The Middle East Media Research Institute is an Israeli-US effort that deliberately mistranslates or otherwise misleads with a bias towards Israel. Assad didn't doubt the existence of the Holocaust nor that 6 million Jews were killed. He did state two problematic things, however:
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Speaking imprecisely on the extent to which Jews were targeted when trying to draw attention to the fact that Germans used the same concentration camps and mass death on an even larger number of non-Jews.
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Delving into the Khazar origins hypothesis for Ashkenazi Jews, which was originally based on scanty evidence and is now an academic quagmire in terms of genetic evidence. The real reason for the hypothesis in these situations is to undermine the idea that European Jews are a diaspora from The Levant in order to undermine Zionist claims to the land, and to that end it's a counterproductive overreach, as it rhetorically implies that a 2000-year-old diaspora would indeed have the right to settler-colonize and brutalize the populations living in "the homeland".
Both are in the spirit of lazy narratives that flirt with antisemitism but are not the naked antisemitism that the headlines are falsely claiming.
Agreed. There's no reason whatsoever that Assad would take this line. It sounds like Hasbra message manipulation.
Isn't the Khazar hypothesis debunked long ago?
There is proven Jew presence in Germany from like III century and even the term Ashkenazi was used not long after destruction of Khazar Khaganate while there was entire centuries old Jewish organisation in Western Europe. Eastern European Jews are descended from mostly German Jews who were fleeing from the mass oppression and pogroms in XIII-XIV century.
Krymchaks and Karaites might be descendants of Khazar since last mentions of them are from Crimea and Krymchaks and Karaites do not speak Yiddish but a Turkic language, but it's unclear.
In terms of non-genetic evidence it's always been on shaky ground. Not necessarily disproven so much as it wasn't established as likely in the first place.
In terms of comparative genetics analysis, the studies are fraught. The more typical hypothesis of origins near the Levant is the most popular and does have decent evidence. At the same time, some scientists, including Israeli ones, have reasonably entertained hypotheses of origins in the caucuses and have some amount of evidence. IMO there have not been good enough studies in general, they need to sample more populations, particularly different ethnic groups, and do proper work testing alternative hypotheses under different (appropriate) modeling methods. This research is also challenging because of the hypothesis being favored by antisemites. I probably wouldn't work on the topic myself if I were in the field. There's a lot of potential for negative outcomes without having rock-solid evidence and rock-solid evidence may be impossible.
well there's two types of northern European Jews: Ashkenazi and Russian. I say this because Israel's statistics counted them separately
the Ashkenazi ones definitely have some influence from the Middle East, although they're extremely mixed with Northern European, to the point they cluster with croatians/serbs rather than actual Mizrahi Jews
the Russian ones idk, it doesn't seem farfetched that they could be descended from the Khazars
Can you elaborate on you second bullet point a little? I’ve definitely not surveyed all academia on the Khazars but almost all criticism of the hypothesis I’ve been able to find is straight up hasbara talking points that simply treats the idea as a heresy without actually engaging in any sort of objective evidence based response. They even call it the Khazar Heresy even though the Jewish religion is indifferent to the “genetic” origins of Jewish groups across the world. The heresy is a heresy against the Zionist religion in that formulation. And from proponents of the Khazar idea, while I’ve seen them use it, in part, as a cudgel against the idea of a Jewish nation emerging from a specific gene pool in the Levant, arguing that this is actually a concession to Zionism seems like accepting Zionist bad-faith counter-framing (which is done by Zionists in bad faith).
the problem of evidence is for the Khazar hypothesis, there's a handful of letters & coins showing the Khazar leaders practicised judaism, to what extent the whole state or people did is speculation. then it's speculation and entirely undocumented how these "khazars" got so far west of where the khazar state had been, yet did not leave a much of a trace in the caucauses.
and then why did jews in eastern europe speak yiddish? that just has to be ignored or chalked up to... cultural imperialism? on the part of later migrants.
