the Shoah is linked to the extermination of Native Americans, the massacres of the OvaHerero and Namibians, the slaughter of the Armenians, Fascist Italy’s exploits in Africa, mediaeval anti‐Judaism, Spartan ableism, Anglo‐American eugenics, violence against German communists, violence against Soviet POWs…

Get ready to be called an anti-Semite and holocaust denier. Point of the Holocaust/Shoah narrative is that it is a unique event in human history and Jewish people are unique victims of it, comparing it to other events (no matter how similar or despite having a larger death toll) is considered Holocaust denial.

Bashar Al-Assad was called an anti-semite and hater of Jews:

In recent remarks issued by Syrian President Bashar Assad, he propagated hateful and deeply disturbing antisemitic rhetoric, questioning the veracity of the Holocaust and cultivating conspiracy theories. We, as responsible members of the global community, vehemently condemn his remarks.

The Holocaust has been extensively documented, researched, and studied as one of the most tragic and horrifying events in human history. The attempt to trivialize, deny, or distort its horrors is a form of antisemitism. source

What did Assad say?

The video of the speech, translated and published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), reveals Assad telling a crowd that ‘there is no evidence that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.’

He never denied lots of Jews were killed (he’d probably say it was in the millions himself), he has a problem with the number “6 million”.

Assad questioned the politicization of the Holocaust issue, arguing, "True, there were concentration camps, but what shows you that this is a politicized issue, not a humanitarian one and not a real one, is that we talk about these six million, but why don’t we talk about the 26 million Soviets who were killed in that war? Are the six million more precious? " [emphasis mine]

He claimed during his speech riddled with historically inaccurate lies that, “there was no specific method of torture or killing specific to the Jews. The Nazis used the same methods everywhere.”

Assad goes on to publicly and inaccurately question, “How was it that despite the German collapse and European constraints, Nazism was allowed to rise and build an army? It was done with American support, money, loans and investments .” [emphasis mine] source

“there was no specific method of torture or killing specific to the Jews” is an anti-semitic statement because it doesn’t recognise Jewish suffering as unique.

Even if the whole Zyklon-B showers/gas chambers thing is made up, and even if the Holocaust denialists are right when they say “only” 400k-1.5million Jews were killed due to malnourishment/disease/conditions, we still have hard proof of: 1) Einsatzgruppen genociding Slavs and Jews in Eastern Europe, 2) Jews were stripped of belongings, property, rights and put into concentration camps, 3) Germany did want to clear Eastern Europe of people to make Lebensraum and keep lots of Slavs as slaves for the reich, 4) Germany did attack all of Europe and want to turn it all fascist and extinguish any culture/ethnicity not compatible with it, 5) Germany did wish to expel all Jews and remove them from German society (along with other undesirables), and so on.

Even a hundred dead for racist reasons is too many. Method of killing os irrelevant too. Whether Nazis killed millions of Jews and other people with bullets, malnourishment, bad treatment, gas, kind words, hugs… it doesn’t matter, Nazis killed a bunch of people. But I guess it is jmportant we know they killed differently than other European/colonial powers who also killed millions.

The Nazis should obviously be opposed (and many have opposed them even before they started genociding) so what are possible motivations for making up horror stories about them? I remember being told in the 90s Nazis made soap out of Jews and stuffed coats with their hair.

One I could think of is that the US had “internment camps” for Japanese people. Every Japanese person in the US was sent to a concentration camp. What makes US camps different than German ones? No systemic extermination of course!

Another extermination camp I can think of is Jasenovac, where people were killed by axes, saws, hammers, knives… handheld weapons. So the argument that Nazis used Zyklon-B so that their soldiers wouldn’t have to actually kill people with their bare hands and not fuck themselves up mentally makes sense, with Jewish inmates responsible for dragging away the bodies.

If I were you, I wouldn’t touch the issue with a ten-foot pole. You either have to accept the main ADL narrative where the Jews have suffered uniquely and therefore deserve special privileges on the world stage, or you don’t agree with it and say Jews have been (and in some places continue to be) oppressed based on their religion and heritage, much like many people have been throughout history and be called an anti-semite for trivialising the plight of the Jews.

This is a topic where reason can’t win, even discussing the topic gets you labeled an anti-semite. Questioning a single aspect of the narrative is akin to denying the whole thing.