In his defense of his country, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov recently crossed the line into outright antisemitism. Israel has demanded an apology for this. Christians must continue to pray for hearts to be changed and eyes to be opened in Russia. 

From The Guardian. Israel has summoned the Russian ambassador and demanded an apology over remarks by the Kremlin foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood” and that the “most rabid antisemites tend to be Jews”.

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The remarks were part of Lavrov’s defence of Russia’s policy of “denazification” in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s term for a sweeping purge that Ukraine says is a pretext for “mass murder.”

In an interview with Italian TV, Lavrov was asked to address how Russia could say it needed to “denazify” the country when its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is Jewish.

“As to [Zelenskiy’s] argument of what kind of nazification can we have if I’m Jewish, if I remember correctly, and I may be wrong, Hitler also had Jewish blood,” Lavrov said during an interview with Italian television channel Mediaset. “It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

“We have for a long time listened to the wise Jewish people who say that the most rabid antisemites tend to be Jews,” Lavrov continued. “There is no family without a monster.”

The remarks have sparked a diplomatic row with Israel, one of the few western countries that has yet to impose sanctions on Russia over its invasion and has not provided military aid to Ukraine.

“His words are untrue and their intentions are wrong,” said the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett. “Using the Holocaust of the Jewish people as a political tool must cease immediately.”

Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, said Israel made “every effort” to have good relations with Russia “but there is a limit and this limit has been crossed this time. The government of Russia needs to apologise to us and the Jewish people….”

In his interview this week, Lavrov also said he did not want Ukraine to surrender but simply that it “stop resisting”.

“We don’t demand that [Zelenskiy] surrender,” Lavrov said. “We demand that he give the order to release all civilians and stop resisting. Our goal does not include regime change in Ukraine….”

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(Excerpt from The Guardian. Photo Credit: Getty Images)