Auschwitz Selfie Goes Viral: Disrespectful?

Here’s an interesting debate for a religions class.

Is this teen’s smiling selfie at the biggest concentration camp grossly disrespectful?

The selife went viral with many slamming the teen for being inappropriate and others defending her.

BuzzFeed printed some tweets that thought she was inappropriate like the two tweets below.

And here’s an example that shows support.

Craig Detweiler, a professor working in Europe this summer, wrote an interesting defense of the selife for CNN’s Belief Blog. He notes that both the teen,  Brenna Mitchell, and Justin Bieber who earlier this year visited the home of Anne Frank and wrote “Hopefully, she would have been a Belieber,”  probably never intended to be disrespectful to the dead.

Thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices (mobiquity!), adolescent mistakes and hard lessons that used to be learned in private can quickly devolve into public drubbings.