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Watch: Russian TV Host Compares Israeli Actions to Nazi Atrocities, Gaza War to Holocaust in Wild On-Air Rant
Russian TV host Armen Gasparyan goes on an anti-Israel rant on his eponymous current affairs show “Gasparyan.” Photo: Screenshot
The host of a highly popular Russian TV show recently accused an Israeli guest of “justifying the murder of Palestinian children,” compared Israeli claims of Hamas’ use of human shields to those made by the Nazis during World War II, and even drew a comparison between the war in Gaza and the Holocaust.
Israeli-Russian journalist Nick Kolyohin was interviewed by Armen Gasparyan, host of the eponymous current affairs show “Gasparyan,” about the ongoing war in Gaza. Gasparyan asked Kolyohin why Israel’s military campaign against the Hamas terror group, which rules Gaza, had not ended “despite the fact that 15,000 Palestinian children have been killed,” and requested that Kolyohin “be objective” in his response.
Kolyohin said that while there were certainly “peaceful civilians” in Gaza, not all of them were innocent.
Kolyohin cited former Israeli hostages who he had interviewed as saying that Hamas terrorists cynically use Gazan children to bring them items, including food and weapons, into the Palestinian terror group’s extensive network of underground tunnels.
“Children are sometimes used as a tool for terrorists. Sometimes the [terrorists] threaten their families leaving them with no other option, or it might be the only way for them to earn money,” Kolyohin said. “But sometimes they genuinely believe in what they’re doing because they are brainwashed to think that Jews are evil, and they must be killed.”
Kolyohin went on to say that while some Palestinian civilians are being used by Hamas as human shields, others actively aid the terrorists. He pointed to acts of barbarity committed by Palestinian civilians on Oct. 7 itself. Waves of Palestinians who were not affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Iran-backed terrorist group in Gaza, took advantage of the breached border and stormed Israeli communities, many of whom were caught on surveillance cameras stealing, murdering, and even kidnapping Israeli civilians back to Gaza.
“We shouldn’t think about everyone in the same way. Some may be peaceful and some may not,” Kolyohin told Gasparyan.
Gasparyan thanked Kolyohin for his time before launching into a diatribe against him. “Friends, I apologize for the horror of what we just broadcast on the air,” Gasparyan prefaced.
“I never thought that I would hear a justification for the murder of children on my show,” he said.
“It’s one thing to read about such things in various intellectual books about Nazism and understand that this was all condemned at the Nuremberg trials as a grave crime,” he went on. “But quite another thing when sitting in the studio, microphone in front of you, and you are told, ever so calmly, that [children] are being used by Hamas.”
Gasparyan compared the allegations to those made by the Nazis during World War II to justify the murder of children of members of Soviet partisan guerilla groups.
“Listening to someone justifying the murder of children — that’s something new, that’s the very worst,” he said.
He went on to say that Israel is a state “founded by people who survived the Holocaust — the worst ever catastrophe.”
“You would think they would be the last ones who would perpetrate one. Yet here we’ve heard everything that was said now, in a totally calm manner,” Gasparyan continued.
“We have to ask: where will we end up?” he added. “What is the next stage? Justifying the use of nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip under the pretense of dealing with those tunnels? [They’d say] ‘Hamas left us no other choice, right?’”
Gasparyan’s show is wildly popular on Solovyov Live, a channel run by Russian TV presenter and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. With tens of millions of viewers on the Telegram channel alone, “Gasparyan” is ranked No. 2 on Solovyov Live, second only to Solvyov’s own TV show. YouTube blocked the channel after Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022.
Kolyohin described Gasparyan’s takedown of him as “highly offensive” and castigated the Russian host for not speaking his mind while the Israeli journalist was still on air.
“I couldn’t defend myself. It wasn’t only offensive; it was scary,” Kolyohin told The Algemeiner in a phone call from St. Petersburg. “When you are compared to the most evil thing that happened in our history, it’s awful.”
“People watching could believe the anchor. This is scary and dangerous in today’s world,” he said.
Kolyohin accused the Russian press of extreme propaganda. “They see everyone as Nazis. Not just Ukrainians, but Israelis also.”
In the months following the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, Russian sympathies transferred from Israelis to Palestinians, Kolyohin said, in a shift that was partly driven by the Arab and Muslim world which understood the value in shoring up Russian support. The Israel-Hamas war was leveraged to highlight the “double standards of the West and its hypocrisy” in its dealings with both Russia and the Muslim world, he said.
“It’s a cynical, geopolitical game,” he added.
Kolyohin, who divides his time between Moscow and Tel Aviv, said he was not worried about speaking in defense of Israel on pro-Russian news channels.
“This profession is a scary one everywhere, not just here,” he said. “I think it’s a mistake not to speak, even if I don’t accept their agenda. I believe that if you are speaking the truth and not speaking hate, people will understand what I’m saying and accept it.”
Watch Kolyohin’s comments on Solovyov Live and Gasparyan’s subsequent diatribe below:
The post Watch: Russian TV Host Compares Israeli Actions to Nazi Atrocities, Gaza War to Holocaust in Wild On-Air Rant first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd
Magdeburg Christmas market, December 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang
i24 News – A suspected terrorist plowed a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, west of the capital Berlin, killing at least five and injuring dozens more.
Local police confirmed that the suspect was a Saudi national born in 1974 and acting alone.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his concern about the incident, saying that “reports from Magdeburg suggest something bad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Police declined to give casualty numbers, confirming only a large-scale operation at the market, where people had gathered to celebrate in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.
The post Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister
A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Syria’s new rulers have appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency which toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defense minister in the interim government, an official source said on Saturday.
Abu Qasra, who is also known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan 600, is a senior figure in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which led the campaign that ousted Assad this month. He led numerous military operations during Syria’s revolution, the source said.
Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa discussed “the form of the military institution in the new Syria” during a meeting with armed factions on Saturday, state news agency SANA reported.
Abu Qasra during the meeting sat next to Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, photos published by SANA showed.
Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said this week that the defense ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Assad’s army.
Bashir, who formerly led an HTS-affiliated administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, has said he will lead a three-month transitional government. The new administration has not declared plans for what will happen after that.
Earlier on Saturday, the ruling General Command named Asaad Hassan al-Shibani as foreign minister, SANA said. A source in the new administration told Reuters that this step “comes in response to the aspirations of the Syrian people to establish international relations that bring peace and stability.”
Shibani, a 37-year-old graduate of Damascus University, previously led the political department of the rebels’ Idlib government, the General Command said.
Sharaa’s group was part of al Qaeda until he broke ties in 2016. It had been confined to Idlib for years until going on the offensive in late November, sweeping through the cities of western Syria and into Damascus as the army melted away.
Sharaa has met with a number of international envoys this week. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.
Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Dec. 8, forcing Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war and ending his family’s decades-long rule.
Washington designated Sharaa a terrorist in 2013, saying al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria. US officials said on Friday that Washington would remove a $10 million bounty on his head.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.
The post Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
i24 News – Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.
The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.
“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”
The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.
“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.
The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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