On April 27th, 2017, Al-Masdar News made an announcement through their Twitter account that they had become aware that one of their contributing writers “may have engaged in abusive behavior on a public forum prior to joining AMN”, and that the unnamed journalist in question was as of that date “suspended with pay”.

The individual at the center of this vaguely-described scandal at AMN the Australian writer and lecturer Paul Antonopoulos, the now-former Deputy Editor at Al-Masdar News who has contributed articles websites such as GlobalResearch.ca, Russia Insider, Russia News Now, Katehon and others. Antonopoulos has been a guest lecturer at Charles Stuart University and a researcher at Western Sydney University in Australia. The websites Antonopoulos contributes to are typically affiliated with the Assad Government in Syria (such as Al-Masdar News), strongly aligned with the media narratives of Putin’s administration in Russia (Russia Insider), and traffic in conspiracy theories that claim to expose “mainstream media lies” (Global Research).

The content shared by this genre of media often repeats a similar narrative that characterizes the Syrian Conflict as being the product of the united resistance of Putin, Assad and their allies against a sinister plot by global financial elites to bring the entire world under an exploitative and oppressive financial and political order. Antonopoulos has contributed to this narrative by writing critical pieces about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, and by suggesting in an AMN article that the chemical weapons attack in Idlib, Syria on April 4th of this year was perpetrated by Syrian opposition forces rather than the Syrian Government, a story that was quickly repeated by multiple conspiracy theory websites, including Alex Jones’s high-profile media outlet InfoWars (an examination of the attack and these claims may be found on The Fulda Gap here).

On the same day that AMN made the announcement regarding Antonopoulos’s termination, reports began circulating on twitter accounts linked to various investigative journalists that an account linked to Antonopoulos had been discovered on the White-Nationalist forum Stormfront. Posting under the name “Minimalistix”, Antonopoulos had allegedly engaged in racially-charged dialogue on the forum with the assorted varieties of White Nationalists for a number of years, as well as similar posts made on an Australian football forum. AMN is run by the Lebanese-American Leith Abou Fadel, who is outspokenly supportive of the Assad government and whose media work is ostensibly based out of Beirut, Lebanon. Although on the surface it may appear strange and contradictory that someone with a White Nationalist background would have such an affinity for an Arab-majority country such as Syria, upon closer examination it becomes apparent that a wide range of White Nationalists from across the world have these same kinds of sympathies for the Assad regime and some of its allies since the beginning of the conflict.

Across the Pacific ocean in the United States, both the younger generation of White Nationalists (euphemistically referred to as the “Alt-Right”) and aging members of America’s racialist vanguard like David Duke have shown support for Assad. In the case of Duke, a 66-year old former Ku Klux Klan leader and outspokenly Anti-Semetic Louisiana State politician, this affinity predates the Syrian war, with Duke having paid a visit to Damascus in 2005 in which he gave a public speech in support of the Syrian Government. More recently, Duke condemned the US missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in Syria on April 7th, expressing his great disappointment while also claiming that the military action exposes the “Jewish Deep State” which in his view (and that of most White Nationalists), is nefariously controlling American political and financial affairs from the shadows.

Richard Spencer, one of the most high-profile faces of the Alt-Right who received widespread media coverage in 2016 for his support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, publicly condemned the Shayrat strike as well through his twitter account. Spencer, in an idiosyncratic moment, also praised Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard, who has been a forceful critic of American foreign intervention and traveled to Syria in January of 2017 to meet with the Assad government. Gabbard, who is of Indian descent and whose positions veer to the left in the US political establishment, likely has little in common with Spencer aside from their shared positions on the Syrian Conflict and a mutual dislike for conservative Sunni Islamic communities.

Another contemporary White Nationalist by the name of Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief of Counter-Currents Publishing (the ideological press of the self-described “North American New Right”), has similarly expressed dismay over the military action in Syria in an article entitled “God Emperor No More” in which he characterizes Trump as a “betrayer” and insists that “we want Assad to win this war”.

Duke, Spencer and Johnson mostly limit the expression of their outrage to a restrained form of political criticism, which is consistent with their tactical approach of pursuing a White-Separatist agenda through cultural, political and legal means, in contrast with the more openly-violent and anti-State trends within the movement that boiled up in the 1980s and ’90s. Taking this position a step further is the case of Matthew Heimbach, who gained some notoriety in 2012 for his organization of the “White Student Union” at Towson University in Maryland. Heimbach, who is still in his twenties, has continued organizing in the White Nationalist scene through the political entity he founded, the Traditionalist Workers Party. Heimbach, not content merely to support Assad’s cause in the Syrian war, also publicly praises the Lebanese Shia Muslim para-state entity Hezbollah, who have been fighting alongside Assad’s forces since 2012. In a radio show episode hosted in May of 2016, Heimbach praised Hezbollah’s organizing methods, cause, and armed resistance of the Israeli military during the Lebanese Civil War. Heimbach states here that he considers Hezbollah to be “Arab National Socialists”, and that their methodology of building community infrastructure alongside armed militancy may provide a successful blueprint that White Nationalists can follow, since in Heimbach’s eyes both Hezbollah and North American White Nationalists share a common enemy in an international Jewish-run conspiracy to manipulate and enslave the world.

