I found this “hilarious” cartoon attached to an essay entitled “No Moral Equivalence in the Middle East,” but it serves just as well as an illustration of the sadly predictable “liberal Russian” ruminations, below. ||| TRR
Hello, dear readers!
This is the Moscow Times weekly newsletter at your disposal. Let’s hope that our friends, acquaintances, relatives, and just plain Israelis survive the barbaric attack by terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad with minimal losses. We’ll discuss the role the Russian Federation played in this attack below, immediately after a preview of this issue.
You will read:
- about debt-ridden Russians;
- about the demographic disaster in the Russian Federation;
- about the civil war in Moscow thirty years ago.
But let’s go back to Israel. Yes, it has to be said that the Israeli special services, often called the best in the world, failed to fulfill their principal mission this time round. They were asleep at the wheel in the face of the most serious danger, and the country has paid for it with the lives of not only soldiers, but also of ordinary people. Israel has already lost at least 300 people, and many more have been seriously injured, while Palestine [sic] says there have been 250 victims [among Palestinians?], but the military [sic] operation against Hamas has only just begun.
Commentators have especially focused on the number of rockets that Hamas has managed to stockpile, and see in this the undoubted support of Iran and, possibly, Syria. Without its involvement, weapons or parts of weapons would simply not have got from Iran to Palestine [sic]. It’s geographically unlikely.
Here is what the Iranian Foreign Ministry had to say: “The protection of their land and shrines from occupation, aggression, daily crimes and terrorism on the part of the Zionist regime is the natural and legitimate right of the oppressed Palestinian nation.” And here are the words with which Vladimir Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine: “The purpose of the special operation is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.” Putin has also repeatedly called the Ukrainian leadership “terrorists.”
Russia, unlike most European countries and the United States, does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and Moscow received its leader Ismail Haniyeh with all possible honors just a year ago. Now Haniyeh says that Hamas is going to seize Jerusalem—and the Russian Foreign Ministry officially agrees with him: Palestine [sic] should be returned to its 1967 borders and have its capital in East Jerusalem.
But the point, of course, is not in the verbal support that the Russian Federation has provided to Hamas. Russia, by unleashing a war in Ukraine, has shown that international law and diplomatic methods of conflict resolution can be ignored. We should also not fail to point out the consistent indecision of Western countries in response to Russian aggression. This indecision was undoubtedly noticed by Iran, which freely supplies weapons to the Russian Federation, and by Azerbaijan, which blockaded and then conquered Nagorno-Karabakh, and by Palestine [sic], which stockpiled a gigantic arsenal and has put it to use. The Russian Federation has shattered the world order with its actions, and considerable efforts will be required to return to the situation of three years ago, if at all it is possible to return to it.
Let’s finish with the statement made by the Taliban movement, who have also received a warm welcome in the Kremlin. The Taliban appealed to Iran, Jordan, and Iraq to let their troops go help Hamas conquer Jerusalem.
[…]
The Hamas attack is Israel’s Pearl Harbor for Israel, military expert Sergei Migdal argues [in his opinion piece] about the causes and consequences of the attack, written hot on its heels. If you want to read about the background of what is happening, then here is an almost academic article by Ze’ev Khanin, in which he clearly answers the question of whether it is worth negotiating with terrorists.
[…]
Source: Moscow Times Russian Service weekly email newsletter, 8 October 2023. Translated by the Russian Reader, who reminds his readers that the opinions expressed in the texts published in this almost-sixteen-year-old Russian zeitgeist chronicle may not coincide with his own. But how else would his readers find out that “liberal” Russians don’t regard Palestinians and many other Arabs (e.g., Syrians) as full-fledged human beings who can lay claim to the same rights and freedoms as “just plain Israelis” and “liberal” Russians?
