Summary

A group of masked men with Nazi flags protested outside a performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Howell, Michigan, shouting antisemitic slurs.

Audience members were reportedly frightened and needed escorts to their cars. The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which staged the play, described the protesters’ presence as a disturbing reminder of the fear faced by Holocaust victims.

The Anti-Defamation League condemned the display. The incident follows other recent displays of racism in the area.

  • @ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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    1455 months ago

    They had a flag! Why call them anything other than Nazis protesting outside Anne Frank theater performance? Corpo-fascist apologists.

  • @HikingVet@lemmy.ca
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    1195 months ago

    We should start beating these people who seem to think Nazis are cool. Make it painful to be a bigot.

    • EleventhHour
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      5 months ago

      Letting them live is too kind. People like this cannot be rehabilitated.

      • @BertramDitore@lemm.ee
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        285 months ago

        As a Jew I fully understand your sentiment, but it is a really dangerous thing to normalize. Everyone can change if they’re given the right kind of attention and put in a ton of work being deprogrammed. There are amazing examples of Nazis and white supremacists finally understanding the impact of their hatred. I’m not saying it’s always going to work, probably not even most of the time. But absolutes like this are not a constructive solution. Threatening death, violence, and/or refusing to even try to rehabilitate racists, bigots, and Nazis only gives them more power.

        • @teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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          45 months ago

          I’m convinced a good number of these accounts are divisiveness bots, running a psyop to intentionally stoke the flames in left-leaning forums the same way they continue to do on the right. I assume at least one will respond to this calling me a nazi sympathizer. It’s happened before for much less.

          I don’t know what to do about this, because I also acknowledge that there are actual anti-fascist protesters being pulled into the narrative.

          I’m as anti-fascist as they come, but (in addition to your points about winning people over) I also believe in preserving free speech, and acknowledge that there is a very fine line here. It’s free speech to wave a flag with a symbol on it, it’s free speech to say you think that flag represents hate speech and shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s hate speech to openly endorse genocide, and vigilante justice subverts the point of a justice system. If our justice system falls apart…we’re screwed.

            • @teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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              14 months ago

              Yeah, notice I’m not advocating for tolerance of hate speech. I’m advocating for a working society where we don’t need to resort to vigilantism. We should be demanding that our police shut down threats of violence and hate speech without tolerance.

              Btw, memes are fun, but I don’t recommend distilling philosophical concepts about ethics to memes. Much less lazily sharing them in place of thoughtful discussion. You run the risk of sharing them in a moment that makes it appear you weren’t paying any attention to the discussion at hand.

        • @Netux@lemmy.world
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          24 months ago

          We fought a whole war about it. The ones left alive got moved into high government positions with project paperclip, leading to the right wing course we’ve been on ever since. At a minimum they need to be made afraid to broadcast their bigotry.

    • @HikingVet@lemmy.ca
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      295 months ago

      As Nazis are. Bunch of scared, racist pedos (and before you come at me for the pedo comment, just take a moment and look up how many Nazis have pedo charges)

    • Flying Squid
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      135 months ago

      And I thought masks were bad. Not just bad, but downright dangerous.

      That’s what we kept being told all through COVID.

    • Here, I fixed it:

