Why are we not surprised? The Syrian who has brought mass death while being the leader for life of his benighted country, a country has been engulfed in a civil war since 2011, recently delivered a speech explaining that there never was a Holocaust of six million Jews, that the people who call themselves Jews in Israel are really the descendants of the Khazars, a Central Asian tribe, and that it was the United States that supported the Nazis before World War II. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on the rich fantasy life of Bashar Assad can be found here: “Assad: ‘No evidence six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,’” JNS, December 21, 2023:
The Jews “who came to Palestine” are pagan Khazar converts, not the Children of Israel, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in a Dec. 18 speech posted online by the official Syrian Arab News Agency and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
This story about the Jews in Israel today really being the descendants of the Khazars, and thus have no connection to the Jews who lived in the Land of Israel in ancient times, is a staple of recent Arab propaganda. It is designed to convince the world that the Israeli “Jews” are mere interlopers who have no centuries-old connection to the land “between the river and the sea,” and ought by rights to be sent back to Central Asia where the Khazars lived, and then disappeared by 965 A.D. In this story, the vast numbers of Jews found outside what was once Khazaria —Ashkenazi Jews in Europe and Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in the Middle East — are simply left out of the narrative. We are supposed to believe that all Jews descend from the Khazar converts to Judaism. It isn’t true.
The Syrian dictator went on to state there is “no evidence” that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that the Nazis did not employ any special methods of torture or killing for Jews, who he said were killed just like other victims of World War II.
Assad is willing to concede that “some” Jews were killed during World War II. But the number was far less than six million, a figure, he claims, for which there is “no evidence.” Like Mahmoud Abbas, who concluded in his doctoral thesis that there had been no Holocaust, but then revised that for his book, claiming that perhaps “as many” as several hundred thousand Jews had died (and many of them, he claimed, succumbed to such diseases as typhus and dysentery), Assad is a Holocaust minimizer. He also wants us to believe that the Jews fared no worse than many other civilian populations who suffered during World War II. That is false. More than two-thirds of Europe’s Jews died by being murdered by the Nazis. Only the Jews were sent to the death camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, where some were starved to death, or worked to death, but most were killed immediately upon their arrival, sent to take “showers” in what turned out to be poison gas – Zyklon B — chambers. Only the Jews were herded into cattle cars, without food or water; many died, pressed up against each other, suffocating while being transported to the camps. Only the Jews had their shoes, their jewelry, their clothes, their watches, their shoes, even their hair, taken from them. Only the Jews were murdered by being shot at the edge of vast pits, into which the bodies would topple, then other bodies fall on top of them, until tens of thousands of victims, as at Babiy Yar, were lying there, some still not dead but writhing under the crush of other bodies, then buried alive when the earth was shoveled over them. Only the Jews were burned alive in crematoria. Only Jews were herded into mobile killing wagons that soon filled with carbon monoxide. Only the Jews were subject to fiendish medical experiments by Dr. Mengele and his fellows.
Yes, non-Jews too died, but not in the same ways, and not in anything like the same numbers, as the Jews of Europe.
The Holocaust was “politicized” and used as a false pretext to transfer the Jews from Europe to Palestine, said Assad.
According to Assad, that so-called “Holocaust” of the Jews was exaggerated by them to provide a pretext and a justification for letting them into “Palestine.” He overlooks the fact that long before the Holocaust, Jews had been returning in significant numbers to the Land of Israel, beginning in the nineteenth century, and this movement of olim making aliyah has continued right through to the present day. It was the League of Nations that in 1922, in establishing the Mandate for Palestine, recognized the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel – that is, to all the land “from the river to the sea.”
He [Bashar Assad] also claimed that America was the one who supported the rise of the Nazis in Germany between the world wars.
This is nonsense. Members of the German-American Bund supported the Nazis once they were in power, but neither they, nor any other group in America, had “supported the rise” of Hitler. Only one well-known American was impressed with Hitler and tried to keep America from joining the war against the Nazis. This single pillar of the “America First” group was Charles Lindbergh.