genetics are a) useless for determining anything but the most generalized impressions of migrations that have happened b) no "khazars" or descendant groups exist to test against. c) to the extent they've tested, it doesn't support the theory
you're right in that the theory has been used in various ways, both to try to create the impression of jewish indigeneity to russia (from russian jews), also to deny ashkenazi indigeneity to palestine (anti-zionism)---but it makes lots of people uncomfortable because after being mostly run out of academia for the above reasons, the people left talking about it are mostly antisemitic cranks making the case ashkenazi were 'turkish' interlopers in europe.
it doesn't matter where the people doing apartheid in Palestine "actually" came from though, the problem is they're doing apartheid. if groups of european jews had just moved to palestine like normal immigrants and not taken over and stolen everything, no-one would care if they believed their mythic ancestors were from there, right?
The two chiefs issues are the pre-genetics claims and the genetics claims.
The pre-genetics claims were hand-wavy guesswork that antisemites latched onto rapidly and then some anti-Zionists reflexively used because they wanted to undermine Zionism (using a bad argument, as I argued). Israel's conflation of Judaism and Zionism has often created situations in which there are varying degrees of antisemitism used against Zionism, ranging from explicit and raging antisemitism to casual tropes to simply mixing up Judaism and Israel when making criticisms. Several anti-Zionist groups, including some Soviet ones, latched on to the poor pre-genetics evidence and ran with it for political reasons, for example.
The genetics research is fraught. Comparative genetics is complex to analyze and very sensitive to the method used and assumptions made. There are scientists who claim that Ashkenazi Jewish population data suggests origins roughly in the area of Turkey to Palestine and this is generally the most popular interpretation. It certainly has decent evidence. At the same time, there are others who do see ambiguity there and markers that suggest ancestry near the caucuses as well, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Slavic. Ashkenazi Jews are certainly the result of diaspora, the only mystery is exactly where it started, so it's challenging to tell the difference between "the diaspora started here" vs. "the diaspora moved here for a while and then continued". From my perspective (and I do know a decent amount about the general methodologies), it seems like there are not enough seminal studies on the topic to properly challenge either hypothesis and it's also difficult to disentangle from scientists' biases, as the Khazar origins hypothesis has this history with antisemites and most people are unwilling to touch on it with ambiguous data. Some of the scientists who did, though, were Israeli, for what it's worth.
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Outside of two Israeli sources I wasn't able to find anything on this. Not saying that he didn't say it, but still.
The text under the headline doesn't necessarily support the title, even without looking further into it. Depends whether it's been accurately or poorly translated. '[W]eren't specifically targeted' could be a translation of a few things, among them the idea that others were also targeted. 'Specifically' is a word like 'literally', which doesn't always mean 'literally' anymore. He's wrong if he does mean something like Jews weren't targeted for being Jewish, of course, and I don't defend that. I'm only highlighting that it wouldn't be the first time that 'loose' translations have made some enemies of the west look bad (Lukaschenko gets this a lot, I believe).
tag an Arabic speaker
How old are these Israeli articles that you found?
I looked for the same and they're all from this week.
considering it's Memri TV, can anyone confirm that the subtitles in the video are accurate?
Unfortunately they are. I checked each bit and there's nothing wrong with the subs. I'll find the full video to see the context of this, but it's looking real bad for him.
the full memri video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlzpnP1221Y
the original video it was taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZaQzBcjOgM
i'll check if there was any convenient cutting of words from the original clip.
4:40 is the part
🏢🎙📹🇸🇾 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said there is no evidence that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust and accused the United States of financing the German Nazi Party.
"There is no evidence that six million Jews were killed [during the Holocaust]. There may have been a Holocaust, no one denies that... Yes, there were concentration camps, but this is a politicized issue, not a humanitarian or real one. Why are we talking about these six million [Jews] and not about the 26 million Soviet people who were killed in this [World War II]? Is that six million more expensive? There were the same actions, there was no method of torture or murder specific to Jews. The Nazis used the same method everywhere. However, this issue was politicized in order to falsify the truth, and then to prepare for the resettlement of Jews from Europe to other regions or to Palestine," Bashar al—Assad said during a meeting of Baath members on Monday.
