Thai Students Parade in Nazi Uniforms

Students waved Nazi flags and raised their swastika-banded arms in the “Seig heil” salute during a parade at the Sacred Heart School in the hillside city of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Some carried plastic machine guns and others painted on mustaches to mimic Hitler. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish rights organization, asked for punishment for those involved and for Thai Christian leaders to publicly denounce the event. “It is difficult to calculate the hurt such a display inflicted on survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and the families of all victims of Nazism,” SWC associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper said. The school director posted an apology on the school's website today, explaining that it was a sports day and students on the red team chose to represent their color with Nazi uniforms. This isn’t the first scandal of its kind in Thailand: in 2007 hundreds of students took part in a similar parade in Bangkok.