News media is abuzz with Israel’s reaction to a statement of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about German dictator Adolf Hitler’s alleged Jewish ancestry. Israel has condemned the Russian minister’s statement and expressed a strong reaction against it.
Russian Foreign Minister’s Statement
The Associated Press cited Russian Foreign Minister’s statement in their story featured in Yahoo News on Monday (May 02, 2022). Sergey Lavrov said:
So when they say ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites were Jewish.
Lavrov was seemingly referring to the Ukrainian side’s defense against the existence of Nazi militia as part of its military in the current war with Russia. The Ukrainian government and its globalist allies in America and Europe have been condemned and taunted by Russian supporters and/or critics of the Ukrainian dictatorship over their alliance with Nazis. The Ukrainian dictator/ president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Jew and that makes it an unholy political alliance with the neo-Nazis.
Israel’s Reaction
As documented in the Associated Press story, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid condemned Lavrov’s statement as “unforgivable, scandalous, and a horrible historical error.” The story cited Lapid as:
The Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust,” said Lapid, the son of a Holocaust survivor.
Reuters reported that Israel’s foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to Israel and demanded an apology over Lavrov’s statement.
Context of Lavrov’s Statement on Hitler’s Ancestry
In August 2019, media outlets reported on a study Hitler’s ancestry suggesting that the historically infamous dictator of Germany was the grandchild of Jewish people. Fox News reported that Dr. Leonard Sax authored the study “Revisiting the question of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather” published in the Journal of European Studies in May 2019.
The study is based on a conjecture not independently verified at the time of the study’s publication but the suggestion strengthened the already existing idea of Hitler’s Jewish ancestry as proposed by Hitler’s own personal lawyer Hans Frank in 1930.
Rationale of Reaction by Israel
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s reaction is based on his inference that because someone came from a Jewish family or ancestors cannot engage in hostility and violence toward Jews. This inference is fundamentally flawed since it assumes that only ancestry determines one’s ideology, conduct, and/or policies. If that were the case, Muslims would never kill Muslims; Iran – a Shia Muslim nation – would be a political ally of Azerbaijan (also a Shia Muslim nation) instead of an entirely Christian Armenia or mostly Christian Russia; Catholic Joe Biden would be anti-abortion and fight for Christian causes instead of representing the mainly godless left; and blacks would not have owned black slaves during the many slavery years in world history. Even today, most violence against blacks come from blacks, and same for other ethnic groups in their respective countries.
In reality, people’s beliefs, conduct, and policies are shaped by a number of factors and it’s not uncommon for people to show loyalty to causes and ideologies other than those of their ancestors or even immediate family.
The second issue with Israel’s grievance over the Russian minister’s comment is that of generalization. To state that Lavrov’s suggestion that Hitler came from a Jewish family meant that Jews did the holocaust is a statement of gross generalization. If Hitler is supposed to be a Jew, for the sake of the argument, it does not imply automatically that those carrying out his orders of killing and persecution of Jews were also Jewish; just like an allegedly Catholic Biden’s bombing of children in Afghanistan does not mean Christians killed Afghan children. The generalization is irrational.