At protests against vaccine mandates and lockdown policies, demonstrators have from time to time appeared wearing yellow stars, and on October 3 protestors in front of the Utah governor’s mansion unfurled a large flag displaying a swastika made out of syringes. Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, and the Anti-Defamation League representative Seth Brysk comment:
Extremists have invoked new conspiracies by using old tropes to blame Jews for the pandemic or to accuse them of profiting from it. We have also watched with alarm as protesters have affixed a yellow Star of David to their clothing to protest public-health requirements. Jews in Nazi Germany were forced to wear yellow stars visibly on their clothing so they could be identified as Jews in the aftermath of the violent Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938. Jews who refused to comply were subject to being shot on the spot.
Using a swastika or yellow star as a cheap symbol of protest against the vaccine or mask requirements is odious. The genocide committed by the Nazis resulting in the destruction of two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of the global Jewish population is not a subject for glib comparisons or politicization. Denying, minimizing, or trivializing of the Holocaust is at worst an expression of anti-Semitism and at best a display of the ignorance of the protester invoking the comparison.
Encouraging vaccinations does not compare to schemes hastening the mass murder of millions of innocent people. . . . Policies designed to save lives do not equate with policies devised to mete out death.
Read more on Deseret News: https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2021/10/25/22745180/utah-governor-nazi-swastika-covid19-protest-jewish-holocaust-offensive