As of January 15, 2024, Khachatrian had posted multiple antisemitic and anti-Israel comments on LinkedIn that month. All his comments were in response to a single post dated January 7, 2024, which linked to an article titled: “‘I’m afraid every day for my children’: As antisemitism soars, French Jews flee to Israel.”
In a post dated 2 days earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “...I hope you live long enough to see Zionism crumble with your own eyes…”
Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture. Zionism is a core part of the identity of most Jews.
In the same post dated 2 days earlier, Khachatrian continued: “…I’m standing up against the oppressors. That would be the Zionists. Let me define what a Zionist is for you: A confused person who has no faith but believes that God gave his/her ancestors the Holy Land exclusively and without preconditions. Even though those ancestors may not be from the Levant region at all.”
One method that anti-Israel activists often use to spread [00:02:16] anti-Semitism and deny Israel’s legitimacy is to claim [00:06:46] that Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites and are therefore not Jews. The most common version of this claim is the “Khazar myth.”
As shown further below, Khachatrian has promoted the Khazar myth.
In a post dated 4 days earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “...Your nasty Zionist compadres have been terrorizing, killing and oppressing God’s most pious people since the inception of Israel…And your global media machine had successfully managed to paint them as terrorists all while the true terrorists are the Zionists themselves…”
In a post dated 6 days earlier Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “…We see what is happening to civilian Palestinians as genocide and no amount of terrorist attacks can justify wiping out a peoples [sic] from their ancestral lands…”
In a post dated 6 days earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “...The ancient kingdom of Khazaria is what I was referring to… Modern European Jews are of Khazar origins…”
The “Khazar myth” refers to the assertion that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites but instead come from the Khazar People, whose ruling class was said to have converted to Judaism. One way anti-Israel activists spread anti-Semitism is to promote the Khazar myth to deny [00:02:16] Israel’s legitimacy through the denial of Jewish ancestry and Jews’ connection to the Land of Israel.
In another post dated 6 days earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn, referring to the Khazars: “...Most of the people claiming to be Jewish today have Turkic blood and most certainly didn’t originate from the Holy land…”
In another post dated 6 days earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “Israel’s media machine had suppressed information about the oppression to such a degree that normal people weren’t aware…The Zionist overlords brought this on our heads. The changes afflicting societies all over the world are not organic, evolutionary changes. They are artificially deployed at us to keep is [sic] divided and distracted. You are simply getting a taste of the poison and corruption that the Zionists dished out upon the average person.”
In a post dated 6 days earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “...You are still claiming that Zionist control over media, international law and international finance is a conspiracy theory? / Yeah, you’ve been drinking their kool-Aid for far too long and have started believing it yourself…”
In a post dated one week earlier, Khachatrian commented on LinkedIn: “Denounce Zionism. The target now is Zionism…You just have to denounce Zionism.”
