Title of TarheelDem’s diary: Russia Orthodox Anti-Semitism
and line at the end: Turns to the right like Russia’s often turn anti-Semitic.
Both gave faulty impression of John Helmer’s article and conclusion. Such broad and general statements give false information about Russia and the Russian Orthodox church and clergy.
Same with blaming the Russian Federation for the alt-right and white supremacist movement in Trump’s election campaign. The US Islamophobes have fostered the UKIP in the UK and the likes of Geert Wilders in Holland. Essentially the alt-right in the US is homegrown as is the domestic terror of white-supremacist individuals and groups.
Let’s talk about the rise of fascism around the globe … I can name a few states allied to and viewed as friendly leaders of Washington DC.
The Fateful Triangle: Russia, Ukraine and the Jews
…
US Jews are divided on the Ukraine, as they were divided on Palestine. Friends of Palestine, people with a strong anti-imperialist record and sound knowledge of East European history – Noam Chomsky and Stephen F. Cohen — recognised and renounced the US attempt to sustain their hegemony by keeping brazen Russia down. A subset of people, Gilad Atzmon aptly called AZZ (anti-zionist zionists), Trots and other faux-Leftist shills for NATO like Louis Proyect – called for American intervention and brayed for Russian blood.The notorious Israel Lobby is strictly anti-Russian. The State Dept. official Victoria (“Fuck EU”) Nuland personally directed the Kiev coup; she handpicked the government and the president of the new American colony on the Dnieper River. Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a founder of FPI, the successor of infamous PNAC, the extremist Zionist think tank which promoted wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and pushed for a war with Iran. Now they attack Russia, but they do not forget about their support for Israel.
[Author: Israel Adam Shamir – biography]
In his article Shamir speaks of Igor (Benya) Kolomoysky … I wrote a diary about his exploits in the Ukraine:
Continued below the fold …
○ Biden’s Ukrainian Oligarchs and Corruption
Reminded me of US ambassador’s Pyatt’s attemp to play the anti-semitic card shortly after the coup d’état in Kiev, Ukraine.
US calls anti-Semitic Ukraine leaflets ‘grotesque’ | Times of Israel – April 18, 2014 |
The United States on Thursday condemned as “grotesque” the distribution of leaflets demanding that Jews in eastern Ukraine register with a self-proclaimed local authority or face consequences. US officials also denounced other instances of religious intolerance that are inflaming tensions in the crisis in Ukraine and said no such behavior could be tolerated.
Speaking in Geneva after top diplomats from the US, European Union, Russia and Ukraine reached agreement on steps to de-escalate the situation, Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the leaflets.
“In the year 2014, after all of the miles traveled and all of the journey of history, this is not just intolerable; it’s grotesque,” Kerry told reporters. “It is beyond unacceptable. And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities, from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of, there is no place for that.”
Kerry also denounced apparent threats to members of the Russian Orthodox Church from members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He noted that the agreement signed on Thursday “strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-Semitism.”
This is the document that John Kerry has just referred to – calling on Jews in Donetsk to register. pic.twitter.com/6s5rnftKJ0
— Kevin Bishop (@bishopk) 17 april 2014
My diary about the leaflet with no author …
○ Kerry in Geneva Uses Anti-Semitic Leaflet in Provocation by Oui @BooMan on April 17, 2014
More reading …
○ War On The Rocks – McCain Surrogate/ PNAC/AIPAC
○ EurAsianism and Russian Ultra-Nationalists United In Aleksandr Dugin
Just this week after 8 years as leader of the most powerful nation, Barack Obama stated …
○ Invoking the specter of Nazi Germany, Obama warns against complacency | Economic Club of Chicago |
○ Fascism: Hitler and Nazis in Political Kabuki Theater by Oui @BooMan on March 15, 2017
○ A “Blue and White” Kristallnacht: Only a Matter of Time | Tikun Olam |
Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel, a Saudi citizen, gains ‘significant control’ of Independent alongside Russian media mogul Evgeny Lebedev
○ Saudi investor ploughs millions into liberal icon of UK media | Middle East Eye |
○ Journalists, NGOs slam Saudi ‘threats’ to close Al Jazeera
Wow, what a job of distraction. Tarheel writes about Jew-baiting by the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and you come back with a flurry of stuff about Palestine, Saudi investors, Al Jazeera, John Kerry and John McCain, and on and on.
I don’t know why it’s necessary to make this point explicitly, but evidently it is: anti-Semitism predates the Israeli/Palestinian struggle by many centuries. The idea you are implicitly promoting–that somehow Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians is responsible for anti-Semitism–is both laughable and an absurd promotion of the idea that anti-Semites are not responsible for their own behavior, their own hatreds. Nope–it’s Jews who turned them into anti-Semites.
