Anti-vaccination protesters in London wearing yellow stars condemned

Protesters at an anti-vaccination rally held in London this past weekend were pictured wearing the yellow star that was forced upon Jews during the Holocaust.

Comedian David Baddiel took to Twitter to share a photo of a woman wearing the yellow star, accompanying it with the caption: “Take. That. Off.”

The Auschwitz Memorial replied to this photo in support of Mr Baddiel, tweeting: “Instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, and finally isolated in ghettos and murdered during the Holocaust, in order to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”

This is not the first time that anti-vaccination protesters have used the yellow star during their rallies. Recently, French protesters were seen wearing them at a demonstration in Avignon, and they have also been seen elsewhere in Europe and North America.

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David so that the Nazis could easily identify them and massacre them in a systematic genocide that saw six million Jewish men, women and children slaughtered simply for being Jewish.

“Comparisons between the Holocaust and COVID-19 regulations and vaccinations are grossly ignorant and utterly despicable, because to compare vaccination passports, restrictions on who can enter a football area or rules about wearing masks on public transport with the genocide of over a third of the world’s Jewish population in the Holocaust is essentially a form of Holocaust denial.”

Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination networks have become known as hotbeds of antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes.

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