To be honest, I had not expected anything reasonable on this subject from a group called the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union (UCSJ) but in this report, they really outdo themselves.
Groups like the disgusting ADL in the US spend most of their time engaged in worthless activities like promoting a fake anti-Semitism crisis in the US. Some examples?
An execrable attack on the sublime Walt/Mearshimer report. A shrill screech against some guy saying “Holocaust” and not referring to Jewish folks. A depressing and relentless push for scary hate crime laws. Stoking the fires with the Catholic Church after the Vatican buried the hatchet. Shamelessly shilling for the Israeli gangster state.
Ludicrous anti-Semitism surveys that only ask folks if they are aware of the obvious. Waging total war against the noble academic boycotts of Apartheid Israel.
I could go on but why? Someone got their feelings hurt, wah wah. 1 million humans lie dead in a charnel house called Iraq and the ADL says some Jewish folks got their feelings hurt. I am supposed to really care about this? I don’t think so.
So I dubiously clicked the link on UCSJ page, at best hoping to find an obsession with the Jewish victims and short shift of the Gentile victims of Russian Nazis. To their credit, the UCSJ did a bang-up job, and I salute them.
This is the real deal, the stuff Jews ought to be really concerned about, instead of wasting time chasing phantoms, persecuting innocent people who “criminally” don’t genuflect enough in front of the Jews and shuddering over fake persecution crises.
The entire month of April 2006 was a great big party in all of Russia. It was Adolf Hitler’s birthday, and the skinheads were partying with guns, knives, fists, etc. When the shindig was over, seven innocent people were corpses, and over a dozen more were seriously wounded. The list itself is worth reading in its numbness and outrage.
Victims were Tajiks, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Turks, Muslims in general, people from the Caucasus, Syrians, Mongolians, Tuvans, Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Malays, Indians, Gypsies, Jews (of course), anti-fascists like me, Senegalese, Zambians, ordinary Russians (??), and fans of rock music (they hate people who listen to “racially inferior” Black music like rap and reggae).
In one case, Tajiks in a market fought back, and a Nazi was killed. Good show!
That was last year. This year is 25% worse.
Sean’s Russian Blog has a good rundown on the crisis, suggesting that the Russian Far Right is becoming radicalized. He blames the socioeconomic structure of Putinism itself.
This stuff has been going on for a long time now. The gangs formed around 1993, but the attacks did not start until 1995. In 1994, police began beating immigrants from the Caucasus repeatedly in public, and there was no punishment for them. This seemed to set an example for the Nazis.
By 1998, they were using weapons in most attacks. Already in 1998, there were many attacks against Indians in Russia, mostly students. So many that the Indian Embassy lodged repeated complaints. That year, neo-Nazis pledged to kill “an Asian a day” and “a Black a day” during April when they celebrate Hitler’s birthday. April 1998 was a particularly bad year for attacks on Indians in Russia.
And in the month after April 20, 1998, an average of four Blacks a day were attacked in Russia. One died. Victims came from Nigeria, Benin, Sudan, South Africa and India. Two Pakistani women were badly beaten. In the following years, synagogues were bombed, police were attacked and bombs were planted in the streets.
There are now at least 70,000 skinheads in Russia and probably many more. That is 50% of the world’s skinhead population. 2/3 of the population agrees with nationalist slogans like “Russia for Russians” and blames all problems on foreigners.
1/2 of Russians want to restrict the rights of Russian national minorities. The Russian neo-Nazis probably have quite a bit of popular support, though it has been difficult to gauge the true level of it.
In the past couple of years, they have crossed a previous red line – no attacks on children. They now usually use screwdrivers, baseball bats and knives, and increasingly the attacks end in homicide. In 2004, they killed Nikolai Girenko, an anti-skinhead activist who had helped convict a number of skinheads in court. He had received many death threats and the entrance to his building was covered in Nazi slogans and symbols.
A good, but long, report on the subject is available here.
