Union of Councils for Soviet Jews: Bigotry Monitor: Volume Two, Number 4

News

Bigotry Monitor: Volume Two, Number 4

(January 25, 2002)

Volume Two, Number 4
Friday, January 25, 2002

BIGOTRY MONITOR
A Weekly Human Rights Newsletter on Antisemitism, Xenophobia, and Religious Persecution in the Former Communist World and Western Europe

EDITOR: CHARLES FENYVESI
(News and Editorial Policy within the sole discretion of the editor)

Published by UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union
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ANTISEMITIC NEWSPAPER SUES JEWISH LEADER AND TV STATION. The stridently antisemitic newspaper "Russkaya Obshchina Yekaterinburga" (which means the Russian Community of Yekaterinburg) has sued Dr. Mikhail Oshtrakh, a Jewish leader in Sverdlovsk Oblast, as well as a local television station for damaging the newspaper's "business reputation," according to a report from Oshtrakh to UCSJ on January 22. Editor S. F. Pilshchikov demands compensation of 10,000 rubles from the television company and 5,000 rubles from Oshtrakh for their accusations that his newspaper incited ethnic hatred. (One dollar is the rough equivalent of 30 rubles.) Last year, Oshtrakh and other ethnic minority leaders in the region signed a letter to the regional Prosecutor's Office demanding that charges be brought against the newspaper for inciting ethnic hatred, which is illegal under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code. As a result, a criminal case against the paper began last month. A recent article in Pilshchikov's newspaper may explain why he filed his lawsuit. It says: "There is a secret war to exterminate the Russian people, so we have to act in a like manner. We have to go to war. In this it is not sufficient to just defend ourselves. The best defense is to attack."

Under the same law, Ostrakh has sued the Russian Orthodox diocese in Yekaterinburg for distributing antisemitic books, and the local Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal inquiry. (See Bigotry Monitor of January 11, Vol. 2, No. 2.) Diocese spokesman Boris Kosinsky told the Associated Press that the author in question, Sergei Nilus, was a well-known Christian publicist before the Bolshevik revolution who "warned his coreligionists of a mortal danger" but at the same time spoke of "the impermissibility of seeing the entire Jewish people, misled by their rulers, as the enemy." AP noted: "The case marks a rare effort to prosecute anyone on charges of inciting religious intolerance in Russia and is the first time federal authorities have challenged the country's majority church over alleged antisemitism."

DAGESTAN JUDGE THROWS OUT NEO-NAZI LAWSUIT. On January 16 Igor Boykov, the "commissar" of the National Bolshevik Party's Dagestan branch, appeared in a Makhachkala court to press defamation charges against Gadzhi Abashilov, editor-in-chief of the local newspaper "Molodezh Dagestana," and its commentator Konstantin Zachesov, according to the Dagestan government web site. (See Bigotry Monitor of November 21, 2001, Vol. 1, No. 29.) In October, the newspaper published an article by Boykov explaining his party's program ("to seize power in a national and social revolution") as well as responses from Abashilov and Zachesov who accused the party of following a pro-Nazi ideology. (Zachesov declared that "The bacillus of Nazism is more infectious and dreadful than anthrax.") "Boykov perceived the comments as an insult to him and his party and appealed to the court," the web site reported. After 30 minutes of deliberations, the judge threw out the lawsuit.

ANTISEMITIC EDITOR WINS SEAT IN REGIONAL LEGISLATURE. Oleg Pashchenko, the editor of the antisemitic newspaper "Krasnoyarskaya Gazeta" published in Krasnoyarsk Kray, has been elected to the region's legislature, according to "Novaya Gazeta" of January 21. "Novaya Gazeta" criticized Pashchenko's paper for regularly publishing statements such as: "Let the newspaper write about Zionists and kikes. This filth has started a civil war in the country, and have destroyed the flower of Russia with their own hands. Putin is not Stalin, he is so far too soft, he hasn't hung anybody, but he needs to." Another comment tried to be subtle: "People of that well known ethnicity who have seized all the television channels and scream louder than anybody else about the threat of a 'return to the past' are especially irritating." Pashchenko's election campaign flaunted his extremist views. One of his election flyers contained a poem of his wishing for the return of Stalin so he could carry out "a great purge." The poem ended with the call, "Prepare the lists! Prepare the lists!"

SWASTIKAS, RACIST COMMENTS DEFACE SIBERIAN CITY. Swastikas have appeared on a main Omsk thoroughfare named after World War II hero Marshal Zhukov, according to a January 17 report by the Provincial News Agency. The swastikas, daubed near a police station, were accompanied by racist slogans targeting Kazakhs. This is not the first time that such graffiti appear in Omsk, a Siberian city in a region bordering Kazakhstan. The reporter speculated that nobody would bother to erase them until right before a parade that is scheduled for February 23.

