Syrian dictator Bashar Assad gave a speech on Monday in which he said the Jews in “Palestine” are pagan foreigners, not the biblical children of Israel, there is “no evidence” the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, the Holocaust was just a pretext for moving European Jews into “Palestine,” and America was behind the rise of the Nazis before World War II.

“Most of us do not know that the rise of Nazism between the two world wars happened with American support. The question on everybody’s mind is: ‘How is 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,” Assad raved.

The murderous Syrian dictator hastened to assure his audience that he was not denying the Holocaust, then proceeded to do exactly that:

True, there were concentration camps, but what shows you that this is a politicized issue, and is not a humanitarian issue, and is not real, [is] how come we talk about these six millions, and not the 26 million Soviets who were killed in that war? Are those six millions more precious? The same acts were everywhere. There was no method of torture or killing specific to the Jews. The Nazis used the same method everywhere.

However, this issue was politicized, in order to falsify the truth, and later to prepare for the transfer of the Jews from Europe to other areas, or [rather] to Palestine. The Jews who came to Palestine are Khazar Jews, from east of the Caspian Sea. They were pagans who converted to Judaism in the eighth century. They emigrated to Europe, and from there, came to this region. They have nothing to do whatever with the [ancient] people of Israel.

The “Khazar Jews” are a lunatic conspiracy theory concocted by supporters of Palestinian terrorism, and recently pushed by no less than the president of the Palestinian Authority, the allegedly “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, center, speaks after laying a wreath at the tomb of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, inside the Mukataa government compound, in the West Bank city of Ramallah as Palestinians commemorate the 14th anniversary of his death, Sunday, Nov. 11, 2018 (AP Photo/Nasser Shiyoukhi).

The idea is to respond to the rather obvious point that Jews have been in Israel for a very long time – they had already been there for quite a while when one of them became famed as a carpenter, and then even more famous for several other reasons – so Palestinian rants about the Jews as latter-day interlopers who arrived a century ago are ridiculous.

The Khazar theory is that modern Israel is filled with European Jews descended from a group of Tatars who converted to Judaism in the 11th century, so they have no ancestral claim on the land as Israelites. Abbas probably brought this up to signal that his faction of the Palestinians would no longer honor a promise made by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the early 1990s to accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

Among many other problems with the Khazar conspiracy theory, geneticists have debunked it and rational historians point out the number of Turkic Khazars who might have converted to Judaism centuries ago was relatively small. The myth persists as a way of claiming modern Israelis are alien interlopers who have no real connection to the history of the region.