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.”

Dan Friedman is the former executive editor and whisky correspondent of the Forward, and is the author of a book about Tears for Fears, the ’80s emo rock band.

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