Disgust growing over vaccine protesters' Holocaust comparisons
CBC
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.
At the solemn ceremony, which happened the same day provincial officials unveiled details of Ontario's vaccine passport system, there was little sympathy for those who have been protesting against such passports and vaccine mandates — some comparing themselves to victims of Nazi brutality.
"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.
"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."