Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized Tuesday for invoking Anne Frank to imply Jews had more freedoms during the Holocaust than unvaccinated Americans do today – remarks that drew a public backlash and criticism from Kennedy’s wife.
Kennedy had referenced Frank, a child who died in a Nazi concentration camp, while speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday at an anti-vaccine rally. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” said Kennedy, a longtime opponent of vaccines who has spread unsupported claims about shots shown to protect against covid-19.
On Tuesday, after intense criticism, he tweeted that to “the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”
“I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors,” wrote Kennedy, the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., and nephew of President John F. Kennedy. “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control.”
Even before the pandemic, Kennedy’s statements on vaccines and support for conspiracy theories put him at odds with family members, health professionals and historians. Some social media platforms have banned him. But his speech Sunday drew especially strong condemnation.
The Auschwitz Memorial expressed anger at his comments in a tweet without naming him. “Exploiting . . . the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum released a similar statement.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted that the statements were “deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply troubling.”
Kennedy’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines, also distanced herself from his remarks. “My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own,” she tweeted. “While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.”
David Nasaw, a retired history professor who wrote a book about Kennedy’s grandfather, said Kennedy was cordial, down-to-earth and intelligent when he met him in person in 2011. Nasaw said he gave Kennedy the benefit of the doubt when the son supported the release of his father’s killer or when he backed inaccurate views about vaccines.
“But it is beyond the pale,” Nasaw said about Kennedy’s remarks on Frank in a phone interview. “Was the speech scripted? Did he write it? Or is it because he saw that ’60 Minutes’ had done something recently about Anne Frank?” he added, referring to the CBS news show’s airing of an investigation about who might have turned Frank and her family in to Nazi authorities.
In a statement a Kennedy spokeswoman sent to the Associated Press on Monday, he said he “compared no one to the Nazis or Adolf Hitler.”
“I referred to Anne Frank’s terrible two year ordeal only by way of showing that modern surveillance capacity would make her courageous feat virtually impossible today,” Kennedy said.
It was not the first time Kennedy invoked the Holocaust in reference to vaccines. In 2015, he said of vaccinations: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
For years, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and author, has publicly supported the baseless claim that vaccines cause autism. They do not.
In 2005, Kennedy incorrectly wrote in an article published in Rolling Stone and Salon that an ingredient in some new vaccines, thimerosal, was dangerous and that the government was hiding its links to autism. Rolling Stone issued several corrections. Salon retracted the story from its website. Kennedy expanded the article into a book published in 2014.
Such views have invited rebukes from other family members, including one from niece Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, an internal medicine resident physician. In an opinion piece for the New York Times in December 2020, when coronavirus vaccines were first being rolled out, Meltzer said she loved her uncle. “But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong,” she wrote.
In a 2019 opinion piece for Politico Magazine, Kennedy’s siblings and a different niece noted how President Kennedy had signed the 1962 Vaccination Assistance Act, to highlight that Kennedy Jr.’s inaccurate statements on vaccines were worsening a measles outbreak in the country at the time.
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and a Kennedy family scholar, said she suspected Robert Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to vaccine mandates came from his work as an environmentalist.
He has campaigned against pollutants, such as mercury, that contaminate food sources, Perry said in an interview. “Clearly he doesn’t want people poisoned in the environment by pollutants,” she said. “In his mind, I guess, it’s a pretty easy step to [think] not poisoning the body through vaccination.”
(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Andrew Jeong
{Matzav.com}
Anne Frank was a fraud. Just because the secular make her out to be a hero, the truth is just the opposite. Do your research.
More nonsense from a משוגענע
“Vaccines do not cause autism.” So why is it listed as a side effect on the patient insert that comes with some vaccines?
Nobody knows what “causes” autism. It has NEVER been proven. Andrew Wakefield is only guessing. It’s the same thing with crib-deaths. No concrete evidence has ever been found. Everything they throw out there is simply conjecturing. Yeh, we are lectured by our privileged elitist government pigs to believe whatever THEY spew out of their perverted mouths. Members of Congress are medical ignoramuses. The lecture us in any way they can profit off of the dumb stupid gullible worthless idiot taxpayers.
Everyone knows the truth which gets censored when posted.
Because it isn’t there.
It is NOT listed.
You aren’t entitled to your own set of facts.
Which vaccines, supplements, foods, or drugs cause you to become a paranoid conspiracist? Perhaps none of them did, and it’s just a long-ingrained habit to lie?
Quote of the title: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Apologizes For Saying The Unvaccinated Have Less Freedom Than Anne Frank Did.”
THIS IS AN OUTRIGHT LIE; ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. NEVER SAID THAT!!!!!!!!!!!
Already in the article’s first paragraph, it already greatly softens the accusation, which I quote: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized Tuesday for invoking Anne Frank to imply Jews had more freedoms during the Holocaust than unvaccinated Americans do today.” It greatly softens the accusation as instead of stating that he actually SAID this idea, it just states that he IMPLIED the idea.
This too is a complete lie, for he never said the idea and never implied the idea.
Instead, what he DID say is quoted in the second paragraph: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” B’Ezras Hashem, looking closely at this line, he says: “Even in Hitler’s Germany . . . . ” clearly, he is not saying or even remotely implying that life in Hitler’s Germany was great and wonderful and our Jewish cousins there had more freedom than we do today! On the contrary, as he prefaces the word’s “Hitler’s Germany” with the phrase “even in,” that already GLARINGLY implies that life in Hitler’s Germany was NOT good and, instead, was actually pretty terrible! Then, as the line continues with talking about “hiding” and “crossing huge mountains,” that further shows that life in “Hitler’s Germany” was not just “pretty terrible,” it was “extremely, extremely, extremely, EXTREMELY terrible,” and that a person had to either “hide” or “get out of there” or he would not be alive!!
