Holocaust Museum criticizes RFK Jr. for Anne Frank comment

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was “reckless” and “outrageous” when he instructed issues are worse for individuals immediately than they had been for Anne Frank, {the teenager} who died in a Nazi focus camp after hiding along with her household in a secret annex in an Amsterdam home for 2 years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum stated.

“Making reckless comparisons to the Holocaust, the homicide of six million Jews, for a political agenda is outrageous and deeply offensive. Those that carelessly invoke Anne Frank, the star badge, and the Nuremberg Trials exploit historical past and the implications of hate,” the museum stated Monday in a statement posted to Twitter.

A spokesman stated the museum made the assertion in response to Kennedy’s speech and different latest incidents of individuals invoking the Holocaust for political functions. The museum additionally identified that Anne Frank was one of many 1.5 million youngsters who died in the course of the Holocaust.

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Throughout a Sunday rally in Washington organized by his anti-vaccine nonprofit group Kids’s Well being Protection, Kennedy complained that folks’s rights had been being violated by public well being measures that had been taken to scale back the variety of individuals sickened and killed by COVID-19. He stated the nation’s main infectious illness physician, Anthony Fauci, was orchestrating “fascism.”

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you would you would cross the Alps to Switzerland. You would disguise in an attic like Anne Frank did,” stated Kennedy, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of his slain brother, former Legal professional Basic, civil rights activist and democratic presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy Jr. went on say that immediately, “the mechanisms are being put in place that may make it so none of us can run and none of us can disguise,” and complained about 5G, the latest technology of wi-fi communication networks, and about vaccine passports.

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An AP investigation revealed final month detailed how Kennedy has invoked the specter of Nazis and the Holocaust in his work to sow doubts about vaccines and agitate towards public well being efforts to deliver the pandemic underneath management, corresponding to requiring masks or vaccine mandates.

In a speech to the Ron Paul Institute in October, for instance, Kennedy referenced Nazis a number of instances, obliquely evaluating public well being measures put in place by governments world wide to Nazi propaganda meant to scare individuals into abandoning essential pondering. Final month, he put out a video that confirmed an image of Fauci with a Hitler mustache.

Kennedy apologized in 2015, after he used the phrase “holocaust” to explain youngsters whom he believes had been damage by vaccines. He stated on the time that he “employed the time period throughout an impromptu speech.”

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That he has continued to make use of such comparisons signifies, “he means it,” stated Dr. David Gorski, a most cancers surgeon at Wayne State College College of Medication in Detroit and a critic of the anti-vaccine motion who has tracked Kennedy’s rhetoric for over 15 years. Gorski stated Kennedy has been making Nazi and Holocaust references in relation to vaccines since a minimum of 2013.

Up to now few years, Gorski stated, Kennedy has been extra open about utilizing such language, which he stated might point out Kennedy senses it resonates with the brand new fan base he has constructed up in the course of the pandemic, or that the implications of utilizing such language aren’t “unacceptably damaging.”

The AP investigation documented how Kennedy had grown his group in the course of the pandemic, increasing his viewers and pulling in thousands and thousands of {dollars} in new funding.

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Gorski stated the language demonstrates one of many methods Kennedy likes to attach together with his viewers: Buttering them up by portraying them as going towards the circulate and smarter than everybody else.

“If vaccine mandates are totalitarian like Nazis and the Soviet Union and that kind of factor, what does that make the anti-vaxxers? They’re courageous freedom fighters,” Gorski stated. “There’s flattery in these analogies.”