ATLANTA — Condemnations are coming in from both sides of the political aisle after Georgia GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene compared mask wearing and vaccinations to the Holocaust.
“I was appalled,” said Dov Wilker of the American Jewish Committee. “She’s not saying anyone or protecting their civil liberties by comparing masks and vaccinations to the experience of Jews during the Holocaust. What she’s actually doing is minimizing the indiscriminate murder of six-million Jews.”
Greene made a series of tweets and statements comparing mask wearing and vaccinations to the Holocaust.
In a tweet criticizing a grocery store chain for asking employees to wear a sticker if they’d been vaccinated, Greene said, “vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”
In response to a story saying the University of Virginia was requiring students to get vaccinated in order to return to in-person classes, Greene tweeted, “it appears Nazi practices have already begun on our youth. Show your vax papers or no in person class for you. This is exactly what I was saying about the gold star.”
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In the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi officials forced Jews to sew gold Stars of David to their clothes in order to identify and ostracize them.
“They were painful,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Allison Padilla-Goodman responded when asked about Greene’s comments. “They were atrocious. They were hurtful. Holocaust analogies have no place in the public debate over masks or vaccinations or anything similar. Period. Such comparisons are offensive. They distort history and the memory of the systematic murder of six-million Jews.”
House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy joined in the criticism of Greene’s comments.
“Marjorie is wrong,” McCarthy said in a statement. “And her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”
In a statement to Channel 2 Action News, Greene defended her statement and instead pointed her finger at Democrats.
“Their attempts to shame, ostracize and brand Americans who choose not to get vaccinated or wear a mask are reminiscent of the great tyrants of history who did the same to those who would not comply. And everyone feeding into it is allowing them to hide the truth which is the disgusting anti-Semitism within the Democratic Party. I’m sorry some of my words make people uncomfortable, but this is what the American left is all about.”
Padilla-Goodman said politicians should never use Holocaust analogies under any circumstance.
“She’s constantly hurling out these Holocaust analogies which trivialize the trauma and deep-seeded kinds of feelings of alienation and fear that the Jewish people and millions of others impacted by the Holocaust feel, that we carry every day,” Padilla-Goodman said.
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