Yesterday’s anti-Semitic pogrom in Makhachkala is a direct result of Putin’s foreign policy and the propaganda that serves it. Putin’s regime not only refused to condemn Hamas directly, but, on the contrary, hospitably welcomed a Hamas delegation to Russia, thus demonstrating its tacit support for this terrorist movement. Russian propaganda, on the other hand, has blatantly adopted a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli stance, spreading anti-Semitic narratives across the Russian information field. Russian diplomacy took the same anti-Israeli stance when it vetoed the draft resolution on the Gaza Strip proposed by the United States in the United Nations Security Council.
Russian Muslims, like most of the Russian population, are consumers of television propaganda. Television is still the main provider and interpreter of information in the Russian Federation, including in the North Caucasus. Having received a certain dose of propaganda television exposure, Dagestani youth succumbed to the anti-Semitic obsession, which resulted in real street riots that turned into a Jewish pogrom. By a happy coincidence, the pogromists did not manage to find any victims, otherwise things could have turned out much more tragically.
It is quite possible that the FSS agents among the Caucasian society, including the representatives of the Muslim clergy infiltrated by the FSS, who were able to present their flock with information under the right sauce, in this case anti-Semitic. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain the fact that the Muslim community in Russia, including in Dagestan, reacts so violently to the oppression of Muslims only in certain cases, when this violent reaction corresponds to the interests of the Kremlin. After all, neither the policy of genocide of Uighur Muslims in China, nor the carpet bombing of Muslims in Syria by Russian aircraft caused such a violent reaction.
The anti-Semitic hysteria that is rapidly spreading around the world is obviously inspired and supported by the Kremlin in order to create new hotbeds of tension in the world and distract the attention of the international community from the war in Ukraine. In part, Putin has already succeeded. Attempts by Russian propaganda to shift responsibility to some allegedly pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels with several tens of thousands of subscribers against the background of the demonstrative inaction of the Dagestan security forces are laughable.
We declare our strong protest against the developing anti-Semitic campaign, the ugliest forms of which we saw yesterday during the pogrom in Makhachkala. At the same time, we insist that the real source of this campaign is the Kremlin. The Putin regime is working hard to deprive Ukraine of Western support or to weaken that support, which is what the Kremlin’s efforts to inflame the Arab-Israeli conflict and anti-Semitic sentiment among Muslim communities – both in Russia and abroad – are aimed at.
We recall that the Free Russia Forum has already repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that the Putin regime cooperates with other despotisms and radical terrorist organizations. The Kremlin, Iran and Hamas are obvious allies in their struggle against the Free World. All of these regimes must be destroyed and uprooted from the soil of the countries where they have taken root. Otherwise, their poisonous shoots will continue to spread, spawning new dictatorships, terror and wars.
Approved by the Council of the Free Russia Forum on November 30, 2023
