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Justin Bieber Controversy at Anne Frank House

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Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber.
Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber.
During a layaway stop on his European tour last Friday, April 12, Justin Bieber and his entourage of friends and bodyguards chose to stop by the Anne Frank House for an after-hours visit.

The Amsterdam museum is essentially the house in which Holocaust victim Anne Frank and her family lived at while in hiding from the Nazis. And everyone knows the sad story: they were eventually discovered by authorities following a tip from an informer who was never identified. The teenager died of Typhus in a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at the tender age of 15, but chronicled her life in hiding in a now famous dairy titled The Diary of Anne Frank.

Here’s where the jewcy part comes in: according to the Anne Frank House’s Facebook page, Bieber signed the museum’s guestbook as follows:

“Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.”

For those who are not Justin Bieber fans, a Belieber is a term coined for someone who is. It’s those last six words (seven if you count the “a”) that some people don’t approve of, noting a self-serving flair. And sure, it wasn’t the tactical thing to write on the pop star’s behalf, but was it really that bad?

Apparently so, according to some civilian critics. Shortly after the Amsterdam museum posted Bieber’s comment onto their Facebook page, a frenzy started as a slew of commentators quickly sounded off unabashed in their criticism of Bieber’s seemingly flimsy take on… the Holocaust? Anne Frank? Life, as a whole?

Soon, social media critics also chimed in with varying opinions… and the guestbook comment heard round the world found itself on the proverbial front page of Gawker and similar news feeds. ‘Twas difficult for some to fathom how one of the most important chroniclers of Word War II would enjoy that damn rock-and-roll music.

While the question of whether Anne Frank would have been a Belieber is daunting indeed, it was partially answered by Anne herself in her famous diary. A June 1944 entry indicates her musical style might have been slightly more… sophisticated: “There was a beautiful Mozart concert on the radio from six to seven-fifteen; I especially enjoyed the ‘Kleine Nachtmusik.’ I can hardly bear to listen in the kitchen, since beautiful music stirs me to the very depths of my soul.”

Still, there’s also proof to the contrary indicating she was a pop culture lush with a vast array on knowledge on celebrity culture. Frank was particularly fond of Greta Garbo and Ray Milland, of which she wrote of fondly and collected pictures. A biography by Melissa Muller quotes friends of Frank recalling she was not adverse to celebrity culture in the least bit, and her diary often mentioned her dreams of one day visiting Hollywood.

The irony stands that while Anne Frank was one of the most important authorizes to emerge from the Holocaust; she was also just a normal 15 year old girl, a teenager who crushed on boys, collected celebrity posters, and kept a journal.

Perhaps if she had lived today, Anne Frank would have even been one of Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, or a Taylor Swift Swifty. There I said it, does it take away a sacred part of the memory she left behind?

The truth of the matter is that many critics have been drinking from the Justin Bieber haterade lately so he’s also kind of an easy target, (Hey, all the cool kids are doing it). The young pop star has been in the gossip rags a lot as of late. First it was mainly for squabs with the paparazzi, then for being caught trying to smuggle his pet monkey into Munich (which draws reminisce of another late singer’s favorite monkey: Bubbles, anyone?).

Still, he’s nineteen years old in Amsterdam, and instead of going to a place where marijuana and other forms of drugs and alcohol are readily available, he chose to visit the Anne Frank House on a Friday night. For the critics who wrote entire spiels about this, where were your teenagers on the night of Friday, April 12? Most likely, not at a museum… Sometimes an ellipsis says it all.

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