At the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa on Tuesday, they gathered to remember the Babi Yar massacre.
Over two days in late September 1941, nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women and children were herded through the streets of Kyiv in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, stripped of their clothing and forced into a narrow ravine where they were mown down with machine guns. Dead and wounded alike were then buried where they lay.
“It’s a total desecration of the memory of … those that were killed during the Holocaust,” said prominent Ottawa lawyer Lawrence Greenspon, who co-chaired Tuesday’s commemoration. “It’s incredibly insulting.”
The comparisons are “vile,” agreed Andrea Freedman, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa.
“They’re dangerous, and they’re a gross and wilful distortion of history,” she told CBC News.
Ottawa lawyer Lawrence Greenspon said it’s ‘incredibly insulting’ for protesers to make such comparisons to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. (Alistair Steele/CBC)
“It’s offensive. It’s offensive to the survivors, and it’s offensive to the memory of the six million people who were systematically murdered.”
It’s difficult to say whether the sentiment is widespread among the protesters, or representative of an extreme fringe. Protesters wearing yellow stars like those Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe have been seen at demonstrations across Canada.
At a demonstration in Calgary last week, one protester held a picture of Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who died in a Nazi concentration camp.
One internet meme making the rounds shows two forearms, one wearing a proof-of-vaccination bracelet at a baseball game, the other bearing a six-digit tattoo from a concentration camp.
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” the caption reads.
But CBC News spotted no sign of demonstrators comparing their cause to the plight of Jews during the Second World War when about 50 gathered on Monday near the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital.
Speakers at a ceremony on Tuesday at Ottawa’s National Holocaust Monument cautioned against forgetting the lessons of history. (Alistair Steele/CBC)
Freedman rejects any such comparisons as not only wrong-headed, but potentially dangerous.
“There can be absolutely no comparison between torture and persecution, to getting a vaccine or wearing a mask, and quite frankly making such comparisons just trivializes the horrors of the [Holocaust],” she said.
For Freedman, that distortion is linked both to a general and growing ignorance about the Holocaust.
“It’s a lack of knowledge, it’s a lack of education and it’s a wilful ignorance of understanding the complexities of history,” she said.
That’s particularly true when it comes to hospital protesters comparing themselves to Frank, who’s believed to have died of typhus.
“The irony of this is that Anne Frank perished from a treatable disease,” Freedman said.
Increasingly, politicians are speaking out against such comparisons, too.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson called them “unbelievable and appalling.”
“Please think about the millions of Jews and others murdered and tortured and stop using this analogy,” he wrote on Twitter last week.
I find it unbelievable and appalling that so many anti mask and anti vaccine activists continue to compare public health guidelines to fight Covid 19 to the Holocaust and nazism. Please think about the millions of Jews and others murdered and tortured and stop using this analogy
“I really wish there was a way that we could stop it from happening, but I don’t think that the criminal law is at current equipped to be able to do that,” said Greenspon.
At the commemoration on Tuesday, several speakers alluded to a key lesson of the Holocaust: that such evil is only made possible when others look away. For that reason, Freedman says everyone has a duty to denounce such comparisons.
“We can’t stay silent,” she said. “That is one of the lessons of the Holocaust, is you can’t stay silent.”
TORONTO – Ontario is pushing through several bills with little or no debate, which the government house leader says is due to a short legislative sitting.
The government has significantly reduced debate and committee time on the proposed law that would force municipalities to seek permission to install bike lanes when they would remove a car lane.
It also passed the fall economic statement that contains legislation to send out $200 cheques to taxpayers with reduced debating time.
The province tabled a bill Wednesday afternoon that would extend the per-vote subsidy program, which funnels money to political parties, until 2027.
That bill passed third reading Thursday morning with no debate and is awaiting royal assent.
Government House Leader Steve Clark did not answer a question about whether the province is speeding up passage of the bills in order to have an election in the spring, which Premier Doug Ford has not ruled out.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