      A group of people Nazis carrying Nazi flags demonstrated outside a community theater performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Livingston County, Michigan, in a display of antisemitism.
      Several masked men Nazis showed up waving Nazi flags and reportedly shouted antisemitic and racist slurs outside the American Legion Post 141 in Howell on Saturday during the play, according to CNN affiliate WXYZ.
      “People were shocked. They were appalled,” Army veteran Bobby Brite told WXYZ. “Everything you would expect.”
      Brite said many of the 75 people who watched the play were afraid to leave the building and had to be escorted to their cars.
      “Nobody in America should feel like that,” he said.
      Demonstrators Nazis were also seen in the nearby town of Fowlerville, according to eyewitnesses.
      Alex Sutliff and his wife were driving home through downtown Fowlerville when they came across a group of masked men Nazis waving Nazi flags.
      “They were saying awful antisemitic things that I don’t even feel comfortable repeating myself,” Sutliff told CNN on Tuesday.
      Sutliff, who filmed the brief encounter, said the group of Nazis “all stuck their hands up” and chanted “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.”
      Sutliff’s interaction with the demonstrators Nazis took place at a stoplight, and when the light turned green, he drove away before things could escalate.
      He and his wife called local police to report what they saw, and then circled back to let the demonstrators Nazis know that authorities were on their way.
      “The second that they heard that they were on the way, they all packed up their stuff and ran away.”
      CNN has reached out to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office for further details.
      The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which put on the production, said in a statement the play “centers on real people who lost their lives in the Holocaust” and added the cast and crew “endeavored to tell their story with as much realism as possible.”
      “On Saturday evening, things became more real than we expected,” the group said. “The presence of protesters Nazis (this one I may be willing to let slide if it’s a direct quote) outside gave us a small glimpse of the fear and uncertainty felt by those in hiding.”
      “As a theatre, we want to make people feel and think. We hope by presenting Anne’s story, we can help prevent the atrocities of the past from happening again.”
      Citing the sheriff’s office, The Detroit News reported the demonstrators Nazis left after being told to vacate the legion post’s parking lot, then ensued in a brief exchange of words with patrons while across the street.
      The Anti-Defamation League’s regional office in Michigan said on social media it was “disgusted by the far-right extremists Nazis (again, this may be a direct quote?) who praised Hitler and waved Nazi flags outside of an American Legion hosting the play.”
      The county has faced similar displays of racism this year. In July, White supremacists Nazis marched through Howell, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Detroit.
      Threats to Jews in the US tripled in the one-year period since the deadly October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, preliminary data provided to CNN by the ADL showed. In the weeks following October 7, reports of hate crimes and bias incidents targeting Jews, Muslims and Arabs all surged.
      “The Diary of Anne Frank” was published posthumously and has been translated into more than 70 languages in more than 60 nations, with several film and stage adaptations. Her diary is often a teen’s first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust caused by Nazis during World War II.
      She and seven others, all Jewish, hiding in a secret annex above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam for nearly two years were detained and deported in 1944. Anne later died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at age 15.
      Growing fears of antisemitism remains a present issue – including in Amsterdam. In July, a statue of Anne in a local park was vandalized with the word “Gaza” scrawled in red paint. More recently, people were beaten and injured in violent clashes between fans of an Israeli soccer team and counter-protesters in the city over the weekend, which Dutch authorities condemned as antisemitic.

    • @CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      14 months ago

      FFS, how many times are the “liberal media” going to call the insurrectionists ( a way too nice of a term, by the way - they are truly terrorists in every sense of that term ) “rioters”?

  • Ghostalmedia
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    385 months ago

    The far right extremists are feeling more and more emboldened.

    Don’t hide from these assholes. That’s how they win.

      • @Astronauticaldb@lemmy.world
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        395 months ago

        No, the real way to show 'em is to punch them square in the jaw. If you’re acting the part of a Nazi, you’d better get ready for what the public is prepared to do to Nazis.

              • @BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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                24 months ago

                Too soon to call them nazis? No, go ahead. I’d prefer if we didn’t dilute the term, so if fascist is more accurate, then maybe use that instead. But if someone’s a nazi, call them out, document it, make their employers know who they have on their payroll.

                Too soon to joke about? Yes, definitely. Joking about the current situation dulls people’s perception of what’s happening. You need Americans to have their eyes wide open for what’s coming.

                I took OP’s comment as being made in jest, thus my “too soon” comment.

                • @HikingVet@lemmy.ca
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                  24 months ago

                  I took it as the statement of an uncomfortable fact that we have to deal with. And saying “too soon” is what the gun lobby in the US says after a school shooting.

        • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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          85 months ago

          They did a fairly extensive study in the 1940s on how to deal with Nazis.

          Findings were that punching, while not necessarily a bad thing to do to them, was quite a bit less effective than other forms of engagement due to the Nazi having a tendency to get back up after a punch alone.

  • 🎨 Elaine Cortez 🇨🇦
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    234 months ago

    The fact that such hateful people still exist in the world is staggering. Anne Frank was only 15 years old when she died, so not only are they being incredibly racist, they’re also mocking the death of an innocent child. We only get to live on this planet for a short time, so why can’t we just love eachother?

  • The Pantser
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    205 months ago

    Yep, Howell is a big cluster fuck of Nazis. I wouldn’t be sad if someone blew it up.

    • @MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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      115 months ago

      It’s a lovely little town. You’d never know driving through. I even used to work there briefly, never saw a single hint of racism. They have a pretty good Thai restaurant.

      Of course, I also never saw a single black person there. I briefly contemplated moving there and then just quietly voting against all their bullshit, but I don’t really want to be that close to folks like that. Certainly don’t want my kids around it.