Just Stop Oil angers British Jews over ‘phenomenally bad’ Anne Frank comment

Environmental campaigners triggered the fury of the Jewish community last week by evoking the memory of Holocaust victim Anne Frank to describe their position.

Activists linked to Just Stop Oil, which has stoked motorists’ anger in recent weeks by shutting motorways, tweeted about the young Jewish diarist who famously hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, before being captured and deported.

“The people who hid Anne Frank during WW2 were criminals… So were the French Resistance,” they posted. “Obeying the law does not give you the moral high ground – not when it’s still legal for our government to greenlight enough oil and gas to kill millions. Good people break bad laws.”

Mike Katz, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, called it “a phenomenally bad take, especially on Armistice Day”.

Meanwhile, Leeds Jewish Representative Council chair Simon Myerson urged the protesters not to “compare your self-indulgent performative nonsense to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany”, adding that it was “crass, wrong and arguably racist”.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), likewise, said Holocaust comparisons were “inappropriate and insulting,” adding that environmental protesters had been wrapped up in similar controversies on previous occasions.