KY Libertarian party bashed for comparing vaccine passport to Jewish Holocaust badges
The Libertarian Party of Kentucky has faced backlash after comparing COVID-19 vaccine passports to the badges that Nazis made Jewish people wear to distinguish themselves during the Holocaust.
The Libertarian Party made the comparison in a tweet Monday and then tried to clarify with later posts while also retweeting people who defended its comparison.
“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?” the party asked in a tweet Monday.
The state Libertarian Party continued tweeting to respond to the criticisms. On Wednesday morning, the party sent out a Twitter thread and said the Monday tweet wasn’t “polished,” but it “did however, start a conversation that needed to be had.”
The original tweet was met with heavy criticism from Twitter users, politicians, and members of the Jewish community.
Louisville Rabbi Robert Slosberg called the tweet “reprehensible.”
“It’s just not appropriate,” said Slosberg, who has been the rabbi at Congregation Adath Jeshurun for 40 years. “It’s not intellectually correct. It’s very difficult to argue against something that is nonsensical. And this argument is nonsense.”
Slosberg said he didn’t want to be dismissive of people’s concerns about vaccinations and how to determine who has been vaccinated. But he wanted the debate to be “intellectual,” and comparing the issue to the Holocaust was “kind of sick.”
“When we can’t come up with a good, intellectual debate, we go low,” Slosberg told the Herald-Leader. “There’s no connection whatsoever. None. Zero. Oppose it, that’s fine. But pulling in the Holocaust kind of says to me, ‘well, we’re out of arguments, and we don’t know what to say.’”
Lexington Rabbi Shlomo Litvin shared similar criticisms, slamming the social media post as “abhorrent.”
“I am embarrassed by this Holocaust minimization coming of our Kentucky,” Litvin said in a Facebook post. “Sadly, this is not the first time the LPKY has engaged in a form of Holocaust Denial.”
Gov. Andy Beshear called the comparison by the Libertarian Party of Kentucky “shameful” and said there was no place for anti-Semitism in Kentucky.
“This group should stop politicizing the pandemic and apologize,” Beshear said in a tweet.
The Kentucky Democratic Party also called the tweet “unconscionable and unacceptable,” and Rep. John Yarmuth said it’s “ignorant” and “disgusting.”
The yellow stars that Jewish people were forced to wear in the 1930s and 1940s were shaped like the Star of David. The practice started in Germany but spread to newly-conquered lands when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, according to the Holocaust Memorial Center. Nazi propaganda leaflets told people that anyone wearing the star was “an enemy of our people.”
“The German government’s policy of forcing Jews to wear identifying badges was but one of many psychological tactics aimed at isolating and dehumanizing the Jews of Europe, directly marking them as being different (i.e., inferior) to everyone else,” the Holocaust Memorial Center said on its website.
Vaccine passports, on the other hand, are seen by many as a way to get back to normalcy faster and prevent virus spread. Cruise lines, sports teams, other businesses and organizations have stated their intentions to require proof of vaccination from patrons.
The passports are expected to be free and accessible through smartphone apps or by printing them out, according to the Washington Post. The passports would be scannable to let people provide instant proof of vaccination if needed.
Other countries have considered similar options. The European Union has proposed digital certificates, which would prove that a person has either been vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result or recovered from COVID-19, according to NPR. The certificates could make summer travel possible.
But the United States is facing data privacy concerns and health care inequality issues as President Joe Biden’s administration works to get the idea off the ground, according to the Washington Post.
The Libertarian Party of Kentucky Wednesday morning said it wasn’t backpedaling from its original post even though representatives understood the criticism. The party insisted the tweet wasn’t anti-Semitic. The party also retweeted several tweets from comedian Dave Smith who was defending it.
“Maybe if everyone in this country had the attitude of (the Libertarian Party of Kentucky) we wouldn’t have lost so many of our freedoms over the last year,” Smith said.
This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 10:48 AM.