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Anne Frank laser projection deserves jail, court is told

October 5, 2023
A court drawing of Robert Wilson. Illustration: Aloys Oosterwijk ANP

A Canadian Polish dual national should be jailed for six months and banned from Amsterdam for five years for projecting anti-Semitic slogans on the Anne Frank House earlier this year, the public prosecution department told Thursday’s court hearing.

Robert Wilson, 41, also made a discriminatory video of the laser projection using a drone and spread those images via social media, the department said.

“These actions were, without a doubt, intended to present Anne Frank in bad light, and with her all Jews, the public prosecutor told the court in a strongly worded statement. “The video goes beyond insulting, the texts also incite hatred against and discrimination against Jews.”

Wilson is a prominent member of the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi Goyim Defense League and according to the Parool, has left a “trail of hatred” all over the globe.

The projection of the text “Anne Frank invented the ballpoint pen” on the front of the building on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal in February caused outrage in the Netherlands and abroad.

The text harks back to long debunked conspiracy theories based on pages covered with ball point pen writing, which were left in the diary by a researcher.

The director of the Anne Frank House described the incident at the time as “a new low in a string of anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands”.

Wilson was not arrested immediately but was tracked down via a Telegram channel called The Laser Nazi, which plots out his trip from Poland to Amsterdam and back. He had left the US earlier after facing hate crime charges.

He was eventually arrested in Germany, just before getting on a plane to Canada, and extradited to the Netherlands, where he has been held in custody since July.

The projection in Amsterdam was just one of several in the Netherlands early in the year. The most notorious was the projection of racist comments on the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam during the New Year celebrations.

Two Dutch nationals, not thought to be linked to Wilson, were arrested in that case, which has yet to come to court.

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