CAA produces video about Just Stop Oil: “Just stop trivialising the Holocaust”
Campaign Against Antisemitism has produced a video about Just Stop Oil in which we say: “Just stop trivialising the Holocaust.”
The controversial environmental activist organisation, which gained notoriety for its public stunts intended to cause inconvenience to the general public as a means of bringing attention towards oil usage which has included throwing soup on rare artworks and hanging banners over motorway gantries, has a history of using Holocaust comparisons in their messaging.
Yesterday, the group compared the bosses of oil and gas companies to the architects of the Holocaust. Activists took to Parliament Square where they invoked the name of Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer in the Third Reich and an architect of the Final Solution — the industrial slaughter of six million Jews.
Chloe Naldrett, a member of the group, said: “Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, at his trial sought to defend himself by saying that he didn’t kill Jews because he was only in charge of transporting them to the death camps. The judges threw out this obscene defence and he was hanged.
“When those in charge today go to court in the coming years, they will claim that they only facilitated the continued use of oil and gas and coal. They will argue that they never directly killed the millions who are already dying and will continue to die of starvation, floods, drought, wildfires and deadly heat.”
When Zoe Cohen, a different member of Just Stop Oil, was asked by LBC about the comparison, she refused to apologise and instead doubled down, stating: “Forgive me for saying this, and I say this very sincerely, but it’s like we’re all trapped in a giant gas chamber. And we know that every single tonne of carbon dioxide makes this worse. And yet these people go on expanding oil and gas. Is that not genocide? Of course, it is.”
This evening, James Harvey, one of Just Stop Oil’s spokespeople, appeared on TalkTV where he was asked by Vanessa Feltz whether or not he defended those comments. He attempted to justify the comparison before stating: “At the time, in Germany, in the 1930s and 40s, we know that the government there facilitated the deaths of thousands and thousands of people.”
Ms Feltz responded to this comment by saying “That wasn’t facilitating”, to which Mr Harvey replied: “Or, they caused the deaths of thousands and thousands.”
Towards the end of the interview, after repeatedly being asked whether he apologised for the group’s Holocaust comparisons, he stated: “On a personal level, I am sorry if we have caused any offence to people.”
In June, the group took to Twitter to compare themselves to those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, writing: “We don’t deny we take action outside of current laws…It was illegal to free slaves. Illegal to hide Jews. Illegal for women to vote. Legality is not a guide for morality.”
Last year, Just Stop Oil compared themselves to people who hid Anne Frank, drawing condemnation from several users.
The comment was made on Twitter in reply to the former UKIP leader Henry Bolton. Mr Bolton, replying to a tweet posted by the activist group which stated that one of its members responsible for causing disruption to traffic on the M25 motorway would be imprisoned until her trial, wrote: “If you commit a crime, don’t complain if you’re arrested, prosecuted and and [sic] jailed.”
In response, the activist group wrote that “The people who hid Anne Frank during WW2 were criminals, Henry. So were the French Resistance.”
It added: “Obeying the law does not give you the moral highground [sic] — not when it’s still legal for our Government to greenlight enough oil and gas to kill millions. Good people break bad laws.”
The tweet drew the ire of several Twitter users with many denouncing the comparison.
It is reported that the group is led by Roger Hallam, the co-founder of the activist group Extinction Rebellion, who was disowned by his colleagues after he described the Holocaust as “just another f***ery in human history.” He later apologised for his “crass words”.
Last week, Mr Hallam published a Twitter thread comparing Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer to Eichmann.
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Just Stop Oil has a disturbing history of minimising the Holocaust in its messaging. In the latest example, a spokesperson for the group said on TalkTV that the Nazis merely ‘facilitated the deaths of thousands and thousands of people.’ This is historically ignorant, and that ignorance is dangerously combined with the group’s insatiable pursuit of attention at any cost. The result is the strange and inflammatory ubiquity of the genocide of the Jews in the group’s activism. Why can’t Just Stop Oil just stop trivialising the Holocaust?”
