(RepublicanPress.org) – In the US, denying the Holocaust and spreading conspiracy theories is legal. That’s not the case in other parts of the world, like the Netherlands. A man was just sentenced to jail time for a stunt at the Anne Frank House Museum.
In February, authorities in the Netherlands arrested Robert Wilson for projecting an image on the side of the museum. The museum is located in the building where Frank and her family hid from the Nazis for two years. Wilson cast “Ann [sic] Frank invented the ballpoint pen” onto the side of the building.
Man gets 2 months in prison for projecting antisemitic conspiracy theory onto Anne Frank House Museum https://t.co/c92FLilG26 pic.twitter.com/5h55EZSRtE
— New York Post (@nypost) October 20, 2023
Although the sentence might seem innocent, it caused outrage across the city. That’s because it’s a nod to the conspiracy theory that Frank didn’t write a diary while she was hiding. The teen stopped writing abruptly in 1944 when the Nazis found her family and sent them to concentration camps. Sadly, the only person to survive was her father, Otto Frank. He published her diary in 1947 and fulfilled her wish of becoming a writer.
Some Holocaust deniers believe Frank didn’t write the diary because papers written with a ballpoint pen were found in it in the 1980s. Ballpoint pens didn’t exist in Amsterdam in the 1940s. Experts have said those papers were placed in the diary in the 1960s and forgotten about.
Authorities accused Wilson of Holocaust-denying and distributing images of the projection on the building. The court ruled on the case on October 17 and agreed that Wilson’s actions qualified as Holocaust denials because of the “significance of Anne Frank’s diary for the commemoration of the persecution of the Jews.” He wasn’t found guilty of sharing the image because there wasn’t enough proof.
The court sentenced the defendant to two months in detention, but he’d already served that much time in pre-trial lockup. Wilson denied that he cast the image on the building. However, he allegedly belongs to a neo-Nazi group, the Goyim Defense League. He’s facing charges in the US for assault and yelling homophobic slurs at one of his neighbors.
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