What the line DOES say is that, as very extremely terrible that Hitler’s Germany was, there were still a few ways by which a person could possibly avoid being killed by it: by hiding or by crossing huge mountains to get out of there. Obviously, these are SEVERELY, SEVERELY, SEVERELY DIFFICULT things to have to do to avoid getting killed, but they were means of possible escape that did exist. Anne Frank and her family is probably the most famous case and, Boruch Hashem, there were countless thousands of other people who were able to hide in attics and/or basements and/or abandoned buildings and/or nearby forests and/or were able to sneak out through the mountains to safer areas and survive the horrific Churban.
This line: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” is just one line from a very large context of many lines in Mr. Kennedy’s speech and cannot be properly understood or appreciated without closely looking at this large context. The article though, makes only two, exceedingly brief, in-passing references to the context, one in paragraph 4 and one in paragraph 12, and gives no explanation of it at all.
Mr. Kennedy’s full speech can be seen at https://www.brighteon.com/883ff1fe-cff7-4eb3-9f82-b6be3a1adc7e; at point 21:12 in the video to point to 24:30 is the large context. In it, he relates how very many decades ago in the 1940’s, a number of authors, the most famous of them, Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name “George Orwell,” wrote a number of science fiction novels about the world of the far distant future. These fictional narratives portray quite a bizarre, horrid world, which is tightly ruled by an evil tyrannical dictatorship, which, using super-advanced technology, IS ABLE TO KNOW AND CONTROL EVERYTHING THAT EVERY PERSON DOES!!
So, Mr. Kennedy emphatically exclaimed that these super-advanced-knowing-what-you-do-technologies are no longer make-believe-science-fiction!! They are existing here right now!!
As infinitely horrible and evil Hitler’s Nazi sadistic abuse of us was and as much as they certainly WANTED TO and certainly TRIED TO tightly lock us in under thick iron walls, THERE WERE HOLES AND CRACKS in those walls!! Albeit that it was obviously under the most severe of severe danger, Boruch Hashem, Anne Frank and her family and countless others were somehow able to “slip through” those “holes” and those “cracks” and hide in attics and basements and forests and even completely escape Nazi occupied areas.
However, today, with the super-advanced-watching-you-technologies THAT ARE NOW HERE, there are NO MORE holes and cracks in the walls!! With the countless surveillance cameras that are positioned virtually everywhere, with the advanced-tracking-you-mechanisms of the newest computers and Smart-Meters and Smart-Refrigerators and Smart-Ovens and Smart-Toasters and Smart-Phones and iPhones and jPhones and kPhones and l-m-n-o-pPhones that “everyone” has, and with countless flying drones equipped with x-ray vision cameras that can see & photograph through walls and roofs and floors, and with tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of eye-watching-satellites that, constantly, around-the-clock, all together cover EVERY SINGLE SQUARE INCH OF THE ENTIRE WORLD, where is there any place that a person can run and hide??????? Whatever attic or basement or old house or tunnel or tree canopy he would attempt to go to, he will be clearly seen just as much as if he were in the open downtown city square!!
RACHMANA LITZLAN!!
The man is a hardcore nutcase, without a day of basic scientific training in his resume.
He is a lawyer, and a politician.
Now, which do you trust more – lawyers or politicians? If the answer is that both are at the very bottom of the barrel, why, then, even bother to quote his nonsense?
And Kathy Hochul DOES have “basic scientific training”? Does ANY politician have real medical knowledge? Which medical school did the honorable Joe Biden or his sidekick Jen Psaki attend??? Nancy Pelosi? Eric Adams? Why should anyone with a half a brain trust and listen to anything medical our beloved government commands us on? Would you invite any single one of them into your house for a meal with your wife and kids? Are YOU that stupid? Look in the mirror before you bunch everyone that disagrees with your vaccine position, in one big basket.
The difference is that the people whom you listed are following advice from the greatest experts in medicine, whose training and knowledge gives them the right to voice opinions about controlling this epidemic, while Kennedy is merely passing gas.
As if you didn’t realize that, before posting.
When a gang of mean people will want to ruin someone, they will often have him framed up to look like he had committed some terrible crime. They will have the police arrest him and formally accuse him; then, at the trial, the prosecutor will superbly present a perfectly smooth looking narrative of an airtight case “proving” this man is a “bad guy.” Then, the kangaroo court will pronounce the guilty verdict and have the innocent man put away for a long, long time.
However, if the man is able to get a lawyer who is truly honest and sincere and truly wants to help him, that good lawyer will look beneath the surface of the smooth narrative and correctly figure out what is really going on. Before the court, he will thus show up the many holes and contradictions in the smooth sounding narrative. If the jury is composed of fair minded people, they will realize what is the truth and exonerate the innocent man.
For many, many years, numerous people — from the government, from the mainstream media, from the modern medical establishment — have superbly presented to us a perfectly smooth polished narrative of our health, disease, and what we must do. Understandably, almost all of us religiously strictly believed it and followed it and adhered to it and implemented it.
However, Boruch Hashem, especially in view of the events of the last two years, with even a “small” look beneath the surface of the smooth narrative, very, very many of us began to realize that there are many holes — actually, many whole humungous gaps — and glaring sharp contradictions in the smooth sounding polished narrative. Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, and certainly other lawyers like him, were certainly able to utilize their lawyer analysis skills to look even deeper under the surface and realize even more large gaps and contradictions in the narrative.
So, Boruch Hashem, we have acted accordingly.