Italy
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Politicians and Jewish groups in Italy expressed outrage on Monday following a weekend protest in which campaigners opposing the country's COVID pass dressed up as World War 2 death camp deportees, AFP reports.

Activists opposed to the new pass demonstrated Saturday in Novara, a city in northwest Italy, wearing the vertically striped uniforms of those deported to the Nazi concentration camps.

Some of the costumes also carried numbers, an apparent reference to the identity numbers many death camp inmates had tattooed on their skin.

The demonstrators carried placards denouncing a "dictatorship" and government "blackmail".

"These are images I would never have thought to see," wrote Noemi Di Segni, president of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities (Ucei) in Monday's edition of La Stampa newspaper.

She added that those images were as stupid and ignorant as they were dangerous.

Describing the protest as an "intolerable outrage", she dismissed any attempt to characterize it as a demonstration of free speech.

Health Minister Roberto Speranza denounced the display as well and said he was "shocked by these people referring to the concentration camps".

The mayor of Novara, Alessandro Canelli condemned the stunt as well.

"To compare an ideological position on a vaccine or a health pass to the most tragic page of our history and to people who were deported, humiliated, tortured and killed is quite simply shameful," he said, according to AFP.

"They couldn't have chosen a worse way to express a position on which one can be more or less in agreement," he added.

In September, ten men dressed like Nazis and carried out a mock arrest of man wearing a yellow star as part of a rally against COVID-19 measures in the Netherlands. They later apologized for their actions.

In April of 2020, a Dutch-Muslim politician caused an uproar when he tweeted a picture of a Jewish yellow star to protest plans to monitor coronavirus carriers.

Arnoud van Doorn, a member of the City Council of The Hague, posted the picture hours before the start of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.

In Germany, some demonstrators protesting coronavirus restrictions have used the yellow star, emblazoned with the words “non-vaccinated” in a Hebraicized script, to boost their claim of being persecuted for opposing coronavirus policies.

In May, Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner urged a crackdown on protesters who don yellow stars to complain about the pandemic lockdown.