Antisemitism and Pro-Kremlin Disinformation.

T. Belman. Galina recommended this article to me.  One word of caution, both sides propagate disinformation. Among other things, it suggests that George Soros is being unjustly smeared. What do my readers think? Also,

“Russian state-controlled media, emboldened by Lavrov, added that six million Jews were exterminated by Europeans, led by Adolf Hitler.” I ask you, is it fair to say that “six million Jews were exterminated by Europeans, led by Adolf Hitler.”?

I would also remind you that the EU supports the “Palestinians” and their “resistance”.  They are not our friend.

EU v Disinfo     JANUARY 27, 2023

At the very end of 2022, the now exiled chief Rabbi of Moscow made a remarkable statement, urging Russian Jews to leave the country(opens in a new tab) while still possible, before they are made scapegoats for the hardship caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Despite the Kremlin’s long standing efforts to portray Russia as the main force of resistance against Nazism, now and throughout history, pro-Kremlin media have routinely entertained antisemitic messaging. A lot of it originated in Russian nationalist conservative and religious circles. It was, if not supported, then tolerated by Russian authorities, and made its way into pro-Kremlin media.

EUvsDisinfo has collected multiple examples of antisemitic pro-Kremlin disinformation messages, including instances of Russian state-controlled TV openly engaging in antisemitic conspiracy theories, airing the antisemitic statements of Russian politicians and pundits, and suggesting to drop the ‘Jew Taboo’.

Antisemitism camouflaged as conspiracy theories about individuals

According to a 2020 study conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute(opens in a new tab)conspiratorial depictions of Jews are often camouflaged as conspiracy theories about specific individuals, for example about George Soros. This is a trend we have observed in pro-Kremlin media. The EUvsDisinfo database contains over 200 entries documenting disinformation claims that accuse George Soros of all sorts of malice – from controlling Ukrainian leaders to global human trafficking schemes.

Another recent example is a meme with distinctly antisemitic tones mocking President Zelenskyy of Ukraine that was shared by the official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy in the UK. The American Jewish Committee condemned the meme (opens in a new tab), pointing out that it echoed ancient antisemitic propaganda by degrading Jews through fictional facial stereotypes.

But if in the past antisemitic messages were tolerated rather than initiated by Russian authorities as an effective propaganda component[i], the situation changed markedly following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

According to the exiled chief Rabbi of Moscow (opens in a new tab)governmental anti-Semitism is on the rise in Russia, complete with attempts to close the Jewish Agency. Meanwhile, rhetoric on Russian state-controlled TV channels reflects that pro-Kremlin pundits and officials are increasingly comfortable with antisemitism.

Holocaust distortion – a form of antisemitism

One of the most egregious examples of antisemitic rhetoric came in May 2022, when Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov said that Hitler had ‘Jewish blood(opens in a new tab)’ and that ‘most ardent antisemites are usually Jews’ in an apparent attempt to denigrate President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. Although reportedly Putin later apologised(opens in a new tab) for Lavrov’s claims, this was not an isolated or the last incident of antisemitic statements coming from Russia’s top diplomat.

In January 2023, at his annual news conference, Lavrov claimed(opens in a new tab) that the West was waging a war against Russia with the task of imposing a ‘final solution to the Russian question’, thus drawing parallels between the crimes of Nazi Germany and international support for Ukraine, defending itself against Russian aggression.

When the statement drew a sharp rebuke internationally and from the EU(opens in a new tab), Russian state-controlled media, emboldened by Lavrov, added that six million Jews were exterminated by Europeans, led by Adolf Hitler.

Such statements distort and trivialise the Holocaust and are an expression of anti-Semitism(opens in a new tab).

The question is, why do pro-Kremlin pundits feel increasingly comfortable with it?

War propaganda opens the floodgates

The distortion(opens in a new tab) of the Holocaust is linked to a distortion of history in general, according to professor Yehuda Bauer, an honorary chairman of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

The Kremlin has long used historical revisionism as a tool to generate legitimacy at home and frame its behaviour abroad. In this context the Kremlin has adamantly downplayed its alliance with Nazi Germany, casting the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a necessity which is now unjustly ‘demonised‘ in Europe.

It is only by denying its complicity in fuelling Nazi Germany’s war machine that enabled the Kremlin to propagate the ‘Nazis in Ukraine’ myth, which has been a cornerstone of the Kremlin’s propaganda since the Euromaidan protests in 2013-2014. The Kremlin sought to discredit pro-European protests in Kyiv and, subsequently, the broader pro-Western shift in Ukraine’s foreign policy labelling it as a ‘Nazi coup’. The EUvsDisinfo database contains nearly 500 examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation claims about ‘Nazi/Fascist Ukraine’.

The Kremlin’s attempts to justify the invasion of Ukraine by equating it the Nazi regime trivialise the memory of millions of victims of Nazism(opens in a new tab). According to historians(opens in a new tab) from universities in Berlin and Munich, this narrative has also served as a ready-made excuse to escalate violence to World War II levels and lowered resistance to committing war crimes(opens in a new tab) in Ukraine.

At the same time, the imperatives of war propaganda within Russia have erased any limits for what is acceptable on Russian TV. Combined with the nearly complete repression and expulsion of independent media and civil society, war propaganda has created an environment where antisemitic messages and conspiracy theories are not simply tolerated but condoned and almost expected.

