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09/18/2007: "Phone company weeps over reference to Holocaust in ads"

Canada's biggest phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cellphones.

The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads "Belsen was a gas" -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a reference to Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The billboards appeared in mass-transit systems in Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as in Toronto, which has a large Jewish community and many Holocaust survivors.

[ They wanted to seem edgy, but "not that edgy." The drama is really silly. People on both sides of the issue need to get over the Holocaust and move on. In a world of seven billion, the death of six million -- or seventy million -- is something to be overcome, not endlessly mourned. ]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070917/od_nm/phones1_dc