A year ago, 20 members of the Duma, the Russian lower house of parliament, sent a letter to the Prosecutor General asking to ban all Jewish organizations because of “extremism.” They were only a fraction of the 500 signatories.
The Prosecutor General said he would not follow up on the charges because 19 of the 20 legislators, after gaining worldwide negative attention for signing the letter, withdrew their support from it—not because the charges were baseless and anti-Semitic.
Russian anti-Semitism gave us the forgery that is still a best-seller in the Muslim world: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Russian anti-Semitism was rampant during the Cold War, and as soon as they could, hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of Russian Jews fled the nation.
Russian Jewish leaders have been warning that Russian anti-Semitism, never truly gone, was getting worse. Russian leaders have denied it. A rabbi was brutally beaten by a group of skinheads. This barely raised eyebrows.
Two days ago, a skinhead rampaged through a synagogue in Moscow and stabbed eight people while shouting, “I will kill Jews!”
He admitted to the prosecutor that he intended to kill Jews.
MOSCOW, January 13 (RIA Novosti) - A man accused of stabbing eight people in a central Moscow synagogue has confessed that he was driven by anti-Semitic sentiments, prosecutors said Friday. According to the prosecutors, Alexander Koptsev, 20, said during questioning in the presence of his lawyers that he was “intolerant toward Jews and that he had committed the crime out of envy of them, because they live better.”
In spite of this admission, Pravda is quick to find the real villains in this piece: The videogame the skinhead was playing before he went out on his mission to kill Jews. And the Jews themselves.
Sergei Belikov, a lawyer and a researcher of the movement of skinheads, is sure that the version of a skinhead stabbing worshippers in a Moscow synagogue is absolutely groundless. Belikov is an author of three books devoted to the problem of the skinhead movement in Russia.
“Skinheads’ traditional enemies are people of non-white races - Africans and Asians, first and foremost. Russian skinheads attack individuals of Caucasian nationalities too. As for the white race, skinheads hate antifascists, homosexuals and even homeless individuals. As a rule, skinheads do not attack Jews. Anti-Semitism can obviously be found in the ideology of skinheads. However, such sentiments are more typical for the old generation of skinheads, to which Alexander Koptsev cannot be applied due to his young age. So-called “old skinheads” that make a very small group of national socialists have two ritual dates for their attacks. For example, they may commit acts of vandalism on Jewish cemeteries at night of November 9. On this date they celebrate the Crystal Night of 1938, when a wild outburst of Jewish pogroms swept across Germany. April 1st is another significant date of theirs: the boycott of all Jewish enterprises in Germany was announced on 1 April 1933. The young generation of skinheads is not interested in Anti-Semitism. They mostly attack Asians. The story is the Moscow synagogue is rather mysterious. It is well-known that synagogues have professional security guards and metal detectors. It would be extremely difficult for a common man to enter the building with a knife in his pocket,” Sergei Belikov said.
Russian anti-Semitism? Oh, yeah. We’ve still got that. Russian denial of anti-Semitism? Got that, too.
