Back in May, Mark Meechan of Coatbridge, Lanarkshire was arrested for a video he made. No, it wasn't evidence of a violent crime or child exploitation or abuse. The video was of Mark shouting "Gas the Jews" and "Heil Hitler" which prompts his pug to make what appears to be a Nazi salute.
Monday, September 11, was his first court date. He is charged with a hate crime for making the video which went viral and has currently racked up over 3 million total views. Meechan and his pug, Buddha, gained some overnight success with the release of the Youtube video entitled, "M8 yer dugs a Nazi." Another scene has Buddha, the pug, engrossed in watching footage of Hitler at the Olympic Games in Berlin from the documentary, 'Olympia.'
<a href="https://thegoldwater.com/news/2999-Gas-The-Jews-Video-Sends-Scottish-Man-to-Court-Hate-Crimes">Meechan claims innocence of a hate crime</a>. The video, made last April, was primarily an attempt to annoy his girlfriend, Suzanne Kelly, he asserts. Ephraim Borowski, 66, director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities has called the video "grossly offensive."
<blockquote>“It stuns me that anyone should think it is a joke. My immediate reaction is that there is a clear distinction to be made between an off-hand remark and the amount of effort that is required to train a dog like that. I actually feel sorry for the dog. In many ways, the bit I found most offensive was the repetition of ‘Gas the Jews’ rather than the dog itself. The other thing that struck me was the explicit statement that this was intended to give offence and intended to be the most offensive thing he could think of - and then he says he isn’t a racist - but unfortunately we hear that all the time from people. I’m no historian but it is the marching signal of the Nazi stormtroopers who contributed and supported the murder of six million Jews, including members of my own family, and I take this all slightly personally. Material of this kind goes to normalize the anti-Semitic views that frankly we thought we had seen the last of. The Holocaust is not a subject for jocular content.
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Evidently Borowski never saw <a href="http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/last-laugh/">the documentary "The Last Laugh"</a> which features several Jewish comedians like Gilbert Goddfried, Sarah Silverman and others making jokes about the Holocaust and exploring other "taboo topics" for comedy.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Finally found where Andrew Bolt got his ideas from. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/auspol?src=hash">#auspol</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/theboltreport">@theboltreport</a>. <a href="https://t.co/D80fgrt1pt">https://t.co/D80fgrt1pt</a></p>— Andrew Milbourne (@RooAndy) <a href="https://twitter.com/RooAndy/status/907397071124045824">September 12, 2017</a></blockquote>
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I can of course forgive Borowski for not being familiar with the PBS Independent Lens documentary, but seriously, has he not even seen Mel Brooks' award winning <i>The Producers</i> whose "Springtime for Hitlers" proves that even the Fuhrer and the Shoah may be fodder for laughs.
I've heard the rule with offensive humor is, if the offensive joke is funny, it's funny, but when it's not it's just offensive. If humor is in the funny bone of the beholder, is it fair to decide what subjects are and are not suitable for comedy?
