Hunt for Jews in Dagestan: Anti-Semitic gang at the airport gets Putin in trouble

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Sunday, 7 p.m. At that moment, a plane from Tel Aviv landed at the airport of Makhachkala, the capital of the Russian republic of Dagestan. Shortly afterwards, terrifying images circulated online: an angry crowd, mostly men, storming through the airport. The crowd, which reportedly numbered more than 1,000 people, was prompted by the Telegram channel “The Morning of Dagestan” to come to the airport and “warmly welcome” the guests from Israel.

According to the German magazine “Spiegel”, citing reports from the Internet, the airport security forces did not stop the attackers – on the contrary: they even wanted to allow the angry crowd to check the passengers’ passports themselves. To make sure they are actually Israelis. On Telegram, there was a demand to ‘deport’ the passengers who had traveled from Tel Aviv to the Russian Far East – strongly reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric from World War II.

For example, the channel ‘The Morning of Dagestan’, which is responsible for the attack in Dagestan, was founded by the former Russian Duma deputy Ilya Ponomaryov (48). He now lives in Ukraine, has Ukrainian citizenship and coordinates the Russian Volunteer Legion “Freedom of Russia”. The Legion itself spreads anti-Semitic ideas and the neo-Nazis have already carried out attacks on Russian soil – against the Kremlin and against Putin.

Stalin was already an anti-Semite

In fact, anti-Semitism has a tradition in Russia and the Soviet Union. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (1878–1953) became a radical anti-Semite toward the end of his life. Early in his life, the Georgian wanted as few Jews as possible in the high ranks of his government. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Stalin began deporting Russian Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East and other parts of Siberia.

The history of Soviet anti-Semitism dates back to Tsarist times. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881) gave rise to the term pogrom: riots against religious or ethnic minorities, especially Jews. The riots against the Jewish population – in which tens of thousands of Jews were murdered – continued until the First World War.

Escalation is not in Putin’s interest

Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin (71) also comments on the conflict between Hamas and Israel. Two weeks ago, he said Israel had never faced an attack of such magnitude and therefore had “every right to ensure its security.” At the same time, he claimed that a blockade of Gaza was being prepared in the US and Israel, which could be comparable to the 1941 blockade of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht. This gives the impression that Putin seems to believe that the Israelis are the Nazis of today and the Palestinians in Gaza are the Russians of Leningrad.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Putin has tried to justify it with the “denazification of Ukraine.” The anti-Semitic violence in Russia is therefore not in Putin’s interests. Incidents like the one in Dagestan make his anti-Nazi propaganda unbelievable. And: According to Russia expert Sabine Fischer, the war in the Middle East came unexpectedly for Putin, she writes on

Source: Blick