By: Ben Cohen – Jewish News Syndicate; jns.org
Iran and Russia further bind their ties—one an authoritarian regime claiming Divine sanction, the other an authoritarian regime promoting nationalist chauvinism, both of them sworn enemies of Western democracy.
Despite spending five months baiting Ukraine’s leaders as “neo-Nazis,” among them the country’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin didn’t bat an eyelid as he embraced a genuine Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier in the shape of Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Putin visited Tehran last week on his first trip outside the borders of the former USSR since launching the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. The immediate focus was not the war in Ukraine, but that other Russian-fueled bloodbath in Syria. The main meeting brought Khamenei and Putin together with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is seeking Russian and Iranian backing for a renewed onslaught against Kurdish forces in Syria. Putin refrained from making a formal commitment to his Turkish counterpart, but he will have been reassured by Erdoğan’s reference to him as “my dear friend,” and gratified by Turkey’s shameful antics in holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership applications because of the backing of those two nations for the Kurds.
cont’d…