Moral Equivalence

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?

Hasbara

Here’s a great example of Israeli hasbara targeting Russian speakers.

I found the short post on a friend’s Facebook news feed. It consists of three sentences attached to a powerful image of at least thirty missiles or rockets fired simultaneously.

The message reads (in Russian), “Israel today [sad face emoji]. This is exactly the instance when one photo is worth a thousand words. The world needs to know what’s really going on! — feeling down [sad face emoji].”

The post has been shared 6,800 times, garnered 451 likes, and elicited 173 comments in the 20 hours since it was published.

We are meant to imagine, of course, that the “photo worth a thousand words” is a photo of a Hamas rocket installation in the Gaza Strip firing its deadly cargo towards the utterly innocent state of Israel.

A simple Google image search turned up several instances of the same image, all of them bearing different dates and captions, none of which link the “photo” in question to Hamas or the current hostilities between Hamas and the IDF.

So, in fact, the photo is worthless, except to underscore something we already knew.

Zionist hasbaristas are utterly unscrupulous. They count on people not bothering to check any of their claims, but just to pass the “horrible truth” along, thus confusing more people about the real, complicated facts about the relationship between the state of Israeli and the stateless Palestinians. {TRR}

Zeitgeist Checklist

taste real mexico A Williamsburg-inspired eatery in snowy central Petersburg, 5 February 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader

It’s remarkable how the MH17 final report and Ukrainian political prisoner and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike have exacerbated two sad trends among Russia’s left/liberal/creative/academic intelligentsia.

The first trend involves intelligenty out-Putining Putin and his regime’s put-on anti-Americanism by ramping up the number of social media posts and hasbarical hate-a-grams about the US, its sinister machinations, and its signal failings.

This is part of the same operetta in which the nefarious NATO is a greater threat to world peace than a country that reserves the right to invade its closest neighbor and join in crushing a democratic, grassroots rebellion in a faraway country whose people have never harmed Russia in any shape or form.

But it’s no fun talking, much less doing anything, about that at all, because it would require real collective effort. So, depending on your political tastes, it’s much easier, as a Russophone, to hate on NATO or Hamas.

Some Russians go for the trifecta, hating on both “terrorist” organizations, while also indulging in the most satisfying infantile pleasure on our planet today: Islamophobia. You know, Europe has been overrun by Islamic terrorists and that whole tired spiel, which gives such a sense of purpose to otherwise wildly ignorant people who have betrayed their own country and countrymen so many ways over the last 25 or 30 years it should make all our heads spin.

The other trend, which has also kicked into high gear again, is going hipster as hard as you can. There are any number of “projects,” “creative clusters,” eating and drinking establishments, festivals, semi-secret dance parties, and god knows what else in “the capitals” to make the younger crowd and even some of the middle-aged set forget they live in a country ruled by a ultra-reactionary kleptocratic clique that can have any of them abducted for any reason whatsoever at a moment’s notice and charged with “involvement in a terrorist community” or some such nonsense and ruin their lives forever.

That’s no fun to think about it, either, and it’s altogether scary to do something about it, so why not pretend you live in Williamsburg while you can?

The day before yesterday, I translated and posted an essay, by Maria Kuvshinova, about Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike and the non/reaction to this brave call to action on the part of Russia’s creative so-called intelligentsia. At some point, I thought the essay might be a bit off the mark, but on second thought, despite its obvious quirks, I decided Ms. Kuvshinova had sized up the Russian zeitgeist perfectly.

Post-Soviet infantilism is total. It affects the so-called intelligentsia no less than the so-called ordinary folk. Infantilism means being unable to empathize, being unable to put yourself in another person’s shoes, even if that person is President Putin, a man with a quite distinct sense of ethics, a man who has been studied backwards and forwards for twenty years. Apparently, the message sent to the creative communities through the arrest of Kirill Serebrennikov was not registered. If you want to be a dissident, start down the hard road of doing jail time for misdemeanor charges, facing insuperable difficulties in renting performance and exhibition spaces, becoming an outsider, and experiencing despair. If you want a big theater in downtown Moscow, play by the rules. Like your average late-Soviet philistine, Putin regarded the creative intelligentsia with respect at the outset of his presidential career. (See, for example, footage from his visit to Mosfilm Studios in 2003.) However, a few years later, he was convinced the creative intelligentsia was a rampantly conformist social group who would never move even a millimeter out of its comfort zone and would make one concession after another. A lack of self-respect always generates disrespect in counterparts. // TRR