When Bashar Assad declares that there is “no evidence” that “six million Jews” did in “the Holocaust,” he flies in the face of thousands of accounts, by survivors, by Allied soldiers who liberated the death camps, by statesmen, even by some of its perpetrators, and above all, by an army of historians all over the world who have made the meticulous study of the Holocaust their life’s work. When Assad claims that the “Jews” in Israel are really descendants of the Khazars, he again ignores the historians of the Jewish people, and the geneticists too, who have been able, for example, to isolate the genes that are shared by Ashkenazi Jews. When Assad calumniates the United States for “supporting the rise of the Nazis,” he deserves to be laughed out of court. Or better still, why not make public the names of the Nazi war criminals who found a haven, and well-paid jobs with the Syrian secret police, in Syria? Fritz Stangl, the head of the Treblinka extermination camp, was one of the first to go to Syria, before moving on to South America. The most famous Nazi war criminal who found refuge in Syria and remained until his death was Alois Brunner, a high-ranking Gestapo official whom Adolf Eichmann called his “best man”: he was the head of the SS “Department for Jewish Affairs.” His talents at torture were put to good use when he went to work for the Syrian Secret Police.
Americans don’t need to be lectured by an antisemitic Syrian dictator on who supported the Nazis. We have our files on Hajj Amin El-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs who was Himmler’s special friend, on the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali in Iraq, and on many other Arabs who were rooting for the Nazis. Don’t try to tell us anything. We know.
Bexarkat says
I am quite sure while being “educated” in England, he sat under the tutelage of David Irving.
gravenimage says
Bexarkat, this is possible but unlikely. Murderous Islamic hatred of Jews much predates those like David Irving. It hink it more liekly that he learned this at home.
His father, General Hafiz al-Assad, hated Jews and planned the Yom Kippur War attack on Israel in 1973.
Stive says
Assad is a butcher. He hates Christians too. But he protects Syrian Christians. True. Assad is an Alawite in a once Sunni majority nation. To hold power he protected all non Sunni minority’s including Christians to get their support to maintain rule. When Israel left Lebanon, hezbolla rounded up thousands of Lebanese Christians then trucked to Syria where Assad gassed them as they weren’t Syrians useful to his rule. The Sunnis wanted a free democracy and started a revolt but got no help and over a few years the radical Sunni fringe Isis took the support from the moderates. In rigged elections him being valid ruler is voided but the west never solves problems the easy way, take out Assad or take out khomeni. Better to destroy a whole nation instead. Oh, USA does take out leaders, but not the ones they should
࿗Infidel࿘ says
You point out that he protects Syrian Christians. In fact, when the US-backed administration in Iraq held free elections that saw the shi’a come to power, Iraqi Christians fled to Syria and Lebanon for protection. By Arab standards, Syria is one of the best countries for Christians: under the Alawite regime, it’s the only Arab country where not just Christmas, but even Easter is an official holiday. If Assad were taken out, as the sunni population, backed by the then Saudi regime and Qatar tried to do, the result would have been a sunni theocracy in Damascus composed of ISIS, Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), & Muslim Brotherhood. That result would have been worse for everybody – Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, Druze, Alawites, shi’a and even Israel: it would have been akin to having a PIJ regime in Damascus
You’re also conflating father and son. The father was rabidly anti-Israel and had delusions of a greater Syria like in Umayyad times, that would have included Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. Given that the ideological divide at the time was Soviet vs the US, he could aspire to that, and it was under that regime that President Bashir Gemayel was assassinated, the Lebanese Christians massacred and so on. But the son had been trying to draw things back and get Syria to recover, and then the 2011 Arab Spring induced civil war broke out. Thanks to Russian intervention, it saved his regime, but he also owes some of that to the support from Iran and Hizbullah. Which is why he issues statements like this w/o actually sabre-rattling against Israel
gravenimage says
Bashar Assad’s Claim That There is No Evidence Six Million Jews Died in the Holocaust is No Surprise
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This is standard Muslim rhetoric–that the Holocaust never happened,all whie screaming ‘Jews to the gas!’ or lauding Hitler and vowing to ‘finish the job’.
More:
The Jews “who came to Palestine” are pagan Khazar converts, not the Children of Israel, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said in a Dec. 18 speech posted online by the official Syrian Arab News Agency and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
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There were a number of the Khazarian tribe who converted to Judaism because of their chief. These *never* made up a large number of Jews. Judaism, while not an evangelizing faith, has always had a few converts.
Oddly, the man who popularlized the “modern Jews are Khazarians” was himself a European Jew–he had hoped that antisemitism in Europe was just based on race, and that if non-Jewish Europeans believed that modern Jews were not ethnically Jewish that progoms would end.
