The Norwegian street artist Toddel has created a mural of Anne Frank in the southwestern city of Bergen that is nothing short of revolting. “Death of an Innocent,” as it is blandly called, provocatively portrays the late Dutch Jewish diarist clad in a Palestinian keffiyeh.
Toddel has said that his mural is a critique of Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip, which has claimed the lives of a great number of Palestinians. Nearly 40,000, including some 14,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, have been killed since October 7, the day 3,000 Hamas terrorists stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered roughly 1,200 people and abducted 250 Israelis and foreign nationals.
Toddel acknowledges that Hamas started the war with its “horrific terrorist attack.” But he thinks that Israel’s response has been disproportionate and that “the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza must stop now.”
“I feel sure that Anne Frank … would support me in this demand,” he added. “Anne Frank is a symbol of innocence. Like the children and women of Gaza, she suffered and died because of her ethnicity and religion and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Toddel’s explanation is not only self-serving but outrageous and historically wrong.
First of all, what gives him the right to cavalierly assume that Anne Frank would have been supportive of his totally biased position? It is a presumptuous and arrogant assumption that holds no water.
Secondly, civilians in Gaza have not been killed because they are Palestinians, Muslims or Christians, but rather because they were callously exposed to Israeli bombardments by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.
Long story short: Hamas has cynically used civilians as human shields. This has been Hamas’ tactic in all its cross-border wars and skirmishes with Israel since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza prior to October 7, did not build shelters for civilians, knowing full well they would be extremely vulnerable in the event of a war. Instead, Hamas built a vast and expensive network of tunnels for its own exclusive use.
These are elementary facts, yet Toddel had the temerity to create a mural that grotesquely misrepresents Anne Frank, an enduring symbol of the Holocaust.
As the European Jewish Congress stated, “Depicting a Holocaust victim with a keffiyeh is a gross distortion of history. Such acts are not genuine criticism but deeply antisemitic and offensive misrepresentations that undermine Holocaust memory.”
Toddel’s misguided attempt to equate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust with the deaths of Palestinian civilians in a war zone is a travesty. His mural leaves the untrue impression that the Israeli government and the Nazi regime are one and the same. Palestinians and their supporters may believe this calumny, but no one else will buy this brazen lie.
If he has any self-respect, Toddel will remove this disgusting mural and issue an apology for all the pain he has caused.