Saturday, August 24, 2019

Nazi Salute Video at Pacifica High School in Garden Grove

I don't know why these kids do it. I guess they simply haven't been taught the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Nazi acts by youth loom over increasingly diverse Orange County":


In March, social media blew up with photos of a group of partying students from Newport Beach and Costa Mesa giving the Sieg Heil salute to a bunch of red plastic cups arranged into a swastika. School officials immediately condemned the images, notifying parents across the district what had happened and what they planned to do.

The same month, school officials in Garden Grove were alerted to a group of Pacifica High School students raising the Nazi salute while singing a Nazi marching song at an off-campus athletic event.

Pacifica High administrators kept their situation quiet — which worked until this week, when the months-old recorded Snapchat video exploded online after it was sent to the Daily Beast.

Since Monday, Garden Grove Unified School District officials have learned of other videos and multiple allegations of students engaged in hate speech. The district has opened an investigation.

The students’ motivation and identities are unclear. But the images in Newport and Garden Grove reflect both a rise in such incidents nationwide and a conflict more specific to Orange County: tension between a rapidly diversifying populace and racist elements deeply seated in its history.

In September, at a football game in predominantly white Aliso Viejo, the visitors from a predominantly Latino high school in Santa Ana were met with signs of “Build the Wall” and “We love White,” according to the Santa Ana principal.

And white supremacist groups like the Rise Above Movement are giving a new voice to the bigotry of the skinheads and peckerwood gangs that long haunted Huntington Beach, Anaheim and working-class parts of the county. The group attacked counter-protesters and journalists at a rally in support of President Trump at Bolsa Chica State Beach in 2017.

The eight-second video from Garden Grove shows about a dozen Pacifica High school boys standing in what appears to be a banquet room giving the stiff-armed salute used in Nazi Germany, as the song “Erika,” written by German composer Herms Niel during Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power, plays in the background. At least one of the boys appears to sing the lyrics. One boy gets up and leaves, and another quickly drops his arm and sits down.

The video, taken before the start of an athletics banquet in November 2018, was originally shared among a small group of students on Snapchat. High school administrators learned of the video four months later and addressed the situation internally with the students appearing in the video and their families, Garden Grove Unified spokeswoman Abby Broyles said. School district officials did not know about the video until it surfaced Monday.

The students involved were disciplined, but officials declined to discuss the consequences they faced...
It was an "off campus" event. Seems like the First Amendment protects their speech, although that's no defense for it.

Still more.

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