ADL criticizes ‘anti-vaxxers’ for adopting Star of David badge

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Monday criticized anti-vaccine activists for adopting the yellow Star of David badge as a symbol of their “persecution.”

According to a statement from the ADL, the stars, emblazoned with the stylized words “No Vax,” are showing up on social media, especially on Facebook, and at anti-vaccine events.

The group says that appropriation is “hugely inappropriate” given many European Jews were made to wear the stars during the Holocaust, saying that using the symbol trivializes the “six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.”

{mosads}“The Holocaust was a unique event in human history. European Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David by the Nazis as a kind of scarlet letter, a form of persecution and forced exclusion from society,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.

“It is simply wrong to compare the plight of Jews during the Holocaust to that of anti-vaxxers. Groups advancing a political or social agenda should be able to assert their ideas without trivializing the memory of the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.”

The movement against vaccines, commonly called anti-vax, has been pointed to by a number of public officials for being a major contributor to recent disease breakouts, including a number of ongoing measles outbreaks.

Anti-vax activist Del Bigtree pinned a star to his jacket in March while speaking about the Hasidic community in Rockland County, N.Y., where many parents have refused to vaccinate their children and which is currently experiencing a measles outbreak.

Poland’s Auschwitz Memorial and Museum criticized Bigtree’s adoption of the yellow star at the time.

“Instrumentalizing the fate of Jews who were persecuted by hateful anti-Semitic ideology and murdered in extermination camps like #Auschwitz with poisonous gas in order to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a symptom of intellectual and moral degeneration,” it said.