Posted by Jewish communities say Russia free of antiSemitism on Sat, 23 Sep 2017 10:58 | #

Vladimir Putin meeting with Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar and President of the Federation of Jewish Communities Alexander Bordoda.

President of Russia, 14 April 2014:

With Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar and President of the Federation of Jewish Communities Alexander Boroda.

Mr Putin thanked Mr Lazar and Mr Boroda for their work to strengthen interfaith harmony and noted the positive role the Russian Jewish Museum of Tolerance in Moscow is playing.

Mr Lazar and Mr Boroda told the President about the special events, in particular educational events, that will take place in different parts of the country, including Crimea and Sevastopol, to mark the Passover holiday.

* * *

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon.

First of all, I want to congratulate you and all Jews in Russia on the upcoming Passover holiday. How long does the holiday last?

Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar: Eight days. Over those eight days we are not allowed to eat meat or bread or drink vodka. We can only eat matzos and other kosher products. It’s a holiday with strict rules.

Vladimir PUTIN: And after these eight days?

Berl LAZAR: Then everything is allowed as usual.

Vladimir PUTIN: We will be celebrating the Orthodox Easter on April 20, and so this gives us the chance to celebrate our holidays together.

Berl LAZAR: There was always a connection between the Orthodox Easter and the Jewish Passover. The Orthodox Easter begins the first Sunday after our Passover. You can see in this how everything is interconnected and how our religions live together.

Vladimir PUTIN: I want to thank you for everything that you are doing to strengthen interfaith harmony in Russia. This is a very important part of our work together. In this respect, I want to mention once again the marvellous museum that you planned and created – the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre. How is work going there?

Berl LAZAR: There are plenty of visitors. Thousands of people come every week. What stands out most of all is that everyone who comes there says they liked it, found it interesting, and that it made an impression on them. We need to thank you too, because it is thanks to you that we feel at ease and at home in Russia today, and that we can enjoy the highest degree of freedom of worship.

I think this year will be the first time that Passover is going to be so widely celebrated around the country. Big public celebrations will take place in every city. People are not shy about celebrating openly anymore. Today, people are proud to be Jewish and are happy that they can celebrate these holidays together with their community.

With the museum too we see that there are many Jewish people who come. They used to be not so open or even simply didn’t know things, and now they come to the museum and say, “We didn’t know that.” For other peoples it is interesting and useful too.

President OF THE FEDERATION OF JEWISH COMMUNITIES ALEXANDER BORODA: Exhibitions representing all different peoples take place there. We have an Azerbaijani exhibition underway there at the moment. There are different art exhibitions too. Most of the visitors are young people. The average age is between 20 and 30.

The Tolerance Centre works actively with schools. We have certified lessons and the Education Department is introducing them to schools. We provide content to schools and have produced good, well-coordinated work. In particular, the Passover holiday, which is about to begin, is being celebrated throughout the whole country. We have been working actively in Crimea, in particular, on organising celebrations. Simferopol, Sevastopol and Yalta will all hold big celebration events.

Vladimir PUTIN: Are there synagogues there?

Alexander BORODA: Yes.

Berl LAZAR: Unfortunately, this kind of work is not so well developed there yet, but there are synagogues there and Jewish communities. Our task now is to expand our work and make it more open.

Alexander BORODA: As it should be in Russia.

RT, “Jewish communities say Russia is virtually free of anti-Semitism”, 21 Sept 2017:

The head of Russia’s Federation of Jewish Communities has told reporters that over the past years manifestations of anti-Semitism in the country have been at a minimal level and boiled down to day-to-day cases.

“As far as Russia is concerned, here we have mainly day-to-day anti-Semitism and even this is on a minimal level,” Aleksandr Boroda said in an interview with Interfax.

He added that radical groups with extremist views existed everywhere in the world, including the United States, and that the current situation in European countries had prompted many European Jews to seek repatriation to Israel.

Boroda told reporters that, outside of Israel, the Jewish population in Russia of about 1 million was the second largest in the world after the United States with 5.4 million.

He also stated that he could not agree with the opinion that Jews were guilty of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent hard times experienced by Russia.

“The allegation that all senior Bolsheviks were Jews is just a myth invented in the times of the Civil War. Top Bolsheviks represented various ethnicities, and those of them who were Jews were ethnic Jews, but not really religious people,” Boroda said.

‘Can they twist history any more?’ Social media backlash after UK silences RT’s reenactment account

“First of all, these people were citizens with their own political views and beliefs that did not depend on their background.”

In 2015, Boroda praised the religious freedom in Russia in a public speech and warned that Russian Jews would be in serious danger if President Vladimir Putin was ever ousted from power.

He also stated that Putin’s government provides more guaranteed support for Jews than those in Europe and the US, adding that Russian religious institutions are better protected against anti-Semitism, while other countries don’t provide enough security.

Posted by TradYouth is of course doing this too on Sat, 23 Sep 2017 18:22 | #

Think Progress, “Russian, American white nationalists raise their flags in Washington”, 22 Sept 2017:

“The big thing was being able to identify that their goals and our goals are very similar.”

Since 2015, Matthew Heimbach, one of the foremost white nationalists in the United States, has been trying to construct links with Russian nationalists.

At the 2015 launch of his Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), Heimbach hosted Alexander Dugin, Russia’s neo-fascist polemicist — although Dugin, due to the United States’ sanctions regime, could only appear via video. Last year, Heimbach announced his intentions to travel to Russia’s World National Conservative Movement conference, but his travel plans eventually fell through.

