What Do Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Julian Assange Have in Common?
Image by Kremlin, wikimedia commons
By Dan Friedman August 3, 2016
What do Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Julian Assange have in common?
According to an article by Michael Weiss in The Daily Beast they share a sanguine attitude to Russian foreign policy and an enjoyment of anti-Semitic supporters.
Weiss outlines the responses of Trump and Assange to Putin’s military and political incursions into Belarus and Ukraine. He notes their insouciance in the face of things that their positions as the would-be president of America and as the head of the people’s transparency watchman might suggest they oppose strenuously.
And he explains the intersection of their anti-Semitism — Wikileaks and Trump supporters on Twitter — Assange and Putin in the person of Israel Shamir, a holocaust-denying courier and henchman of Assange who took information about dissidents and politicians in Belarus who had met with American officials and donated it to Alexander Lukashenko the pro-Putin strongman who used the information to crush his opposition.
As well as the Wikileaks anti-Semitic tweet, from an account reputed to be managed personally by Assange, that the head of Wikileaks has confidence in Shamir, undermines the public good that Assange claims to do. Here’s what Weiss says about him.
Shamir’s views seem to both anticipate and underscore those of the “alt-right” Trump support wing on social media. Daily Beast columnist Michael Moynihan ably catalogued his fascism in Reason magazine. Shamir believes that Auschwitz was not a Nazi death camp but rather a Red Cross-overseen “internment facility”; that all Muslims and Christians are duty-bound to deny that the Shoah ever took place; that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a debunked tsarist fabrication but actually a Jewish manual for world domination; and that Jews themselves are a “virus in human form.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