I mean yes the genocide of millions of jews is highlighted the most of all the WW2 deaths but to say there is no evidence of it is just weird.
This is a lot more reasonable than the article made it sound
No it's not. He's willfully ignoring the mountains of evidence that the Nazis did indeed deliberately target European Jewish people and almost wiped their population out. They targeted other groups, sure. But antisemitic conspiracies were an explicit part of their entire ideology. Yeah, the legacy of the Holocaust is distorted and weaponized by the West, but his statement is one of Holocaust denial.
This is an L. And his take doesn't help the struggle against Israel or the global reputation of Arabs.
It's not reasonable to deny 6 million jews died in Holocaust. There were systematic killings and torture to wipe out European jewry out of existence along with poles but jews were considered as the lowest grade of people. The concentration camps, the death marches and systematic ethnic cleansing carried out by Nazis was recorded by soviet Union. The problem is solely Jewish state based on Palestine is an artificial problem. Why these arabic governments don't try to address the apartheid in that regard?
aside from the first sentence; there's plenty of evidenceehhhhh reading it again, his only good point is that many people [in the West] ignore or trivialize Soviet casualtiesStill terrible though
Oof....rare super L from Assad 😩
I honestly dont trust it. All from 2 israeli sources and not even like 1-2 years ago Assad was talking about how horrible nazis were and how NATO incorporated them into their network in europe with operation gladio after pretending to be against fascism. I expect this is just another hit job trying to paint anti Zionists as holocaust deniers and nazis. The Israeli media and govt has shown how quick they are to lie about even the most obvious shit, saying things like calendars with days of the week are lists of hamas members and that palestinian school books are in English with dedication pages to terrorists.
Yeah I find this hard to believe cause I just read a post about him explaining exactly that...like ain't no way man...
Anyone have a full transcript of this speech? Even in Arabic? Some have alleged deliberate mistranslation.
Come here and translate this shit, here are 2 articles
You can archive them
The translation is correct
I'm curious about one line in particular, where he says "there's no evidence six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust." Does the word "Jews" actually appear here? I'm wondering if Bashar is merely saying that six million is an underestimation of the total death toll of the Holocaust, or if he straight up thinks no Jews died in the Shoah. Thanks in advance.
I will do so later if I don’t forget. Is there a remind me bot here?
The video is cut right before he questions the Holocaust’s Jewish death toll figures, but he doesn’t deny the Holocaust happened. He just says it has been politicized and he gives evidence to the fact that the Soviet death toll is ignored.
It's a popular trope among certain islamic intellectuals to deny the Holocaust and also to tow the judo-bolshevik conspiracy theory. Assad just made a left wing version of that trope. If you can't deny the Holocaust then it means you shouldn't deny a great amount of atrocity had been committed to the European jewry by Nazis. 6 million jews were systematically killed by gas chambers and death marches and shooting. It was also USSR who addressed the mass atrocities when they supported the 2 state solution.
@PostWatchBot@lemy.lol
Not an Arabic speaker, just posting relevant sources for people to verify.
SANA's 40-min video posted on 2023-12-18 titled "حديث الرئيس الأسد في الشأن السياسي خلال اجتماع اللجنة المركزية لحزب البعث العربي الاشتراكي", also posted on their website (https://sana.sy/?p=2018974): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZaQzBcjOgM
SANA's English news article titled "President al-Assad to al-Baath Party’s Central Committee meeting: Commitment to issues protects nations and homelands", summarizing the main points of his speech, but doesn't mention this particular topic posted by MEMRI TV: https://sana.sy/en/?p=322180
Haha, the karma that Zionists have been expecting.
I think he's just saying there's no evidence that Jews were killed and other concentration camp victims were spared. I don't know if this is historically accurate. But he does say that 6 million Jews were tortured to death like 1 second later.
I think he doesn't.. He like Iranians have trivialized the Holocaust as sort of military pogroms.
