(BrightPress.org) – Syrian President Bashar Assad challenged the assertion that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust during a speech translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Monday, December 18th.
It’s important to note that MEMRI has been criticized previously for mistranslating and cherry-picking quotes out of context to make them appear more inflammatory than they are in reality. The Washington D.C.-based organization was founded by two Israelis. Yigal Carmon, one of the founders, was a colonel in the IDF who had worked with two Israeli prime ministers advising them on terrorism.
Selected quotes and their translations by MEMRI are available here. In the selection, Assad appears to argue that while holocausts did occur many times during World War 2, the number of six million Jews is the focus of the war. He said there’s little evidence to back up that figure, meanwhile, the 26 million Soviet citizens killed in the war get little to no attention.
Assad acknowledged the existence of concentration camps and mass slaughter but added that there were no methods of killing specific to Jews, and Jews were not the only group targeted by the Nazis.
Assad added that the U.S. aided the development of the Nazi regime by funding it. This actually did happen, with the U.S. Federal Reserve and Wall Street banks providing significant loans to the Nazi regime. Ford Motor Company and General Motors both produced vehicles in Germany for the regime, and IBM supplied the Nazis with technology.
Assad said the history was politicized to falsify the truth and create a pressing need for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1948. He argued that the Jews that moved to the newly formed state of Israel were of Khazar descent, coming from the area east of the Caspian Sea. He highlighted that their ancestors became Jewish in the eighth century and had no ancestral connection to the Middle East.
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