The deeply-involved conspiracy theories that characterize the worldviews of many White Nationalists have been well-established for over a century, and modern narratives that depict some kind of Jewish cabal controlling the world financial system hearkens back to Europe’s troubled legacy of culturally-entrenched racism towards Jewish people. Similar conspiratorial claims have been occasionally utilized in propaganda by groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Baathist government of Syria, and other political entities in the region. This being said, it is worth noting that racialist ideologies are generally disavowed by these groups, and they contextualize their rhetoric alongside their conflict with the State of Israel, which is often viewed as a foreign invader and oppressor, and whose relationship with its neighbors has been characterized by armed violence and disputes over territorial sovereignty since the 1940s. However this distinction has not stopped the Syrian government and their allies from embracing support from the European and North American far-right when they can get it.

In 2013, an organization calling themselves the European Solidarity Front for Syria made a trip to Syria, touring the cities of Damascus and Tartus while posing for photographs with Syrian soldiers, also meeting with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Syria while they were there . While not promoting an explicitly far-right platform, they are associated with groups such as the Italian neo-fascist organization CasaPound, who have hosted conferences for them. The Syrian-born Australian Maram Susli (known as PartisanGirl), a YouTube media personality who makes videos in support of the Syrian Government as well as offering her take on various conspiracy theories. On April 11th, 2017, Susli (who has also been a guest of Alex Jones) was interviewed on David Duke’s radio show where she repeated the official Syrian Government narrative about the April chemical weapons attacks and other related subjects.

Although ties between Assad’s allies and White Nationalists are most likely opportunistic in nature, questions persist as to how deep and how far back these ties may go. Besides David Duke’s official trip to Syria over a decade ago, there is the notable case of Alois Brunner, an SS officer of Austrian origin who oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of Jewish people to internment camps during the Second World War. Brunner managed to escape to Egypt and later to Syria following the war, where he worked in an unspecified role as an “advisor” to the Syrian government. While Brunner was in Syria, the government repeatedly denied requests from France and other nations to extradite him to face trial for his contributions to the Holocaust, and Brunner lived out the rest of his life in Damascus, reportedly dying sometime in 2010. Details of Brunner’s life are murky, speculative, and hard to come by since the Syrian government has obstructed any investigation into Brunner since he arrived in Syria in the 1950s. But Syrian sources have reported that Brunner offered up his knowledge of torture techniques in exchange for asylum and protection in Syria. Hafez al-Assad’s mukhabarat (secret police) inherited this knowledge in the 1970s, and it is believed by many Syrians that Brunner’s influence is responsible for the horrific torture practices used by Government security forces in the present day.

On May 5th, 2017, Paul Antonopoulos released a statement regarding the exposed Stormfront forum posts that led to his resignation from Al-Masdar News, where he denies that he created the account but acknowledges that some of the posts have been authored by him, claiming this account was created by Fascists years ago to smear his reputation and discredit him. Despite Antonopoulos’s denial of culpability, The “Minimalistix” post history does not appear to be filled with the outright-inflammatory statements that could be expected from a fake profile intended to smear someone. The author of these posts appears to have mostly engaged in debates about Greek and Balkan history, Australian issues, Eastern-Orthodox Christianity, and football — all of which are are consistent with how Antonopoulos represents himself otherwise.

Antonopoulos appears to identify with Marxism and legacy of the Soviet Union, and frequently decries Fascism if what he says through his Twitter account is an accurate indication of his interests. It would seem that allegations of Fascist sympathies that Antonopoulos seems to be most concerned with refuting. In one of his statements Antonopoulos even opens up the rhetorical possibility that the Stormfront posts are his but that “later in life I went through an ideological change.” Although it is possible that Antonopoulos is telling the truth here, having Marxist and White Nationalist affinities are not mutually exclusive. During the Cold-War period, White Nationalists typically identified Marxism as being a product of their “International Jewish Conspiracy”. This mentality still persists to this day in many cases, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a growing interest in Anti-Capitalist and arguably “Leftist” varieties of White Nationalism, and this exists alongside a widespread adoration in this scene for Vladimir Putin’s Russia that further feeds into the conspiratorial narrative that a massive Cold-War style “East-West” struggle is still happening, with the moral high-ground now supposedly being held in Moscow rather than somewhere in the Western world.

That Antonopoulos, Maram Susli, David Duke, and American left-wing politicians such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich all share a common cause on a foreign policy issue exemplifies how convoluted the narratives around world events has become. Also occurring here is the bizarre situation where White Nationalists in Europe and elsewhere are championing Arab and Muslim political entities based in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, while at the same time spreading fear-mongering and racially-charged rhetoric (and occasional violence), directed at refugees fleeing Syria. Adding to this are the indiscriminate tactics of war perpetrated by Syrian government forces are the foremost cause of the Syrian refugee epidemic, which in turn contribute population pressures and other problems that are seized by the far-right and utilized in their rhetoric.