Mick Hartley

Eric Heinze in the Jewish Chronicle – Russia is the global leader in Jew-hate:

Nazism inflicted history’s most horrendous crimes against Jews. But Germany has by no means been history’s top purveyor of global antisemitism.

That distinction goes to Russia, which spread antisemitism more widely and durably.

German and Russian strands cannot, of course, be tidily separated. Nazi rhetoric of Jewish financial and political control and of Jewish bloodlust had roots throughout Europe. It received a mighty boost, however, through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery attributed to the Tsarist secret police.

We cannot compare Russian and German patterns of antisemitism in quantitative terms without first noting their qualitative differences. For Nazism, Europe needed an ontological cleansing: not a single Jew was to remain. Russia, too, has known that kind of “pureblood”, nationalist antisemitism. But it never shaped official policy.

Russia’s state-directed antisemitism has historically taken more targeted, strategic forms — less frenzied nationalism than old-style imperialism. It has easily coexisted with Russian Jews holding positions of political or cultural prominence. And it has gone through phases: Soviets condemned Tsarist pogroms before turning antisemitism into a tool of their own.

The two types of antisemitism also differ over time. The Nazis achieved unparalleled depth with shocking speed. The Kremlin’s more calculated manoeuvres, by contrast, have spanned far greater geographical breadth, and over a longer period….

The former Romanian Securitate official Ion Pacepa documents how the KGB spotted Muslims’ anti-Israel animus as a golden opportunity. The Kremlin viewed Muslims as ignorant and malleable — a spectacular Orientalising, which the most ardent of our self-appointed anti-Orientalists today studiously ignore.

The Secret Police chief and later Secretary General Yuri Andropov undertook a programme of spreading antisemitic propaganda throughout Muslim populations. Suddenly the Protocols were newly minted in Arabic (its terms translated verbatim into the 1988 Hamas Charter), and later displayed for sale as far away as the main airport in Malaysia.

In Andropov’s view: We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel.

The Protocols still widely circulate in Muslim countries with no concerted objections from supposed anti-racists who assure us they care about antisemitism. (Critics who shout about Zionist “imperialism” and “cultural genocide” rarely speak of the far more massive destruction, throughout centuries, of prior cultures wrought by the spread of Russian power and of Islam. Indeed they often praise those.)

Of course, some Nazi contributions kick in there as well. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had eagerly sought anti-Jewish cooperation with Nazis. Once again, however, it was Soviets who subsequently moved in to fuel that hatred within the wider Muslim world.

With public discourse about antisemitism all but extinguished under the Soviet machine, which then tried its hand at Muslim antisemitism, a third, easily receptive target was Western leftist and post-colonial circles in Western Europe, North and Latin America, and parts of Africa, with eager exponents in academia.

After decades, one can still scour scholarship critical of Israel, steeped in thousands of pages of self-proclaimed “critical” consciousness of imperialism, with scarcely a word of it examining the obstacles created by a Russian counterweight that had pumped such venom into the Muslim world.

Not as a matter of scholarly fact but as a matter of political ideology, the only academically discussable imperialism today is Western imperialism.

All others either remain consigned to cloistered circles of specialists, or must carry “the West is just as bad” caveats so weighty as to end up wholly sidelining Russia’s role in aggravating the Israel-Palestine conflict….