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Just Stop Oil spokeswoman claims all humans are in a ‘giant gas chamber’
The climate change protest group have been accused of 'minimising the Holocaust'
July 21, 2023 16:35
The climate change protest group have been accused of 'minimising the Holocaust'
July 21, 2023 16:35Just Stop Oil has been accused of “minimising the Holocaust” after a spokeswoman for the protest group said climate change means all humans are effectively “trapped in a giant gas chamber”.
Zoe Cohen, who has Jewish heritage, claimed oil and gas executives were complicit in “genocide” after other Just Stop Oil members compared oil executives to Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann.
“Forgive me for saying this, but - and I say this very sincerely - but it’s like we’re all trapped in a giant gas chamber and we know every single ton of carbon dioxide makes this worse,” Cohen said on Wedneday.
“That’s been known scientifically, the gold standard of science, for years and years now. And yet these people go on expanding oil and gas.
“How can you do that knowing what it’s doing? Is that not genocide? How else do you decide what it is? Of course it’s genocide.”
Speaking to LBC radio on Thursday, Cohen repeatedly declined to disavow comparing the Shoah to rising global temperatures.
“The language being used here,” presenter Tom Swarbrick suggested, “is for some people completely unnecessary.”
Cohen replied: “I understand the language is unpleasant but so is wet bulb temperatures and dying within a few hours [sic]. So is the extermination of species.”
She went on to defend the use of the phrase as “climate genocide” as the “honest truth”.
Speaking to the JC, Cohen said that as a Just Stop Oil supporter of Jewish heritage, she was brought up learning about atrocities committed against Jews.
“I’ve abhorred injustice ever since,” she said.
“That is why, when I see those in positions of power in governments, oil companies and corporations making decisions to pursue new oil and gas licenses when hundreds of millions of people are already suffering the severe consequences of climate breakdown now, I believe we have a duty to peacefully resist.”
Cohen’s comments came after Roger Hallam, the founder of another climate protest group, Extinction Rebellion (XR), sparked outrage by referring to the Shoah as “just another f***ery in human history”.
Cohen was convicted of criminal damage for smashing the windows of a bank in an XR protest earlier this year.
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Just Stop Oil has a disturbing history of minimising the Holocaust in its messaging.”
Citing a recent example where a member of the group said that the Nazis merely ‘facilitated the deaths of thousands and thousands of people’” the CAA spokesperson added: “This is historically ignorant, and that ignorance is dangerously combined with the group’s insatiable pursuit of attention at any cost.
“The result is the strange and inflammatory ubiquity of the genocide of the Jews in the group’s activism. Why can’t Just Stop Oil just stop trivialising the Holocaust?”
In a statement released on Wednesday, Just Stop Oil said: “Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, at his trial in Jerusalem, sought to defend himself by saying that he never killed any Jews as he was only in charge of transporting them to the death camps.
“The judges overruled this obscene defence, and he was hanged. Similarly, when those in charge today go to court, the judgment will be the same.”
A Community Security Trust spokesman told the Daily Mail: “It is absolutely sickening to see the victims of the Nazi Holocaust abused for publicity by Just Stop Oil.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby previously apologised for causing offence to Jews after he compared the world's failure to act on climate change to appeasing the Nazis.
Just Stop Oil has been contacted for comment.