"The Holocaust of our times" has been done, just as you describe it.
By the same people who think it's OK to hold people in secret and do awful things to them.
Amnesty International wanted to draw attention to this. They have.
We also have resources on rhetoric and figures of speech in the library. Language is a tool. It's not about precision, the way mathematics is. It's about getting your point across. The particular device being used here is the simile, in which certain similarities are used in a descriptive fashion in order to draw attention to the points that the two things have in common. The two things have points in common.