Environmental activists compare themselves to people who hid Anne Frank

The environmental activist organisation Just Stop Oil compared themselves to people who hid Anne Frank on Twitter earlier today, drawing condemnation from several users.

The group, which recently 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, made the comment 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.”

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Such comparisons to victims of the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jewish men, women and children, are totally inappropriate and insulting. This is not the first time radical environmentalists have been caught up in Holocaust controversy. By resorting to degrading the memory of a Jewish girl murdered as part of the worst atrocity in human history, Just Stop Oil only weakens its case and whatever remains of its credibility.”