Now, though, it appears Heimbach has finally had his tete-a-tete with a member of one of Russia’s more notable nationalist movements. Speaking with ThinkProgress, Heimbach revealed that he had spent time earlier this month in both Washington, D.C., and Gettysburg, Pa., with a representative from the Russian Imperial Movement.

The meeting appears to be the first summit on American soil between one of the leaders of the white nationalist movement in the United States and an official representative from a Russian nationalist organization.

“I think [the meeting] was tremendously positive in every regard,” Heimbach told ThinkProgress. “The big thing was being able to identify that their goals and our goals are very similar: being opposed to liberalism, being opposed to really left and conservative reactionary politics, spiritual revival, and nationalist principles. And it looks like we’re really aiming to have TWP kind of be the representative of America at the future gatherings of the Russian Imperial Movement.”

Heimbach has gained outsized notoriety over the past few years, both for being involved in violent scuffles at a Donald Trump rally in 2016 as well as, more recently, his efforts to promote the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that resulted in one of the most violent far-right terror incidents in years.

The Most Important White Supremacist of 2016

However, Heimbach has also made concerted pushes to internationalize his efforts, making multiple trips to Europe in attempts to construct a network of like-minded organizations, individuals, and movements to fracture both trans-Atlantic alliances and Western states alike. (Heimbach has, in the past, called for the break-up of the United States, specifically citing the Soviet Union’s precedent.)

With the meeting earlier this month, Heimbach says he’s that much closer to his goal.

“This is the next step,” he said. “Contact is great — we’ve been in contact since early 2015, but really formalizing us working together in a professional capacity is what has happened now. … [We want] to unify nationalists, to get us working together, talking together, toward this new world. This is really kind of a formal arrangement now of what we can do together.”

And for Heimbach — who has previously described Russian President Vladimir Putin as the “leader … of the anti-globalist forces around the world,” and claimed that “Russia’s our most powerful ally” — the Russian Imperial Movement is just such a partner to help achieve a sort of internationalized nationalism, especially out of Russia. While the two groups aren’t necessarily united on all policy prescriptions, both would like to see the rollback of a liberal world order and a Russia resurgent.

The Russian Imperial Movement, as it is, has constructed its own relationships with official or semi-official organs in Russia, including building ties with Rodina, a far-right party that was co-founded by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin.

The Russian Imperial Movement’s Stanislav Shevchuk, whom Heimbach described as the group’s western European representative, joined Heimbach for a tour of Washington. In addition to visiting museums and strolling the city, Heimbach and Shevchuk posed in front of the White House, hoisting a Russian imperial flag.

The two also traversed to Gettysburg, Pa., where they posed in front of a statue of Robert E. Lee — all while holding the Confederate and Russian imperial flags side by side.

The Russian group announced that a detailed report of the trip would be forthcoming, but the Gettysburg demonstration mirrors another moment in 2015, when Heimbach led a rally featuring both Confederate and Russian imperial flags outside the Conservative Political Action Conference.

A representative from the Russian Imperial Movement told ThinkProgress that they “continue to establish contacts with right-wing, traditionalist and conservative organizations around the world to create a ‘Right-wing International.’” The spokesperson added that “for us the task is to share the experience of political [and] information warfare and joint squad tactics training.”

While it remains unclear what events or rallies, if any, will come next between the Traditionalist Worker Party and the Russian Imperial Movement, or between nationalists in the United States and Russia more broadly, the meeting is but the latest in a litany of links developing between American actors and their Russian counterparts, the latter of whom maintain conspicuous ties with those in and around the Kremlin.

For instance, David Duke, who spent considerable time in Russia, says that his books were once sold in the Russian parliament’s bookstore. Elsewhere, Richard Spencer — who has parroted Russian propaganda on foreign policy, and described Russia as the “sole white power in the world” — is currently married to a woman who has spent time translating the works of Dugin, and whose Twitter feed is regularly filled with the kind of pro-Putin fluff that would make others blush. And in 2015, white nationalist Jared Taylor and former KKK lawyer Sam Dickson flew to St. Petersburg for one of the most notable conclaves of the international far-right in years.

David Duke @DrDavidDuke

I lived in Russia for five years. While there, my book Jewish Supremacism was a best seller and sold in the Duma book store. https://twitter.com/johper4/status/832297497703936000 …
1:09 AM - Feb 17, 2017

More broadly, the meeting appears to be the most recent extension of Russian attempts to build relationships with far-right groups within the United States — a movement that’s by no means limited to white nationalists. Not only have those close to the Kremlin cultivated close relations with Western Christian fundamentalists over the past few years, proffering anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion policies, but, as ThinkProgress detailed last year, Russian actors have further built noteworthy ties with higher-ups at the National Rifle Association.

As it is, Heimbach says he plans on attending next month’s World Youth Conference in Sochi, which would allow the white nationalist to visit Russia for the first time and continue pursuing links with like-minded Russian actors.

In the interim, though, Heimbach says his meeting with the Russian Imperial Movement this month was a harbinger of things to come.

“When we went to the White House, we took a photo with a Russian imperial flag,” he said. “Hopefully before too long, when we’re able to meet in D.C., it will be on the terms of the Russian Imperial Movement [and] the new imperialist tsarist Russia meeting with the delegates from a free and independent white homeland.”

This story has been updated to include additional quotes from a Russian Imperial Movement spokesperson.

Posted by Anonymous on Sat, 30 Sep 2017 15:55 | #

C.I.A. Connections of White Nationalist Leaders and Alternative Media Figures

https://imgur.com/a/OI8vG

Posted by Slavery & Supremacism are good for you on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:02 | #

Richard Spencer does very poorly with black BBC interviewer.

Spencer argues that blacks have benefited from White supremacy and slavery.