A couple of my grandparents came from a village about 50 km from Kiev and lived through both World War I and the “Russian” revolution and civil war. Control of this part of Ukraine flip-flopped back and forth between the Red and White (counter-revolutionary, Ukrainian nationalist) armies. The Whites had the lovely habit of massacring Jews, who were deemed all to be Communists because some in fact aligned themselves with the Communists. (Funny thing that: the Reds were not massacring Jews and even had some Jews in the leadership.) My grandparents would talk about fleeing their village and hiding in the forest, hoping not to be found by White soldiers. By the sort of “you made me do it” logic that you’re promoting, the Whites were actually reasonable people who were turned into anti-Semites by the actions of Jews.
Massacres of Jews in Ukraine has a long history. The Cossack leader Khmelnitsky led pogroms that killed tens of thousands in the 17th century, for example.
Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism unfortunately have been conflated by some for their own purposes.
I think the Torquemada reference in Helmer’s article was pretty clear.
There is some of that history of the Reds and Whites that is playing into Kirill’s attitudes.
The charge is that the Cheka officer responsible for the assassination was not only a religious atheiast, he was an ethnic Jew.
Massacres of Jews have a long history in the Christian West.
Oui, here is what we are seeing the US right now that shapes our view of the European right (UKIP, French National Front, AfD, and several parties in Russia, including factions of United Russia). The US Alt-Right, which is a new public phenomenon since the surfacing or Steve Bannon and the most visible neo-Nazis (Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer), David Duke, other Ku Kluxers, other segregationist white supremacists, and bunches of Gamergate misogynists are looking toward a pan-nationalist global movement with the European right listed above. Aparently the idea, at least among some, is nationalism within its border, linguistic and cultural conservatism, some sort of alliance with “evangelical” or “traditional” religion. So far is seems ragged and not very well thought through but it is something like global corporate fascism with national security and national cultures. And discrimination against immigrants and, in the US view, minority ethnic groups. Note that these folks only pay a little attention to foreign politics. Yes, the US alt-right is homegrown, raised in some Ivy League universities and hangers on (like Duke University) that have a history of right-wing politics and worship of Ayn Rand despite their “liberal” reputations. (I’m not sure if the conservative movement understands what a “liberal arts college” is in terms of the trivium and quadrivium.)
So my interest in any uptick of domestic anti-Semitism in Europe or the US (as contrasted with Israel-related anti-Zionism and BDS) are related to what happens when capitalism, especially fascist forms of capitalism fail. What I see in the West right now is the failure of the promises of the Cold War brought about through overfocus on supply-side economics and austerity. And a mistaken idea of pure market economics. Call it what you will; it has failed; people are looking for strongmen and for ways of removing job competition and small business competition. And they are looking for lower taxes because the public has the power to change politicians to deliver lower taxes. The holders of assets are seeking repayment of the credit they have extended to governments, corporations, and private individuals.
Our winding into more popular support for various forms of nationalism and fascism have to do with increased inequality and scapegoating for poorer prospects. And anti-Semitism is just a more traditional Western form of bigotry than post-Reconquista Islamaphobia. Probably the first resurgence of Islamaphobia was in the 1990s in Republika Srbska (the Croatian-Bosnian ethnic Serb enclave) during the era of Slobodan Milosevich and Radovan Karadic. Ethnic minorities make handy scapegoats. We are seeing a lot of that around the world. What was a minor threat to Europe in 1993 has become a broader threat across the EU as it has been attacked by terrorists attributed to ISIS and as refugees have poured into Europe from the various upheavals of the Arab Spring and subsequent wars.
Back to Helmer’s article. “Torquemada makes a comeback; the Spanish Inquisition has arrived in Moscow” certainly doesn’t sound like the Inquisition or the impulse to Reconquista is limited to Ukraine. Indeed, Helmer’s articles seemed to pin Kirill as the one who keeps wanting to bring up “ritual murder” and assert that the Russian Orthodox Church (hierarchy, Kirill and and some of his functionaries) will make the determination about “ritual murder”. Helmer is my age; although an Australian, he knows very well what anti-Semitism meant in World War II. In Helmer’s article, it seems to be a scapegoat by Kirill along with atheism to absolve all of the Russian Orthodox who collaborated with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a hundred years ago.
It sounds very much like the KKK’s godless atheism and Jews of 50 years ago and resurging. Conservative Russian Orthodoxy is an ally that American evangelicals would like to have in politics.
To my knowledge the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is independent of Kirill and has its own metropolitan. And the other large religious factor in Ukraine is the various rites of the Catholic Church, the largest being the Ukraine Greek Catholic Church. The Latin Rite Catholic Church, who recognize Pope Francis, are also there.
Yes, he talks a bit about anti-Semitism in Ukraine, but we’ve understood who the Bandarists are since 2014 and the situation remains somewhat fluid and unsettled there. I’m not sure who the other parties Who were mounting the militias trying to drive out ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine? And who were mounting the militias trying to preserve ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine? And where were the Bandarists historically during World War II? Ukraine is still the state pieced together after World War I and incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922. And it is still the state that negotiated the disposition of the Soviet navy between Odessa and Seabastapol.