Jewish advocacy groups spoke out against Fox News commentator Lara Logan on Tuesday for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele making Logan becomes the latest far-right figure to draw flak for likening the U.S. government’s response to COVID-19 to Nazi Germany’s perpetration of the Holocaust.
KEY FACTS
–Logan said “people all across the world” are telling her that Fauci reminds her of the Nazi doctor known as the “Angel of Death,” whose infamous experiments on mostly Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp resulted in “great harm or death to the prisoners,” during a Monday night Fox News television segment.
–The American Jewish Committee called on Logan to apologize in a Tuesday tweet, calling the comparison “utterly shameful.”
–Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the analogy “outlandish and offensive” in a written statement, saying “As we have said time and time again since the onset of this pandemic, there’s absolutely no comparison between mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and other COVID-19 mitigation efforts to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust.”
–Fox News has yet to respond to Forbes’ request for comment and Logan has not yet publicly spoken on the matter.
Logan is far from the first on the right to equate COVID restrictions to Jews’ treatment during the Holocaust. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) has compared U.S. COVID policies and the Democratic Party to Nazi Germany on at least five occasions since the beginning of the pandemic. Popular podcast host and conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan likened federal vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany in a video posted to his Instagram in September. Numerous local GOP politicians have compared the denial of access to unvaccinated Americans at restaurants and other public places in some municipalities to that of Jews in the Holocaust, claiming vaccine passports are reminiscent of the yellow badges some Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust.
CHIEF CRITIC
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum condemned Logan’s comments in a Tuesday tweet: “Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful. It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”
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