Not Your Great-Grandmother’s Pogrom: Modern Russia’s Attacks on Jews Are Carried Out by Muslims

In southern Russia, last weekend’s anti-Jewish attacks stretched over a 400-mile arc, running from the Caucasus Mountains to the Caspian Sea, through the nation’s Muslim majority fringe.Starting Saturday at Cherkessk, demonstrators demanded that Jews be expelled from the region, telling authorities: “Israeli refugees must not be allowed to enter.” A few hours later, at Nalchik, protesters burned down a Jewish cultural center under construction. They wrote on a wall: “Death to Jews.”On Sunday, hundreds of young men responded to a report of a man of ‘Israeli appearance’ at the Flamingo Hotel at Khasavyurt, Dagestan. Waving Palestinian flags, they demanded that all hotel guests stand in their room windows for visual identity checks. Only after searching the basement and reviewing the guest register did the mob withdraw. To prevent future protests, the hotel posted a sign: “ENTRANCE IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN for foreign citizens of ISRAEL (JEWS)!!! (AND THEY DO NOT LIVE HERE!!!!!).”That afternoon, on the news that a Red Wings flight from Tel Aviv was landing, a mob of over 1,000 young men invaded the airport of Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan. As the men searched the terminal room by room, travelers from Israel were evacuated to the tarmac in an airport bus. Chanting Allahu Akbar, or God is Most Great, angry men chased the bus around the tarmac, throwing stones at the windows. Seeking to restore control, police officers assured the crowd that they “understand” them and are “ready to stand up and chant” with them.“Children are screaming — one girl is injured by shards of broken glass,” one passenger, Shmuel, a 26-year- old from Jerusalem, told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. “Very scary. The bus loops around the airport, people are chasing us, rocks are flying. I cover the window with my suitcase.“At one point, the crowd stops the bus. They enter inside and ask each of us whether we’re Muslim or Jewish. We’re lucky that the Israelis on the bus speak Russian. It could have all ended with us getting killed. I know the rioters shot and wounded a flight attendant.”After four hours, a military helicopter arrived, clearing a safe passage by firing in the air. All passengers, including 15 Israelis, were evacuated to a nearby by military airbase. The toll among police and protesters was 20 injured, including two in critical condition. Arrests mounted to more than 60, with another 90 identified.What happened? The anti-Jewish rhetoric about “child killers” may sound familiar. A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said it “looked like a pogrom.” Utro Dagestan, a Telegram channel that called its followers to protest, gloated: “We initially asked not to organize pogroms and not to become rowdy, but since this happened, then in any case we support everyone who was at the airport yesterday!!!”This, however, was not your great-grandmother’s pogrom. Most American Jews are descended from the 2 million Jews who fled the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union between 1880 and 1924. They were fleeing general anti-semitism and real pogroms, generally organized by rightwing pro-Czarist, Russian Orthodox groups.Since then, of the 2 million Jews living in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, about 90 percent emigrated to the United States or Israel. Today, there are 1.3 million Russian speakers in Israel, or 18 percent of the Jewish population. Last year, due to the Russia-Ukraine war, Jewish emigration from Russia and Ukraine to Israel spiked to 62,759, a six-fold jump over 2021. Today, there are believed to be only 140,000 Jews left in Russia.With assimilation and a dwindling population, “the Jewish question almost disappeared for the Russians,” Moscow sociologist Alexei Levinson tells the Insider, a Latvia-based émigré news site. “The level of anti-Semitism in Russian society has been declining throughout the 21st century, that is, during Putin’s reign.” Russia’s new anti-Semitism is strong in the impoverished Muslim regions on Russia’s southern edge, the Northern Caucasus. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many ethnic Russians retreated to the nation’s Slavic core. Locals turned from Marxism to their historic faith, Islam.Dagestan, a republic twice the size of Vermont, now has more than 3,000 mosques. Americans confronted this brand of Islam a decade ago when two sons of Dagestan, the Tarnaev brothers, planted pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 281 others.Add to this stew the toxic nature of Russian state TV, where anchors casually talk about dropping nuclear bombs on Berlin or London. President Zelensky yesterday responded to the Dagestan attack by saying Russia “had contaminated its own territory with such a level of hatred and degradation that for the second time this year in Russia, control over events is being lost.”Referring to June’s armed mutiny, he added: “When insurgents head to Moscow and no one stops them, and there is a breakdown of the power system in Dagestan, a real pogrom occurs.”In addition, Russia’s state press offers up a steady news diet of gory images from Gaza. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters yesterday: “Against the backdrop of TV footage showing the horrors of what is happening in the Gaza Strip – the deaths of people, children, old people, it is very easy for enemies to take advantage of and provoke the situation.”In Dagestan, Rabbi Ovadya Isakov told Podyom news outlet: “Simply, Israel lost the information war.” Rabbi Isakov, who serves about 300 Jewish families in Derbent, said that one Jewish woman who called the police for help was told by an officer: “Well, you see what you are doing to their children there [in Gaza].”Over the last decade, Mr. Isakov was shot in the chest by a Muslim radical, his synagogue windows have been broken, and tombstones in Jewish cemeteries vandalized. The population of Dagestan’s “Mountain Jews” has dwindled to 1,000, from 30,000 at the time of the Soviet collapse. The Rabbi said he and others may reluctantly join the emigration flow. This would end a 1,500-year-long Jewish presence on the northern shores of the Caspian.To some degree, demographics dictates the Kremlin’s moves. Muslims now account for 10 percent of Russia’s population of 145 million. Jews account for one tenth of one percent. By receiving a Hamas delegation in Moscow last week, Mr. Putin signaled a green light to anti-Israel protesters. Mr. Levinson, who works for Moscow’s Levada polling company, says: “Today, Putin’s position of taking a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without making explicit anti-Semitic statements, sends a kind of signal.”Yesterday, in a televised meeting with members of his Security Council, Putin blamed Dagestan’s pogrom on the West for its “lies, provocations and sophisticated technologies of psychological and information aggression.” He ordered all officials to protect “inter-ethnic and inter-religious harmony.”After last year’s failed invasion of Ukraine, though, and last summer’s Wagner mercenary mutiny, the Dagestan pogrom looms as a third big intelligence failure for the Kremlin. For days, the Dagestan Utro Telegram channel appealed to its 65,900 followers to mass at the airport to “catch” Jewish passengers from Tel Aviv. News tip for Machakhala’s Keystone Cops: Before Dagestan Utro was shut down last night, the channel was calling for “pan-Caucasian” protests against Israel for this Thursday.

Not Your Great-Grandmother’s Pogrom: Modern Russia’s Attacks on Jews Are Carried Out by Muslims

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