Use of human rights rhetoric to justify anti-Semitism

On January 26, Bishop Pytyrym of Syktyvkar stated that he did not agree with the warning on the intolerability of extremist activity, which was given by the public prosecution office to the newspaper “Eparchy Journal” (Eparchialnye Vedomosti). The Bishop said, “We will stand tall, we will go to our deaths, but we will not reject Scripture. It is ludicrous that we are judged by such mandates. So we do not agree. Or let them remove the Korans and the Talmuds.”

After the acknowledgement of the anti-Semitic almanac “Third Rome,” published by the Russian All-National Union (RONS), as extremist, archimandrite Innokentiy (Yakovlev), the press secretary of the Suzdal eparchy, said, “Any Christian can be recognized as Christian in this way, the expertise is obviously non-professional and doesn't stand up to even the loosest of criticisms. Most of the religious expressions pointed out by the experts are just reflection of Orthodox dogma, often in an over-political tone, but not something that gives grounds for a conclusion of extremism.”

After K. Dushenov's trial and sentence, the Union of Russian People published a statement in which Dushenov's actions were interpreted as “fighting back against evil.” Among the demands of the URP were: “stop the warnings and criminal cases by article 282 for expressing the Orthodox teaching” (i.e. for anti-Semitic statements covered up by words about Orthodox Christianity), to include Jewish literature in the Federal List of Extremist Material which they consider to be hateful of man, to include URP member V. Osipov in the Ministry of Justice Expert Council for a state expertise on the religious status of the group.

URP member A. Mozhegorov, a lawyer-anti-Semite who was sentenced in December 2010 for spreading anti-Semitic literature said at his trial that he “acted in the interest of the Orthodox people (Russians – transl.) and defended the Orthodoxy. When speaking to his colleagues in URP, he proposed that they turn all court processes from the accusation of instigating interethnic spite to a religious matter, calling anti-Semitic statements “Orthodox word usage.” A. Mozhegorov also promised to dedicate the next issue of his newspaper-flier “Armavirskaya Pravda” to “the Orthodox teaching about judes, for a final securing of our right to call the judes judes. (In Russian, jude is as derogatory as “kike.” - transl.)”

The main object of nationalist human rights rhetoric was the textbook by A. Barsenkov and A. Vdovin. The grounds for speaking out in its defense was the discussion of the book in the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation on September 6, 2010. It was impossible not to notice or make some sort of sensible comment on the anti-Semitic and xenophobic passages of the textbook, which were often based on fakes – and this last circumstance was recognized even by some of the book's defenders. This is why the nationalists attempted to influence the public opinion by taking a different stands. They drew an absolutely false, but very adequate to their world view, picture of the “persecution of Russian scholars” and an alleged attempt to deny freedom of speech. The nationalists organized a flow of messaged to MSU Rector Sadovnichiy and the Dean of the Faculty of History Karpov, as well as started the “Open Letter of Kuban Historians” in defense of the Vdovin-Barsenkov textbook. At first, even Karpov himself said in an article published on the MSU History Department website that the discussion around the textbook is purportedly “part of a campaign against the University of Moscow.” He did not make any kind of comment on the unabashedly anti-Semitic and xenophobic parts of the book, only made a short mention of the necessity of “correct explanation” for the “negative sides of inter-ethnic interaction.”

The defenders of Vdovin and Barsenkov also allowed themselves anti-Semitic statements, though they were not central in this particular campaign. The goal of this campaign was to gain the sympathies of the majority that, despite a significant number of people with this or that anti-Semitic phobia, dislikes public expressions of anti-Semitism.
Political writer E. Kholmogorov gave a comment to the nationalistic web portal APN (published on September 7). that stated a rebirth of a kind of “double ethnocracy” that supposedly “acted quite effectively against Russia and Russians in 1995-1999.” Holmogorov's further enunciations made it clear that under “ethnocracy” he meant the Jews and Chechens who allegedly control the Russian governnment.

In a post in his blog dated September 8th, the nationalist K. Krulov, referencing an acquaintance said that advocate M. Musayev “admitted” that the Chechens are “being used against you (Russians – transl.) by 'the greatest people in the world' (Jews – transl.)”

On the September 13 so-called “open community hearings” “Russian History of the XX Century – Freedom of Research or Freedom of Persecution?” the editor of the “Questions of Nationalism” Sergei Sergeev said that Vdovin (the author of most of the book's xenophobic passages) was attacked “by the representatives of two corporations: the Jewish and the Chechen, which decided to unite here.” And, finally, he gave a completely xenophobic statement: “There is a war of ethnic corporations, or mafias, against Russian Culture.”