SAN DIEGO — A neo-Nazi who once lived in San Diego County has been extradited to the Netherlands to face hate speech charges in connection with an antisemitic incident that took place at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam earlier this year.
Forty-one-year-old Robert Wilson, a former Chula Vista resident, is accused of projecting an antisemitic message on the exterior of the Anne Frank House on Feb. 6 and publishing a video of the incident on social media.
On Aug. 28, the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service issued a press release explaining the suspect had been surrendered to the country for prosecution and will face his first court date in early October.
The statement doesn’t explicitly name Wilson, but the description of the suspect matches Wilson’s background and follows his arrest in Poland, which he recorded and posted online.
The text displayed on the Anne Frank House claimed that the Holocaust victim was the “inventor of the ballpoint.” The message refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory suggesting Anne Frank’s diary is a hoax and could not have been written by her, because it was crafted with a ballpoint pen, which was not used widely until after World War II.
This claim has been disproven, as researchers and scholars have shown the diary was not written in ballpoint pen.
Mary, a Netherlands resident who has been tracking right-wing extremism through her group Capitol Terrorist Exposers, said the incident had a big impact across the country.
“It caused a shocking effect, not only in Dutch Jewish society but the entire society,” she said. inewsource has agreed to only use Mary’s first name to protect her safety.
Read the full article on inewsource.org.
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Preceding republished from Times of San Diego, with which San Diego Jewish World trades stories under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.