I'm not a fan of vax mandates, but don't compare it to the Holocaust! Just don't!

Yesterday I reached out to an acquaintance about an article with his name on it. It compares vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Let me be clear, I understand that this is a difficult situation for many people. Particularly those whose consciences will not allow them to get the vaccine. And the rejection and pressure that comes with that, when most others in their profession have received the vaccine, can feel awful and humiliating.

I very much appreciate those feelings. But to compare such actions (where no one has been killed or beaten or forced into slave labor) with what led to the murdering of six million out of nine million Jews in Europe (2 out of 3), is an emotionally based manipulative comparison, meant to provoke a response. It is not based on reason or history.

Below is the note I sent him. To his credit, he mildly changed part of the article and the title, but left in the comparison to the Holocaust. I'm not a fan of vax mandates and I think President Biden has been quite cocky and arrogant in his approach, but I am very much against comparing things that are not anything close to the Holocaust with the Holocaust. It's wrong. It's sensationalism. It's sows fear and division, when you suggest, even indirectly, that the non-vaccinated are going to be rounded up and murdered in the millions. If these people really believed that, they would go into hiding—not post about it on social media.

Furthermore, the Holocaust and Nazism was the height of anti-Semitism. As author Robert Wistrich writes, “Totalitarian anti-Semitism reached its genocidal apex with Hitler’s ideology.” [1] To compare a non-antisemitic act to the Holocaust is to erase the specifically demonic antisemitic component of the Holocaust—Satan's hatred of God and his people.

Dear [name withheld],

I am so grateful for the favor you have shown me over the years in publishing my articles. That's why I wanted to reach out to you privately. As a Jewish believer, I cannot tell you how grieved I am to see the comparison of somebody being fired for not taking the vaccine or being willing to wear a badge that says as much, to the murdering of 6 million Jews.

"Wilkes is only one of perhaps hundreds of thousands around the United States who suffered the same fate. Refuse the vaccination mandate set down by the Biden administration and suffer the consequences of losing your job...

"In the 1930s and 1940s during World War II, Jews in Germany were forced to wear gold star badges to identify them as members of the Jewish race. Consequently, Jews were sent to concentration camps and 6 million were exterminated by the Nazis in what is now infamously called The Holocaust."

I am not endorsing how this woman was treated. But whatever one's views are on the vaccine, it is beyond absurd and disrespectful to compare mandates to the Holocaust. The Holocaust was so obscene, perverse and gruesome that the word was taken out of the dictionary to be used almost exclusively for what Hitler did to 11 million Jews (5 million managed to survive).

There are many times in history where people have been unjustly forced to wear a symbol (although in this case, a case can be made that it has more to do with safety than shaming people…but I won't make that case) where the end result was not mass genocide. In fact you would be hard-pressed to find anything in 6,000 years of history where wearing some sort of ethnic/religious/medical designation ended up in genocide, anywhere close to the magnitude of the Holocaust. For that reason, I urge you to change the headline of your article and to take out any comparison to the Holocaust. If you want to make a story about somebody being unjustly treated, no problem. But no one has been killed yet (or anything close!)

Do you really think we're going to get to the place where we take the unvaccinated, put them on trains for several days, let people drop dead around them, let them defecate and urinate on themselves, without food or water, only to arrive at a death camp where they will be stripped of their clothes and their dignity, and forced to take a fake shower, where they will be gassed to death? This after years of living in a ghetto and then being forced into slave labor. Then, other unvaccinated people are forced to burn their bodies. (That is what you are suggesting when you compare it to the Holocaust.)

Are we seeing the beginning of something like this? History would say absolutely, without a doubt, NO. There's only been one Holocaust. Even the Armenian genocide, which was horrific, pales in comparison.

I can assure you that Hitler was not looking out for the health and welfare of other Germans by making Jews wear the yellow badge. My dear brother, please change the content of the article so that it does not reference the Holocaust, and dishonor the memory of 6 million Jews and their families.

Thank you for taking the time to listen.

Ron Cantor

Footnote: Last spring a few prominent pastors made a video where they accused Israel of enacting Nazi-type policies in regards to the vaccine. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance includes, "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" [2] in their examples of anti-Semetism. That is exactly what these pastors did!

1 Robert S. Wistrich. “A Lethal Obsession.” p. 13

2 Comprehending and Confronting Antisemitism A Multi-Faceted Approach, Edited by Armin Lange, Kerstin Mayerhofer, Dina Porat, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston), p. 566.