Antisemitic rhetoric continues to be used by some opponents of COVID-19 measures

Belle Jarniewskileanedback from her computer, seething with anger after she finishedwatching a video on Reddit showing a Winnipeg restaurateur accosting public health enforcement officers.

"I'm still shaking after listening to that rant. That was unbelievable," she said.

The video shows Shea Ritchie, the owner of Chaise Lounge locations on Corydon Avenue and Provencher Boulevard,speaking with officersgiving him ticketson Sept. 24 for allowing diners who choose not to be vaccinated to dine inside his restaurant.

"If they're so dangerous, shouldn't we be identifying them with something bright, like a yellow star?" Ritchie says in the video,which he filmed andposted to his personal Facebook page and that has since been circulating on social media.

"Why don't you put them in a camp until they finally comply?"

Jarniewski, the executive director of the Jewish Heritage Centre and a memberof the Canadian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said this type ofrhetoric has become more rampant during thepandemic.

"We've seen these anti-vaxxer protests that are trying to compare the restrictions for COVID to the Holocaust," she said. "I have to say, he's gone much further than anyone I personally have seen or heard about."

Jarniewski is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her mother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, Jarniewski said, and her father was taken to six different concentration camps.

"To suggest that these restrictions in any way, shape or form are comparable to the suffering of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust is unconscionable. It's also a distortion of history," she said.

"The comparison is disgusting."

Antisemitic rhetoric surfacedat pandemic protests

Though Jarniewski foundRitchie's commentsto be a particularly extreme version, they arerepresentative of what seems to be a shared belief among a fringe of those vehemently opposed to COVID-19 restrictions: that vaccine mandates and passports and other rules to curb the spread of the coronavirus are similar to the ways the Nazis mistreated Jews and other ethnic groups.

Across Canada, someprotestershave called public health orders genocide, worn yellow stars like those Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe and even attended protests displaying images of Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp and whose diaries were posthumouslypublished and readaround the world.

CBC News spoke with Ritchievia text message about the video and what happened in his restaurant. When asked about being fined for breaking public health orders, he said it was done in an effort to "honour [those who died in the Holocaust] by taking personal responsibility to ensure never again."

"We have suspended charter rights, and it very well could happen again."

Conspiracy narratives share similarities

Some of the most vocal protesters against vaccine passports and other pandemic measures have used or have a history of using antisemitic rhetoric.

Toronto's Chris (Sky) Saccoccia, for example, who's been arrested in Winnipeg for breaking public health orders, has a record of doing so, says retired sociologist and hate group scholar Helmut-Harry Loewen.

"Those who accept aspects of one conspiracist narrative tend to gravitate to other conspiracy theories," Loewen said in an email.

"In the case of the COVID-19 conspiracy movement, some of the most prominent leaders in particular, Chris Sky have a record of claiming that the number of Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide are inaccurate."

He has alsoquotedfrom Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf on his Facebook page, calling parts of it "bang on, like he had a crystal ball into the future" in one 2014post, according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an agency that monitorsand researches hate groups.

Saccoccia again questionedthe number of people who died during the Holocaust in a July interview with Rebel News, storming out midway through after accusing the host of implyinghe's a Holocaust denier and "feeding every narrative that they're using to attack me."

CBC News reached out to Saccocciafor comment on this story but has yet to receive a response.

Yellow vest, anti-Muslim movementsshifted focus to COVID

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network said the kind of rhetoric now on display didn't start 18 months ago when the pandemic was declared.

Executive director EvanBalgordargues it's an evolution from previous movementsassociated with variouscauses seen as fighting against the erosionof individual rights andliberties.

Some, he said, have been affiliated with the far right, which has beensowing discord for years.

The network says some anti-Muslim groups, for example, started pushing a narrative of encroaching "Shariah law," the influx of foreignterrorists into Canada and a number of other unfounded fears after a motion to address Islamophobia and other forms of systemic racism, known as M-103, was brought forward in the House of Commons in 2016.

"There was no Shariah law and Shariah courts, and all the things they were fear mongering about didn't come to pass, so they needed a new issue," he said.

That's when some in the far-right movement shifted theirattention to the yellow vest movement. It began in France as a populist protest against economic inequality and rising gasprices but spread to Canada and other countries, eventually encompassinga wide variety of grievances, including opposition toillegal immigration.

Balgord says the anti-hate network's monitoring of different groupssuggests that at least one organization,Action4Canada, and numerous individuals with large social media followingswho helped spearheadprotests against M-103 became involved in yellow-vestprotests and are nowamong the most influentialopponents of pandemic restrictions.

Saccoccia, for example, wasinvolved in the yellow-vest movement and is nowagainst lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions, he said.

"They really set the agenda," he said. "The far right already had an established propaganda machine. It has its podcasts;it has its shows online; it has its online groups. It knows how to do this."

Balgord acknowledges most people who are against COVID-19 restrictions are not part of the far rightbut may simply share some concerns aboutpandemic measures and got inadvertently caught up ina web of misinformation.

Political messaging not immune

Some of therhetoric around pandemic measures has also crept into political messaging promoted by candidates of the populist People's Party of Canada during the federal election campaign.

PPC candidates in Manitoba and British Columbiacompared vaccine mandates to violations of the Nuremburg Code, a set of ethical research principles developed in response to unethical medical experimentation and atrocities of the Nazi era.

The party's leader, Maxime Bernier, also drew criticism from anti-hate groups when he used the phrase "When tyranny becomes law, revolution becomes our duty" in the context of pandemic restrictions and the rise of what he calls an "authoritarian" government.

That phrase is similar to one used by members of the Three Percenters militia group some of whom participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.

A spokesperson for BerniertoldCBC News in an email to "get lost" when reachedfor comment.

'I'm glad that they didn't have to experience this'

Jarniewski's parents died decades ago, but she says they would have denouncedanycomparisons between the pandemic and the Holocaust.

She's doing what she can to counter it by educating peopleabout the Holocaust and pushing for stricter anti-hate laws in Canada.

"I've often said that, you know, as difficult as it is to have lost my parents so long ago, I'm glad that they didn't have to experience this, to hear this kind of hate again."