Bashar al-Assad recently gave a speech where he denied the Holocaust as well as promoted the idea that Jewish people in Israel are “Khazars”. Widely also reported was Assad’s claim that the US had enabled the Nazis.
Western editorial reactions to the speech primarily focused on Assad’s Holocaust denialism, and the denialism of the ethnicity of Israeli Jews via the Khazar conspiracy theory — and therefore a denial of the Israeli people’s Biblical right to Israel.
However, my primary reactions to the speech were to note Assad’s clear invocation of Russia’s cult of WW2 and ideology of victory as well as continued parrotting of Russian nationalist ideas within a ‘narrative warfare’ context in general.
Another strong takeaway I had was that despite his argumentation that his narrative was the truth, Assad seems to feel that this war for “truth” does not necessarily correspond to the true and the false. In this sense, that is much like the historical antisemitism which is represented by people who believe in forgeries like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion despite all evidence they are inauthentic documents.
I imagined how funny it must have sounded when he said it:
“….whoever winth the truth… Of courthe, the truth, regardleth of whether it is real or falthe, ith the one who winth the war and the battle.” – Bashar al-Assad (sloppy lisp emphasis added by the author)
Continue reading “Bashar al-Assad: Lisping Puppet of Russia”