It seems to me he’s framing it as “6 million Jews… but there were 26 million Slavic victims so who are the true victims?” which seems to be pretty much Holocaust denial to me.
He isn’t outright denying the concentration camps were a thing but he is saying that there is an element of mythmaking in the story of the Holocaust to justify the creation of Israel, and he further seems to deny that modern Jews are descendants of the diaspora which is all pretty much Holocaust denial.
Like, he’s framing it all in a way to undermine the legitimacy of Israel and to undermine any historical connection to Israel that Jewish people feel, and he’s doing that by denying their Jewishness and walking right up to and putting a foot over the line of saying the Holocaust didn’t really happen in the sense of particularly targeting Jewish people.
It’s bad.
Edit: and he seems to question the reliability of 6 million Jewish victims so it’s not just a foot over the line, it’s rank Holocaust denial.
It is in the Arab perception of the Holocaust that Achcar’s book is at its strongest. Whereas Europeans see the Holocaust from the viewpoint of the perpetrators, Arabs see it as victims. This explains the role that Holocaust denial plays amongst Arabs. When Ahmedinajad hosted a Holocaust conference in December 2006 in Tehran, he was greeted with headlines such as ‘Enough stupidity’ in left‐wing Beirut daily Al‐Ahkbar.
Dr Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the […] Knesset, who was driven out of [the neocolony] by Shin Bet (‘General Security Service’) wrote in Al‐Ahram that ‘Holocaust Denial does not undermine the moral justifications for the existence of the [neocolony] as some imagine. What it does, however, is hand the European right and [its neocolony] a convenient enemy upon which to unload their problems’ (p. 254).
Achcar asks the most pertinent question of all, namely whether all forms of Holocaust Denial are the same (p. 261). Many Arabs reacted to Zionism’s propagandistic use of the Holocaust by denial. This is entirely different from European neo[fascists], who hope for a repetition of the Holocaust [that] they deny.
(Emphasis added. Source.)
I might piss a lot of people off by saying this, but I honestly don’t believe that all Arabs who deny the Shoah should be treated like neofascists. Yes, what they say is terrible, but they aren’t hopeless. If they had conversations with anti‐Zionists who accept the Shoah as factual (e.g. Neturei Karta), then I believe that they could be persuaded to reconsider their doubt. They can explain to them that accepting the Shoah as factual does not mean justifying Zionism, and that Shoah education has the potential to help anti‐Zionism.
I cannot blame anybody for being upset by this news, but the Zionist ruling class deserves most of blame for people overreacting to its abuse of the Shoah.
I speak no Arabic, but I have a strong suspicion this clip combines uncharitable translation with deceptive editing. It's worth pointing out, as others have, that MEMRI is not a neutral party, and absolutely has a vested interest in painting Assad in the least favorable light, regardless of what they themselves say.
Bashar says there was no Holocaust (singular), but Holocausts (plural). He is criticizing the western fixation solely on Jewish victims of the Holocaust at the expense of the non-Jewish victims whom actually comprise the majority of those murdered in the camps. Of course the Nazis were motivated by hatred of Jews, but they were more than happy to murder plenty of others who met their arbitrary criteria for extermination, as is evidenced by the fact that while six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, another eleven million non-Jews were murdered in the exact same fashion.
People everywhere underestimate the absolute magnitude of the Holocaust specifically due to the sole focus on Jewish victims. It is exceedingly common for people to fail to identify most Holocaust victims because the six million figure is thrown around constantly with no broader context. So no, I don't think Assad is denying the Holocaust, but merely broadening the scope of its recognition.
As for the Khazar thing, that's clearly not true, though he is generally correct that Ashkenazim have no ancestral connection to Palestine except by the most generous approximation. Wrong formula, right conclusion.
I think a lot of my comrades have become very jumpy over the sheer volume of accusations of antisemitism thrown their way, and are attempting to prove to themselves and others that they aren't antisemitic by throwing known psyop MEMRI TV a bone and agreeing that Assad hates Jews.
