By Maud Swinnen
A Jewish group has expressed outrage over a satire featuring Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader that it says “belittled the Holocaust.”
Croatian police detained and interrogated last week an opposition activist who posted on facebook a photo montage portrait of Sanader in a Nazi uniform which violated Croatia’s law banning Nazi propaganda.
Sanader said he deplored any use of Nazi symbols for the purposes of political satire.
In a statement, the Brussels-based Rabbinical Center of Europe (RCE) acknowledged Croatia’s right to free speech but said “there must be zero-tolerance for using humor in the Nazi genocidal murder of six million Jews”.
“As individuals who know the poisonous taste of discrimination, the satires are loathsome. Freedom of expression must never lead to arrogance, it must have a certain limit,” the RCE said.
“People of goodwill understand that the use of hateful Holocaust imagery to criticize is unacceptable and beyond the pale of legitimate political criticism. It defames human dignity.”
A delegation of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe visited Croatia last March to discuss the protection of Jewish cemeteries in the country.
