Germany : Film Director in Trouble Over Swastika (anti-Bush) T-Shirt

Der Spiegel ^ | 08/07/2006

[Republicain]

Criticizing US President George W. Bush is fine in Germany, but doing so by displaying the Nazi swastika is a crime, and it's got film director Fatih Akin in trouble with the German authorities.

Fatih Akin attending a film debut in Hamburg last year.

Police in the northern city of Hamburg are investigating award-winning Turkish-German film director Fatih Akin, 32, for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt bearing the word "Bush" in which the letter "s" was replaced by the swastika. Displaying Nazi symbols is a crime in Germany. He wore the T-shirt on a film set and an unnamed man who saw the photo of it in the newspaper filed a complaint with the police.

German-born Akin, who is of Turkish descent, told SPIEGEL: "Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich. I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of the Pentagon to normalise things like torture and Guantanamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists."

Asked why he was using the swastika to make a political statement in Germany of all countries, he said: "You can apply irony to something like that. You can redefine the symbol in a politically correct horizon. My T-shirt is more than mere provocation."

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

"These guys are just a small minority of stupid "trous du cul". We should bring them to Auschwitz or Treblinka for a necessary and obligatory lesson of history."

Yes indeed.

[Hound of the Baskervilles]

"If you press them, you’ll almost always find that these scumbags rationlize away the unfortunate non-Jewishness of Bush by claiming that he is a dumb puppet to the cadre of evil Jews that surround him."

I found a really good essay that expounds on this a lot more but for some reason I can't get it to post. Rats!