The Russian Foreign Ministry is sending a letter to the New York Daily News demanding an official apology after one of its authors compared the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Turkey with the killing of a Nazi German diplomat in 1938.

“This very day, we [the Russian Foreign Ministry] are sending a letter to the editor-in-chief of the media outlet, which published this xenophobic article that contains justification for a terrorist act, to demand an apology,” the ministry’s spokesperson, Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook account, commenting on a piece written by Gersh Kuntzman in the New York Daily News.

Read more

She also expressed her indignation over the fact that Kuntzman described the assassination as “justice served.”

“Did you realize that you have equated the fight of the Jews against anti-Semitism in the late 1930s with the terrorist methods used by Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front, which claimed credit for this terror attack? Are those the same things to you? Do you express the same or even greater amount of understanding to suicide attacks in Israel?” she posed a rhetorical question to the author of the article.

Zakharova then called on “anti-fascist organizations throughout the world” to give their opinions about the publication.

The controversial article by Gersh Kuntzman that provoked such a strong reaction from the ministry commented on the killing of Ambassador Andrey Karlov, who was gunned down by a Turkish riot police officer in Ankara on Monday.

In his piece, Kuntzman called the late ambassador “an embodiment” of Russian foreign policy that, according to the journalist, involves various atrocities in Syria.

He then went on to describe Karlov as “not a diplomat but a soldier” and compared the killing with the attack on Ernst vom Rath, a Nazi Germany diplomat, who the author erroneously called an ambassador to France.

Read more

Vom Rath was killed in Paris in 1938 in an apparent act of anti-Nazi political terrorism by a German-born Polish-Jewish refugee. The killing gave the Nazis a pretext for launching the anti-Jewish pogrom known as the Kristallnacht.

Andrey Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Ankara, was shot dead on Monday evening as he was holding a speech at an opening of an exhibition in the Turkish capital. His murderer, who was shot down at the scene, was later identified as Mevlut Mert Altintas, a 22-year-old officer with the Turkish riot police, who had over two years of service under his belt.

There has been worldwide condemnation of the assassination and many politicians from various countries, including the US president-elect Donald Trump, EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Federica Mogherini, UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson offered their condolences over the incident.

However, some politicians and media figures also tried to promote their own agenda. One Ukrainian MP called the ambassador’s killer ‘a hero’ while a prominent Qatari journalist said the shooting death of the Russian ambassador to Turkey was a “human reaction” to what he said was Moscow’s “barbarism” in war-torn Syria.