A far-right politician has been ordered by a Dutch court to delete social media posts comparing the treatment of unvaccinated people to the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
Thierry Baudet, leader of the Forum for Democracy party, had been taken to court by Jewish organisations and a group of Holocaust survivors over a series of posts that made the comparison, which is frequently made by anti-lockdown and corona-skeptic activists.
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Among Baudet’s offending posts were tweets calling unvaccinated people “the new Jews,” and those “who look the other way … the new Nazis.”
Other posts included a photo of a Dutch child prevented from attending the traditional celebration of the Feast of Saint Nicholas, alongside an image of a Jewish boy, wearing a Star of David, awaiting deportation from a Polish ghetto. Another featured an image of Buchenwald concentration camp with the text: “How is it POSSIBLE not to see how history repeats itself?”
In a ruling on Wednesday, the judge ordered Baudet to delete the four posts within 48 hours or be fined €25,000 (about £21,000) a day, and banned him from making any other posts comparing the Holocaust with the coronavirus pandemic.
The judge ruled that the posts “instrumentalise[d] the human suffering of Jews in the Holocaust” and had created “a breeding ground for anti-Semitism.”
“The right to freedom of expression is not unlimited for a representative of the people,” Dutch press agency ANP quoted the judge as saying.
Baudet gave the impression of reacting defiantly to the ruling, tweeting a selfie in the aftermath of the hearing calling the judge’s decision “insane [and] incomprehensible” and issuing a call for support for his party.
“We are angry and combative,” he tweeted.
But for all his bluster, by Thursday morning Baudet had deleted the tweets in question, although he said still intended to appeal the ruling.
“I am intensely sad that I am not allowed to express what I deeply believe in and I will not resign myself to that. We will certainly appeal,” he wrote in a tweet.
Rhetoric explicitly comparing pandemic restrictions, such as lockdowns or vaccination drives, to the systematic extermination of European Jews by the Nazis has become a routine phenomenon at anti-lockdown protests and a talking-point for right-wing populist politicians around the world.
In May, Germany’s anti-Semitism commission Felix Klein called on the government to ban displays of the yellow Star of David at anti-lockdown protests, after anti-vaxxers adopted it as a symbol of their supposed persecution.
The same month, the controversial US lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was widely criticised for comments likening a mask mandate for politicians on the House floor to the Holocaust.
“We can look back in a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens – so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about [in keeping a mask mandate],” she told an interviewer.
And on Monday, Marcus Fysh, a Conservative MP in the UK, apologised for bringing up Nazi Germany in comments opposing the introduction of vaccine passports. In a radio interview earlier this month, Fysh had said he opposed the concept because:“We are not a ‘papers please society.’ This is not Nazi Germany.”
