The Jewish Journal Of Greater Los Angeles - Anti-Semitism Finds Fertile Soil in Russia

Last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin sought to consolidate his long, successful and bloodless search for centralized authoritarian rule by proposing to cancel citizens’ right to elect their local and regional officials, nominally as a countermeasure to terrorism — a dangerous as well as counterproductive move. Some Jewish leaders and diplomats in the West inveighed and the front and op-ed pages of America’s media discovered this anti-democratic trend as if it were a revelation, after having largely ignored Russia’s critical importance since September 2001. These dangerous and disturbing trends have been occurring in Russia, as elsewhere, for many years. The Russian human rights and anti-Semitic monitoring organizations have been prescient in consistently documenting and warning against Russia’s deteriorating, corrupt and dysfunctional systems for providing rule of law and controlling the impunity of grass-roots anti-Semitic and racist violence and propaganda.