A right-wing Dutch politician was ordered to delete tweets comparing COVID-19 vaccine requirements to the Holocaust

• A Dutch politician was ordered to delete tweets comparing COVID-19 restrictions to the Holocaust.
• Thierry Baudet tweeted that unvaccinated people were "the new Jews."

A right-wing Dutch politician has been ordered by a judge at the court of Amsterdam to delete tweets where he compared COVID-19 vaccination requirements to the Holocaust, the BBC reported.

Thierry Baudet, who is the leader of the Forum for Democracy party, tweeted in November that unvaccinated people were "the new Jews," and those who "look away" are "the new Nazis."

The ruling was in response to a lawsuit reportedly filed by The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) and the Central Jewish Consultation on December 7 against Baudet, saying his words were unlawful and "downplayed the Holocaust."

According to the NL Times, CIDI director Hanna Luden said Baudet was contributing to the denial of history. Luden added that "young people take what he says as true and do not realize that he is speaking nonsense."

Right-wing politicians worldwide have made similar comparisons to the Holocaust, when an estimated 6 million Jewish people were killed during World War II between 1941 and 1945.

Baudet made the comparison as the Netherlands prohibits those who haven't received the vaccine from participating in certain aspects of public life.

The World Health Organization has said that COVID-19 vaccines are "critical" to ending the pandemic, which has killed more than 5 million people globally. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), unvaccinated people are 5.8 times more likely to catch the virus and 14 times more likely to die from it.

The Dutch MP has referenced the comparison in numerous tweets

On Wednesday, the judge hearing the case ruled that Baudet "pointlessly" offended Holocaust victims and their relatives, and Baudet had to delete the posts within 48 hours or he would receive a daily fine of €25,000 ($28,200). The judge also ruled Baudet could no longer use images from the Holocaust as part of debating about the coronavirus pandemic, the NL Times reported.

"The comparison is flawed and you have spoken unnecessarily offensively and unlawfully of survivors of the Holocaust," the court ruled, according to Politico. It was not immediately clear which court made the decision.

Baudet has vowed to appeal the court's decision on Twitter, saying in a December 15 tweet that it was an "incomprehensible, crazy ruling." He has since deleted four tweets, the Dutch news site the NL Times reported Thursday.

As of Friday evening, Baudet's pinned tweet, from September 20, reads, "WHATEVER YOU DO: DON'T TAKE THE 'VACCINE'!"

The BBC reported that among the tweets ordered to be deleted was a photo of a concentration camp with the words, "How is it POSSIBLE to not see how history is repeating itself?" The tweet has now been removed, along with three others, according to the NL Times.

Baudet told Insider in an emailed statement that he was "sad and hurt" by the court's ruling "because it has taken away our ability to express our views" about COVID-19, "and the gradual expulsion of the unvaccinated from social and economic life."

He said that his comparisons came from "empathy" for the people who died in the Holocaust.

The statement continued: "We will definitely appeal the decision and shall stand by our conviction that democracy can only function properly, and society can only progress, if we can have a free and unrestricted, civilized debate about every major question of our time — including the most sensitive ones."

Other right-wing politicians have drawn similar comparisons

US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a Republican, has made several comments likening public health measures to quell the pandemic to the genocide of the Holocaust.

In May, Greene criticized mask mandates in the House of Representatives and called Speaker Nancy Pelosi "mentally ill" for enforcing the rules. She later said on a podcast that the rules were "exactly the type of abuse" Nazis committed against Jews in World War II.

Later that month, Greene said on Twitter that a grocery store's policy of having employees wear vaccination logos was "just like the Nazi's forced Jewish people to wear a gold star," referencing the yellow stars of David that Jewish people were required to wear as identifiers in Nazi Germany.

Millions of Jews, as well as non-Jewish Poles, Romany people, homosexuals, and other communities, in Nazi Germany, were sent to concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where they were starved, experimented on, and stripped of all of their freedoms.