the school’s premier, who said “ignorant students”
didn’t realize the image would offend people, The Associated Press reported.
Designed by students to say goodbye to the graduating class at Chulalongkorn University, the banner was up for two days before criticism forced its removal. In a letter, the university’s premier Suppakorn Disatapundhu said the matter was taken very seriously by the university, the AP reported.
In a telephone interview with an AP reporter, the premier said the idea was to show that good and bad people are in the world, and the students wanted to paint the superheroes “who protect the world.”
Pictures online showed Thai students with their arms raised in Hitler’s salute, the AP said.
When the billboard went up, Jewish rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote a scathing article about the situation.
“Hitler as a superhero? Is he an appropriate role model for Thailand’s younger generation — a genocidal hate monger who mass murdered Jews and Gypsies and who considered people of color as racially inferior?”
the organization quoted from Rabbi Abraham Cooper. “The Simon Wiesenthal Center is outraged and disgusted by this public display at Thailand’s leading school of higher education.”
Hitler just isn’t a good billboard image, and even JC Penney found that out in May when they removed a
billboard that featured a teapot – yes, a teapot – that supposedly looked like the Nazi leader.
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