Another example of ignorance! Rajesh Shah has opened a Western style clothing store named Hitler in India. With the use of name, as well as the Nazi swastika which dots the “i” in Hitler, there has been uproar in the Jewish Community prompting a swift action to be taken. Click below to read more.
The owner of an Indian clothing store said Wednesday that he would only change its name from “Hitler” if he was compensated for re-branding costs, amid a growing row over the new shop.
“I will change it (the name) if people want to compensate me for the money we have spent — the logo, the hoarding, the business cards, the brand,” Rajesh Shah told AFP.
He put the total costs at about 150,000 rupees ($2,700).
Shah insisted that until the store opened he did not know who Adolf Hitler was and that Hitler was a nickname given to the grandfather of his store partner because “he was very strict”.
“I didn’t know how much the name would disturb people,” he told AFP by telephone from Ahmedabad. “It was only when the store opened I learnt Hitler had killed six million people.”
Members of the tiny Jewish community in Ahmedabad condemned the store’s name, while a senior Israeli diplomat said the embassy would raise the matter “in the strongest possible way.”
“People use such names mostly out of ignorance,” Israel’s Mumbai Consul General Orna Sagiv told AFP.
The row evoked memories of a controversy six years ago when a Mumbai restaurant owner called his cafe “Hitler’s Cross” and put a swastika on the hoarding, claiming Hitler was a “catchy” name.
The restaurant owner eventually agreed to change the name after protests by the Israeli embassy, Germany and the US Anti-Defamation League.
