One of our team spotted this in his email feed and immediately escalated it. This is our Headline of the Week.

If you take a look at Comrade Kim’s face, he looks a little embarrassed at the supposed flattery; one has to wonder what was going through his mind upon hearing this from Comrade Lukashenko.

Not a dictator? he might be thinking. What did I do wrong?

The Cambridge Dictionary definition of a dictator is, after all, “a leader who has complete power in a country and has not been elected by the people.” North Korea is (at least on paper) a nation where democracy is local, but national rule is assumed by a hereditary dictatorship. “Supreme Commander” is one of Kim Jong Un’s many titles, which certainly sounds like a synonym for dictator.

Julius Caesar, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia of Paraguay and Donald Trump have all referred to themselves as dictators. Kim Jong Un certainly seems to see himself that way.

So Lukashenko’s remark could either mean that Kim is dedicated to electoral democracy through which the people could remove him from office, or that he is a weak leader who has lost control of his nation. It certainly doesn’t mean the former.

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In a week that saw the mayor of New York skip the Israel Day Parade so that he could go on a bike ride, these two headlines reared their ugly head: “Sorry, there are no Jews allowed”: Israelis denied booking at German hotel and Jewish woman wearing Star of David pendant forced out of Spanish sauna.

The former occurred at the hotel Zum Hirschen in Bavaria on June 2, and the latter in the Thermas sauna in Barcelona on May 29. The Barcelonans shouted “Free Palestine!” as they ejected the Jewish lesbians from their establishment, firmly proving that the incident was far from antisemitic. The Zum Hirschen hotel needs to work on its communication skills; “No Zionists Allowed,” one might suggest.