Just Stop Oil criticised for 'phenomenally bad' Anne Frank comparison

Just Stop Oil is facing criticism after appearing to compare their activists to the people who hid Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis during WW2.

The environmental protest group has just finished a protest in which it blocked parts of the M25 for four days, in a bid to pressure the government to halt new licences for the exploration of oil and other fossil fuels in the UK.

In doing so, they have faced multiple arrests and home office secretary Suella Braverman has spoken out against the group.

After the former leader of Ukip, Henry Bolton said it was "quite right" that one of their activists had been arrested and imprisoned for taking part in the protest, the group justified breaking laws and likened the situation to when Frank and her family were hidden in Amsterdam to escape the Holocaust.

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The family was eventually found and murdered by the Nazis in gas chambers.

They said: "The people who hid Anne Frank during WW2 were criminals, Henry. So were the French Resistance. Obeying the law does not give you the moral highground — not when it's still legal for our Government to greenlight enough oil and gas to kill millions. Good people break bad laws."

People slammed the group for their choice of language including Mike Katz, the national chair of the Jewish Labour Movement:

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism told the Jewish Chronicle: "Such comparisons to victims of the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jewish men, women and children, are totally inappropriate and insulting. This is not the first time radical environmentalists have been caught up in Holocaust controversy. By resorting to degrading the memory of a Jewish girl murdered as part of the worst atrocity in human history, Just Stop Oil only weakens its case and whatever remains of its credibility."

A spokesperson from Just Stop Oil responded to indy100's request for comment by saying: "Is breaking the law, when the State is harmful morally justified?

"It is what people have done historically and we celebrate them, and put up statues and museums to them. The people who hid Anne Frank and her family broke the law, those who helped people escaping slavery broke the the law, those fought aparthied [sic] broke the law. We face the loss of countless millions of lives, the sixth mass extinction is taking place, and our governments continue to betray and harm us".

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