Unwilling to acknowledge its own complicated past, the Kremlin continues to “manage” history, glossing over issues such as antisemitism in the past (see for example here(opens in a new tab)) and therefore in the present(opens in a new tab).

[i] Research by the Network Contagion Research Institute(opens in a new tab) has showed that Russian trolls have disseminated anti-Jewish conspiracy memes as a means to ‘connect’ and stir up antisemitism in extremist groups both on the left and the right of the political spectrum. In other words, antisemitic messages have a clear functional purpose.

 

EUvsDisinfo is the flagship project of the European External Action Service’s East StratCom Task Force(opens in a new tab). It was established in 2015 to better forecast, address, and respond to the Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns affecting the European Union, its Member States, and countries in the shared neighbourhood.

EUvsDisinfo’s core objective is to increase public awareness and understanding of the Kremlin’s disinformation operations, and to help citizens in Europe and beyond develop resistance to digital information and media manipulation.

What we do

Using data analysis and media monitoring services in 15 languages, EUvsDisinfo identifies, compiles, and exposes disinformation cases originating in pro-Kremlin media that are spread across the EU and Eastern Partnership countries. As of 2019, our monitoring capabilities also uncover disinformation spread in the Western Balkans and the EU’s Southern neighbourhood. These cases (and their disproofs) are collected in the EUvsDisinfo database – the only searchable, open-source repository of its kind – which currently comprises over 15,000 samples of pro-Kremlin disinformation. The database is updated every week, together with a brief trend summary. To follow these updates, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Disinformation Review.

May 14, 2023 | 6 Comments »

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6 Comments / 6 Comments

  1. @Felix “Zelensky who is the worst Antisemite on the planet ” Worse than those actually engaged in murdering Jews? Today? Worse than Iran? Worse than Hamas? Worse than Islamic Jihad because of what? Alleged background linking him to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators 80 years ago and White Guardists 100 years ago? Seriously? Do you really expect any rational person to take you seriously? Do you ever listen to yourself?

  2. is it fair to say that “six million Jews were exterminated by Europeans, led by Adolf Hitler.”?

    Save for any mention of efforts of the Righteous Gentiles to forestall the efforts carried out before the Nazi conquest of Europe, I find this statement to be an entirely fair characterization to make. I have often found it a curious notion that the day after the fall of the Nazi regime, there were suddenly, as if by some miracle, no Nazi’s to be found in what had theretofore been Nazi Germany. Likewise, all across Europe, there was never to be found any native recognition of the support or interaction with the Nazi’s and their efforts to scour the earth of our people once the Nazis were pushed from the respective conquered lands. Are we to seriously believe that it was the Germans alone who corralled our people like so many sheep, shipped them like so many cattle, and murdered them like so many vermin? No, sadly this is not true, and if it had been, the successful policy which came to deprive us of so many of our communities in total would never have been the great success which it came to be. The Europeans would have us believe that they were some mix of by-standers or observers, but completely innocent of the genocide to which they themselves were quite an active party. They hide from the shame of their complicity and construct fake narratives to protect latter generations from accepting the role which the European community as a whole, save for the very efforts of the Righteous Gentiles, played in making the German fantasy of a Jew free Europe into a modern day reality.

    Also, the role played by the Righteous Gentiles is more significant than just the numbers of Jews who owe their lives to them. They stand as a statement of reproach against their fellow Europeans, an acknowledgement that the Jews of Europe needed not to have met the fate designed for them by the Germans, if only the Europeans had actually dissented from being involved in the systematic genocide expropriated against our people all across Europe with the aid, cooperation and compliance of the native Europeans, themselves.

  3. @Galina
    There can be no defense of George Soros which is a fair one. He stands as an existential threat to Israel all unto himself. His reach is far more persuasive than just his personal fortune, which though considerable, is only used as a tool to turn the levers of power against the Jewish state. His corruptive intrigues expose Israel to a daily barrage of unwarranted aspersions, maligning the Jewish state while ever claiming protection from attack due to his heritage which he is actively assaulting. From his pursuit of anti-Israel NGOs to support of legal representatives who do not enforce the law, he places Jews around the world in a greater state of peril and the Jews living in Israel in a particularly precarious state of peril. Defend him if you find merit in doing so, but since you do, it certainly does place a far greater barrier between us than you have thus far raised to my attention, despite you having done so on many occasions.

  4. Apologies I meant to add

    “And this is precisely why Zelensky exists as a leader of this Fascist entity Ukraine (It is to prevent great masses of the people internationally seeing the continuity with the past which includes their role in the Holocaust)

    Zelensky is the cog wheel in this and those hiding this reality are implicated.

    Finally I thus do remain true to the memory of the Jews who perished in the Lviv Pogrom of 1941.

    I have their picture heading my Twitter account @FelixQuigley1

    I will be steadfast as others betray them.

  5. I have answered everything in this American, British Imperialist and EU Imperialism bilge from this in the other recent thread “Is Putin’s Government Antisemitic?”

    I place the name of Galina in quotes as in “Galina” because I asked the editor to do checks on this entity and the editor ignored me.

    So for me it is “Galina”.

    In this situation “Galina” used Soros as a diversion because at this moment it is Zelensky who is the worst Antisemite on the planet because all truth for all people for all time leads in the direction of the understanding of the Fascist background and formation of Ukraine today. It is a Fascist regime. End of. It has a real concrete and all too verifiable history. Get with the history.