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Bullying of Russia in Western media resembles informational holocaust — opinion

"Russia is used as a scarecrow without proper facts, rabidly, totally mindlessly on every other occasion that comes their way?" Maria Zakharova said

St PETERSBURG, June 2. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Ministry’s official spokesperson Maria Zakharova said at a summit of world news agencies here on Friday the bullying of Russia in Western mass media was akin to informational holocaust.

"We’ve read in textbooks about the events of the end of the 1930’s in Europe and in Poland and it seemed unfathomable to us that a single people could be accused of all the woes," she said. "How could it be that people got deaf instantaneously and began to trust everything that was peddled to them as truth at that moment?"

"The result was World War II and Holocaust," Zakharova said.

"Doesn’t it seem to you that what we’re going through today, and particularly when it comes down to Russia, resembles an informational holocaust when Russia is used as a scarecrow without proper facts, rabidly, totally mindlessly on every other occasion that comes their way?" she said.

"The mainstream media are setting the tune to it and then this wave, as the nuclear wave, spreads further and rules out an opportunity to ask the question, what facts do you have and why are you doing it?" Zakharova said.

She pointed to the positioning theses voiced by the moderator of the plenary session, Megyn Kelly of the U.S.

"Take for instance the claim that President Bashar Assad carried out the chemical attack," Zakharova said. "I have a question then, and to this particular journalist as well, namely, who of the U.S. reporters located in Syria has approached the site of the incident at least from afar? Our Russian reporters did visit it."

"She (Kelly) doesn’t show any doubts over such theses, in the meantime," she said. "That’s a really dangerous thing."

Zakharova indicated that an epidemic of fake news had also spread to the sphere of education.

"Look at the rewriting of textbooks, at how erosion in many textbooks embraces even the documents of the Nuremberg Trials in spite of the factual materials reaffirmed by a resolution of the UN Security Council," she said. "It means the epidemic of fakes has swept the sphere of education, too.".

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