A Holocaust museum in Florida has opened an exhibit over the police-involved killing of George Floyd that sparked protests and riots around the country.
Lisa Bachman, assistant director of the Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center in Maitland, said the exhibit was designed “so that people can come and look these individuals in the eye.”
“You don’t just see this exhibit,” she continued. “You feel it. The expressions and thoughts of each person photographed tells a story that has a very universal message. It is one that can heal and bring us together. It shows us we are not alone in our thinking.”
The news of the exhibit — titled “Uprooting Prejudice: Faces of Change” — sparked an immediate response with some condemning the museum for sending a message that “trivializes and distorts the Holocaust.” Ezra Levant, founder of Rebel News, said the exhibit “grotesquely implies that American police are Nazis.”
British politician and former journalist Martin Daubney called the exhibit “unbelievable.”
“The Holocaust Museum in Maitland, Florida, has added a George Floyd section,” he tweeted. “To align Floyd’s tragic death with the massacre of 6 million Jews is hugely insensitive. But it’s also political: it positions police as Nazis. Awful decision.”
While he agreed the photos in the Floyd exhibit “have merit,” a Holocaust museum is not the appropriate place to showcase such images.
Talk radio host Dan O’Donnell also decried the exhibit, saying “we live in a world of idiots where words no longer have meaning.”
“The Florida Holocaust museum at the JCC in Orlando has taken a huge step towards transforming the annihilation of European Jewry into a farce,” wrote American-Israeli columnist Caroline Glick. “This is a travesty, an insult to the Jewish people throughout history. And I fear it is just a taste of the madness to come.”