JEWISH GROUPS AND U.S. LAWMAKERS CONDEMN RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN FOR SUGGESTING THAT THE 2016 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION MAY HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED BY RUSSIAN JEWS.

Remarks in U.S. TV interview draw outrage

Jewish groups and U.S. lawmakers condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that the 2016 U.S. presidential election may have been manipulated by Russian Jews.

Putin’s remarks came during a long and occasionally surreal interview with NBC News on Saturday, in which he speculated that nearly anyone other than the Russian government could have been behind a program to disrupt the election. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Putin ordered the effort to undermine faith in the U.S. election and help elect Donald Trump as president.

“Maybe they’re not even Russians,” Putin told Megyn Kelly, referring to who might have been behind the election interference. “Maybe they’re Ukrainian, Tatars, Jews — just with Russian citizenship.”

He also speculated that France, Germany or “Asia” might have interfered in the election — or even Russians paid by the U.S. government.

But his remark about Jews, which seemed to suggest that a Russian Jew was not really a Russian, prompted particular outrage among those who remember Russia’s centurieslong history of anti-Semitism and Jewish purges. Some groups compared the statement to anti-Jewish myths that helped inspire the Holocaust.

“President Putin bizarrely has resorted to the blame game by pointing the finger at Jews and other minorities in his country,” Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “It is deeply disturbing to see the Russian president giving new life to classic anti-Semitic stereotypes that have plagued his country for hundreds of years, with a comment that sounds as if it was ripped from the pages of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ ”

The American Jewish Committee also compared Putin’s comments to the “Elders of Zion” — a fabricated document published in Russia in 1903 that claimed Jews were plotting to take over the world and that helped fuel violence against Jews across Europe, eventually influencing Adolf Hitler’s plans for the Holocaust.

Nearly every U.S. senator signed a letter urging Putin to help Russia’s Jews after he took power, in the early 2000s. In public, he mostly has.

He speaks out against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism, and he has invited Jews who fled Russia during Soviet repression to come back.

While Putin has portrayed Russia in public as a refuge from far-right and anti-Semitic groups gaining political power across Europe, a report by Democratic Senate staffers accused his government of secretly assisting those same groups as part of its effort to destabilize democracies, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.