Justin Bieber upset many people with a flippant comment at the Anne Frank House but he was much less offensive than the response of his ignorant fans.
The 19-year-old pop idol visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam on Saturday and left a note in the Museum’s guest book: ‘Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.’ For those who don’t live with a teenage girl a ‘belieber’ is, apparently, the preferred nomenclature of a Bieber fan.
Bieber’s note is prompting a predictable storm of protest. Certainly the second half of the comment was self-obsessed, immature and disrespectful towards the Museum and to the memory of the young Holocaust victim whose death has become a representative of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
But the first half was gold and the furious copy that is being spent chastising the teen hearthrob is missing the true crime and, worse than that, wasting a golden opportunity to turn the power of the celebrity into a force for good.
Bieber’s excursion has exposed a much darker problem. What’s truly disturbing is the response of the Bieber fans (and I’m not just talking about their grammar). ‘Whos anne frank tho?’ writes one JonTelford on Twitter. ‘I don’t even know whos anne frank help’, posts another fan. ‘Whos this anne frank chick ya’ll talking about’, ‘who’s anne frank???…is she like, deaf or something?’ And so on.
They are not alone. Elsewhere online you can find people who think Anne Frank was ‘something to do with Martin Luther King’, ‘Helen Keller’s sister’ and a participant on a reality television show called The Bad Girls Club. Plus a startling number of vague if more accurate references to her diary, ‘wasn’t she some kind of writer?’. “I think she was a poet”.
Justin Bieber’s Twitter account (@justinbieber) is the most popular celebrity account on the planet with just over 37 million followers. The large community teenage girls who follow every move of one of the world’s most popular figures contains a significant chunk who have never heard of Anne Frank.
Bieber’s visit to the Anne Frank House presents a magnificent opportunity to access people who were too busy following his Twitter feed to listen when they covered World War II in class (giving the education system to benefit of the doubt and assuming the lesson wasn’t dropped for a NAPLAN test or a sporting excursion).
As a result of Justin Bieber visiting the Anne Frank house some of these fans will learn who Anne Frank was. For that reason alone, Bieber has done history – and society – a huge favour.
But the power of the arts presents even more opportunities. The young star says he is a believing Christian. He took the time to visit the Anne Frank House and to write in the guestbook a comment which, if foolish, was obviously meant to be supportive. Most importantly, if he talks and certainly if he sings, there are millions of young people who listen.
If Bieber understands what he saw at the Anne Frank House, if he was – as he surely must have been- moved to stand in that annexe room and feel the ghosts of hope and heartbreak, then he has the opportunity to do something few can do to make a difference.
He describes the visit as ‘truly inspiring’. Imagine if he were to act on this inspiration, to produce a song which told Anne Frank’s story or even mentioned her in passing. He could do what a thousand history teachers could not in making a new generation understand and care about the persecution and murder of a young girl because she happened to be Jewish, and through her about the tremendous cost of anti-Semitism and all forms of hate and prejudice.
We shouldn’t be slamming Bieber for his youthful and self-obsessed ‘belieber’ comment. We should be welcoming his attention and his sentiment and prevailing on him to act upon it.
I doubt Anne Frank would have been a Bieber fan. I’d place her as the more serious type and not a big fad-follower. But she was not a saint nor a natural ascetic. She was a teenage girl, interested in boys and movie stars, prone to giggling and despairing of the idiocy of adults. If she lived today she would probably be reading Twilight, spending her evenings on Facebook and listening to something indie and soulful.
Plenty of her classmates would be ‘beliebers’ though and, like teenagers of any time, much more willing to take instruction from self-chosen idols than from parents and teachers. Movies and music are a way to get through to them that classrooms will never be.
Justin Bieber has these people eating of his hand. He can sells them songs and give them a little education while he is at it. One of Bieber’s catchphrases is ‘Believe’. This would be a good time to find out what he believes in.
