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COVID-19 vaccine opponents invoke the Holocaust, dismaying CSUSB professor
The Orange County Register/Southern California News Group/Bay Area News Group
April 14, 2021
In their zeal to speak out against COVID-19 vaccinations, some Orange County residents are publicly equating the vaccines and the push for their widespread use to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Some experts who track hate speech say the rhetoric is inaccurate, hyperbolic, and crosses a line into anti-Semitism.
“The idea that one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in saving lives is being compared to genocide is abhorrent and cruelly ignorant,” said Prof. Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.
Noting that his father was in a Nazi POW camp, and his mother had COVID-19, Levin added that the comparisons suggest people are unaware of what actually happened during the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed, many of them gassed in concentration camps.
Read the complete article at “COVID-19 vaccine opponents invoke the Holocaust, dismaying hate speech experts.”
The CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism’s latest report on hate crimes against Asian Americans was cited in the following:
Asian Americans in media: ‘You can’t extricate the humanity of yourself from the journalist’
The Hollywood Reporter
April 15, 2021
Over the past year, Asian American journalists have been doing their jobs amid a mounting wave of physical and verbal attacks on Asians across the country (up 145 percent in 2020 in 16 of the top cities in the U.S., according to California State University San Bernardino's Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism), exacerbated by former President Trump's insistence on blaming China for the pandemic and referring to COVID-19 with racist terms, including "Wuhan virus" and "kung flu." With few outlets having committed long-term resources to reporting on the Asian American community, coverage of violent incidents felt sporadic and scattered to many among the affected population, and often driven by Asian Americans in the newsroom who were warning of a larger story unfolding in real time and watching it barrel toward an unthinkable, inevitable culmination.
Rialto condemns racism, violence against Asian community
The Sun/Southern California News Group
April 14, 2021
Rialto leaders this week condemned racism and acts of violence against the Asian community, joining cities, counties and states that have recently done the same. Approved unanimously and without discussion by the City Council Tuesday, April 13, the two-page declaration comes about nine months after the San Bernardino County city declared racism a public health crisis.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans in the 16 largest U.S. cities jumped 149% in 2020, according to an analysis by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. The first spike in hate crimes occurred around this time last year amid an increase in coronavirus cases and negative stereotyping of Asian people related to the pandemic, according to the report.
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