Heeb

Jewish organizations recently condemned the iMussolini, the most fascist of killer iPhone apps. "This is an insult to the memory of all victims of Nazism and fascism," said Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendents.

iMussolini’s creator, Luigi Marino, claims the app, which provides over 100 of the dictator’s speeches, was not designed to praise the Duke of Fascism: "It is . . . simply a tool of history."

In the end, outrage alone — even Jewish outrage — wasn’t enough to remove Il Duce from the multimedia-enabled smartphones of angry Italian teens. Where moral indignation failed, copyright laws prevailed.

Though the apps existence is disturbing — Mussolini’s popularity has risen recently among Italian politicians — the controversy begs the question: What kind of material is acceptable for new media? Was iMussolini entertainment that passed the point of good taste — like Baby Shaker and Slasher — or should the words, despicable or not, of a massively influential historical figure be available for study? Even if he was a fascist piece of shit and a dictator?

Though fun, the Baby Shaker app had very little historical value.

In a far less complicated, more clear-cut case of antisemitism, Wuff, an Austrian magazine, compared Jews to violent dogs by slapping a yellow, six-pointed star with the word "bad" onto a pit-bull.

The pit-bull sat next to a labrador while the headline above asked, "What differentiates us?" Wuff Publisher and lying bitch Gerald Poetz actually claimed the image was not designed to link to Jews, even though it so obviously and undeniably was a Jewish star.