On March 22, a terrorist attack at a concert venue outside of Moscow left over 140 people dead. Islamic State (IS) swiftly emerged as the most likely culprit, while Vladimir Putin and his supporters immediately tried to blame Ukraine. But that is not the only direction in which the Kremlin and its allies pointed their fingers. Izabella Tabarovsky writes:
Aleksandr Dugin, the influential Russian ultranationalist ideologue, wrote on his Telegram channel that the real culprit was not IS, which had taken responsibility, but “the Zionists.” The attack could have been “Zionists’ revenge” for Russia’s position on Gaza, he wrote, urging his 61,000 followers to look for the fingerprints of the Mossad, whose “close relations with IS” are supposedly well-known.
The myth of the Mossad joining hands with IS has been around for as long as IS—and the notion that Jews were to blame for the Crocus City attack popped up on conspiracy theorist sites worldwide almost immediately. In this sense, Dugin’s remark did not reveal anything original. What it did do was confirm that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is an inextricable part of Russian public discourse. What’s more, anti-Semitic speech is now an integral part of Russia’s domestic and global messaging.
One way this expresses itself is in incessant defamatory references to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish identity, which are not only acceptable, but practically de rigueur among Russian political and media elites.
In this way, writes Tabarovsky, Russia is acting much like its Soviet predecessor, and like its allies Iran and China.
More about: Anti-Semitism, Islamic State, Russia