Straight Talk

B.C. antilockdown activist Marco Pietro denies Holocaust

It's a reflection of the antisemitism that has cropped up before in connection with the antimask movement

by Charlie Smith on December 5th, 2020 at 3:50 PM
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      Today, another antimask protest took place in Vancouver. And this time, it received more attention than most.

      That's because Vancouver Canucks' former national anthem singer, Mark Donnelly, agreed to perform at the event.

      News of this led to him being promptly fired over Twitter by Canucks owner, Francesco Aquilini, who threw in the hashtag #wearamask.

      What hasn't received nearly as much attention, however, are links between the antimask movement and Holocaust deniers.

      The @nolifeneet Twitter feed recently posted a tweet showing one of B.C.'s anti-lockdown activists, Marco Pietro, denying Nazi Germany's use of gas chambers. (The Straight isn't posting the tweet for legal reasons.)

      In May, Pietro organized a rally in Vancouver, leading more than 100 protesters through the downtown while carrying a megaphone.

      More recently, video shows him accusing "a bunch of Zionist Jews" of "setting up" Adolf Hitler.

      "Oh, I'm a Holocaust disbeliever," Pietro declared. "You're fuckin' right I am. Okay, I did the research into it."

      He went on to purport that Hitler's systematic murder of six million Jews never happened. He also claimed that there were no gas chambers, notwithstanding their existence at the Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Stutthof, Mauthausen, Saschenhausen, and Ravensbruck concentration camps.

      "What did Hitler want? What did Hitler do?" Pietro said. "Have any of you actually read Mein Kampf? Has anybody read Mein Kampf? Mein Kampf has not one racist dictate or anything of the sort, allusion, none of it in it."

      After accusing Holocaust survivors of making millions of dollars by lying about their ordeal, the tweet ends with Pietro saying this:

      "If you guys can't see the relation between what they did to Hitler and what they're doing to Donald J. Trump, I don't know what to tell you."

      Pietro isn't the only member of the antimask movement who's demonstrated antisemitic attitudes.

      A speaker at a November rally criticized "Satanic, Talmudic" people.

      Here are some other  tweets on the @nolifeneet account raising similar concerns.

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