Itongadol.- A university in Thailand issued an apology this week for a graduation mural on the wall of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts depicting Adolf Hitler among comic book superheroes, the Bangkok Post reported.
"The painting, which has now become a topic of debate, is not intended to refer to anyone particularly," Chulalongkorn University said in its statement.
The university said the mural, that has been removed following the controversy around it, was created by a group of students who "had no ill-intentions" and "were not fully aware of the likely consequences."
"The students only wanted to show through the mural that different superheroes are there to protect the world and that there are both good and evil people," Faculty dean Supakorn Dispan said, according to the Bangkok Post.
"Please do not forget that they are first-year students and have been here for only a few months," he added.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he was "outraged and disgusted" by the mural, and more so by a young woman who was photographed posing in front of the mural doing the Nazi salute.
"Hitler as a superhero? Is he an appropriate role model for Thailand\’s younger generation – a genocidal hate monger who mass murdered Jews and Gypsies and who condemned people of color as racially inferior?" Cooper wrote in the Huffington Post.
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