Sadly, he much underestimated the virulence of antisemitism. This made no difference to “traditional” antisemites in Europe, but was seized on by Muslims and others to try and invalidate a Jewish presence in the Middle East–saying that modern Jews do not belong in the Levant where they have lived for over 3000 years, because they are all Khazarian tribesmen.
Never mind that this is historically absurd. It is embraced by the same sorts who like to believe that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion–created by Tsarist Russia and discredited over a century ago–is a Jewish manual.
Barbara says
If six million Jews did not die in the holocaust, why then did Switzerland refuse, for years, to pay the heirless beneficiaries. The family members who did survive had to fight for years to get the payments due them.
Switzerland fought hard to keep the money for themselves.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
How many Jewish Khazars actually left the Caucasus for Israel? When the Romanovs ran Russia, they would have been no better off under either the Ottomans nor the Qajars had they tried migrating to either of those empires. Their first opportunity to migrate to Israel would have been 1948, but every Soviet regime until Gorbachev put roadblocks on any Soviet Jew being able to migrate to Israel
So there was no window of opportunity in which enough Khazars could have gone to Israel to form a significant part of their population. By the time they could – in say 1989, there were already too many non-Khazar Jews in Israel who were well settled. In fact, were Khazars even a majority of the Russian Jewish population that moved from Russia to Israel after glasnost?
loek de vette says
Hi Hugh,
The lines below seem to confirm that some Muslims do believe that the Jews lived in the land of Israel unlike what the Palestinians and others say who comletely deniy any connection.
This story about the Jews in Israel today really being the descendants of the Khazars, and thus have no connection to the Jews who lived in the Land of Israel in ancient times, is a staple of recent Arab propaganda. It is designed to convince the world that the Israeli “Jews” are mere interlopers who have no centuries-old connection to the land “between the river and the sea,” and ought by rights to be sent back to Central Asia
loek de vette says
HI Hugh,
The text below seems to confirm that Assad at least believe in a connection between the Jewish nation and the land of Israel. (unlike many or most other Arabs. Please comment.
The Syrian who has brought mass death while being the leader for life of his benighted country, a country has been engulfed in a civil war since 2011, recently delivered a speech explaining that there never was a Holocaust of six million Jews, that the people who call themselves Jews in Israel are really the descendants of the Khazars, a Central Asian tribe
Siddi Nasrani says
Your quote, “Jews in Israel are really the descendants of the Khazars, a Central Asian tribe ”
Well not according to the Koran
Quranic passages clearly illustrate the Jews’ imperative to enter the land of Israel.
And [mention, O Muhammad], when Moses said to his people, “O my people, remember the favor of Allah [God] upon you when He appointed among you prophets and made you possessors and gave you that which He had not given anyone among the worlds. O my people, enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you and do not turn back and [thus] become losers.” — Quran, Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:20-21.
According to verses in the Quran, God punishes the Jews for their sin of refusing to fight the indigenous people in the land, and God is angry that the Jews refused to convert to Islam. Yet the verses are consistent in their assertion that God gave the Jews the Holy Land.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11680/quran-jerusalem-jews
gravenimage says
Siddi, if you read loek de vette’s posts, you will see that he does *not* claim that all modern Jews are descendants of the Khazars.
somehistory says
The Jews are the true descendants of Abraham who moved from Ur of the Chaldeans at God’s direction. Due to Abraham’s obedience, he was promised…through a covenant…that his descendants would come to possess the land. And the promise, or covenant, provided that “all the nations of the earth would bless themselves.”
Those people, such as assad, and other devout mozlums and those who promote islam in any way, are rejecting the “blessing”
Because some of the Jews chose disobedience to God, He allowed the Jews to be dispersed and allowed the lines of descent to become blurred. Today, no Jew can prove through which tribe they came to be, such as to claim to be Levite, or of the tribe of Judah. But that doesn’t change any facts of what has happened to Jews due to hatred of them by many people of all “the nations.”
Millions were slaughtered due to the fact that hitler….and others….hated them. As other people were also hated and murdered in the camps alongside the Jews.
People who are dishonest and have some evil goal, will lie about anything that stands in their way. Such as the “priest” in Italy, lying about the family makeup of Jesus as a baby.
This bogus claim of assad’s is just another in the many lies being told and re-told.
The Istanbulian says
Interesting considering that I didn’t realize that the Hittites and Assyrians were Arabs….
࿗Infidel࿘ says
They weren’t. Oh, I see what you mean 😈