UP TO 5,000 SKINHEADS THRIVE IN ST. PETERSBURG. Between 2,000 and 5,000 skinheads live in St. Petersburg and, as in other Russian cities, instructors from Western neo-fascist groups work with some of the gangs, according to the newspaper "Vecherny Peterburg" of January 17. The occasion for the article was the opening of the trial of a leader of the local skinhead gang called Totenkopf, which is German for Death Head, a reference to the infamous SS division known for its brutality. The gang was formed between five and seven years ago as fans of a rock group with the same name. It now has about 150 members and is considered the most radical skinhead gang in the city. Its leader being tried, whose name was withheld by the authorities, has already served two years in prison for attacking citizens of Sri Lanka. He is now accused of stabbing another skinhead and murdering with a knife in the back a total stranger at a rock concert. Before this incident, the most notorious local skinhead act was an attack five years ago on citizens of India by several hundred skinheads who decided "to honor of Hitler's birthday" that way. The same night, a dozen skinheads dragged an Azerbaijani into a subway train, beat him, and cut off his ear. While most of those involved in that attack were arrested, only one was sentenced, on the minor charge of "hooliganism."

The newspaper also reported on the city's largest skinhead gang, called Russian Fist, which boasts more than 150 members. While the common perception of Russian skinheads is that they are unsophisticated, the newspaper noted, the high quality of many skinhead publications, especially the graphics, suggest that they must be doing a good job in raising funds.

NATIONAL BOLSHEVIKS PLAN TO RUN IN LATVIAN ELECTIONS. The Latvian branch of the extremist Russian National Bolshevik Party, currently operating as a public organization called Pobeda (Victory), is scheduled to hold a founding congress this summer, then register as a party and run in Latvia's parliamentary elections this fall, reported the Baltic News Agency on January 24. But their leader, Vladimir Linderman, told reporters that the plans may fail, as the Latvian government could block their registration. At present Pobeda has 30 members and many supporters, he said. Linderman explained that the new party will represent all "outcasts" -- Russians, people from lower classes, and the youth. He said that about 80-85 per cent of Latvia's population "feels rejected from participation in state administration."

Linderman said that should they take power, the National Bolsheviks intend to use any means to achieve their goals - including the execution of corrupt officials and traitors to national interests, and "the cleansing" of state institutions. But, he insisted, "everything will be legitimate," with relevant laws adopted first. He declared: "We wish to operate strictly under the rule of law."

FIGHT IS ON FOR THE SOUL OF RUSSIAN ISLAM, NATIONALITIES MINISTER SAYS. Russia's minister without portfolio for nationalities, Vladimir Zorin, told a gathering in Tyumen Oblast that agitation among Muslims in Russia is his most acute policy problem, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Kazan bureau reported on January 15, citing "strana.ru." Zorin said the struggle for "a Russian Islam" has begun but whether it will resemble Islam in Turkey or Saudi Arabia is as yet unclear.

DAGESTANI GROUP CALLS FOR JIHAD AGAINST RUSSIA. A new group identifying itself as Dagestani Mojahedin has called on fellow Dagestanis to fight a jihad against Russia. In an appeal published on January 20 on the Chechen rebel web site "Kavkaz-Tsentr," the group accused Russia and Dagestan's pro-Russian leadership of violating the rights of Muslims and carrying out the extermination of the Muslim people of Chechnya. Citing what it claimed is a verse from the Koran, the appeal advised: "Believers, do not seek the friendship of the Jews and Christians: they are friends to one another." The text concluded with a blend of tribal rhetoric and Bolshevik-style slogans: "If we do not want to place the burden of ordeals on the fate of our descendants and in a cowardly fashion betray our children, then it is time for everyone to act! Today or never! Freedom or death! Victory or paradise! Islam or the laws of Satan!"

WHERE EXTREMISM FAILED TO WITHER IN MODERATION'S EMBRACE. With more than one third of Leicester's population of 300,000 drawn from ethnic minorities, the English city projects itself as a model of harmonious diversity, "the kind of place where extremism withers in moderation's embrace, " Alan Cowell reported in "The New York Times" on January 22. Yet city elders have come to believe that "it is precisely that tolerance that may have provided Osama bin Laden's organization Al Qaeda with the cover to implant a secretive network here of Algerian militants that blended easily among Muslims of many backgrounds." In recent days, police arrested 17 Leicester residents, charging them with violations of terrorism and immigration laws, in what constitutes Britain's "harshest single crackdown on people suspected of Islamic militancy" since September 11. Many of the arrests focused on the blue-collar Highfields area, where modest row houses are topped with satellite dishes. In one such house, "behind an unadorned brown door," the reporter found scores of Muslim men praying at the six-year-old Taqwa mosque in an upstairs room. Worshipers he spoke to said that they did not know whether some of the 17 detainees had ever prayed there and they denied that the house had been associated with terrorism. According to "The Times," the raids have left the city's 35,000 Muslims "shocked and fearful."

ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS IN BRITAIN MATCH LAST YEAR'S HIGH FIGURE. The number of antisemitic incidents in Britain recorded in 2001 was roughly the same as in 2000, Mike Whine, a senior executive with Community Security Trust (CST), a long-established and widely respected community defense organization, told David Landau of the Tel Aviv daily "Ha'aretz." But in 2000, the figure was fully 50 percent higher than in the preceding year, which Whine said is accountable to the surge that came with the outbreak of the intifada. Violence towards people or property accounts for much less than half of the statistics, he added. Most incidents monitored by CST are threats, hate mail, and Internet attacks.

"It is much better to be a Jew here than a Muslim," Prof. Barry Kosmin told "Ha'aretz," and Whine agreed. It is much better, too, judging by the statistics, to be a Jew on the streets of London than on the streets of Paris. But is this so, the reporter asked, because there are far fewer incidents, or because British Jewry, unlike French Jewry, is traditionally low-key, not to say suppressive, in its publication policy? "More the former," Whine replied, "though it's true we don't as a rule publish incidents without the consent of the victims. We ourselves feel the public does have a right to know, but individuals or organizations under attack - say, a cemetery or a synagogue - may feel differently, and we will respect that."

The newpaper also reported that since September 11, the component of Muslim-originated attacks has risen, while the proportion of the familiar neo-fascist antisemitism has probably declined. The reason cited, to put it crudely, is that right wing hoodlums are busy beating and vandalizing Muslims. Over the years, Jewish organizations have cooperated with their Muslim counterparts against the common enemy, the neo-fascist far right. But now such relations have come to a halt, on almost all levels, "Ha'aretz" quoted Jo Wagerman who heads the lead Jewish organization, the Jewish Board of Deputies. He added that there are still some efforts at inter-religious dialogue.

CZECH PM, GERMAN CHANCELLOR CANDIDATE CLASH ON SUDETEN GERMANS. In an interview with the Austrian magazine "Profil" on January 21, Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman said that the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia prior to World War II were Adolf Hitler's "fifth column," and that many of them "committed treason, a crime that under the then-valid legislation carried the death penalty even in times of peace. If they were expelled or transferred, this was a more moderate punishment than death." Edmund Stoiber, the new conservative candidate for the post of German chancellor, promptly called Zeman's comments "absolutely unacceptable."

* * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * Dr. Martin Luther King, whose day was celebrated across the United States on January 21, said: "You cannot substitute one tyranny for the other, and for the black man to be struggling for justice and then turn around and be antisemitic, is not only a very irrational course, but it is a very immoral course, and whenever we have seen antisemitism we have condemned it with all our might."

HUNGARIAN MP MAY BE PROSECUTED FOR HIS CALL TO 'SHUT OUT' JEWS
The Law May Be Imprecise, but Antisemitism Will Play a Role in the Election Campaign

Hungary's chief prosecutor has not yet decided whether to open a criminal process against Lorant Hegedus Jr., a Member of Parliament and now the Number 3 in the hierarchy of the far right Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIEP) of Istvan Csurka, on the grounds of incitement against the Jewish community. Last summer, Hegedus wrote an article in the Budapest MIEP publication "Ebreszto" (Wake Up) contending that Hungary is being devoured by an army of infiltrators from Galitzia, the Polish-Ukrainian province that many thousands of Jewish refugees fled in the nineteenth century. Hegedus called on Hungarians to "Shut them out! Because if you don't, they will shut you out!" (In the language of Hungarian antisemites, a Galitzian Jew is cast as an unscrupulous, semi-criminal alien whose "hordes" took advantage of Hungary's hospitality.)

In September, the presidium of the National Synod of Calvinists condemned Hegedus, an ordained pastor of the country's main Protestant denomination, for expressing views "contrary to the Christian gospel, inconsistent with the Calvinist faith, and unworthy of the church." On January 18, Hegedus was summoned to the chief prosecutor's office where he was interrogated. He informed the press that he told the chief prosecutor that he had done nothing wrong and that his article was an exercise of his right to express an opinion.

Others point out that according to a ruling by the Constitutional Court, Article 269 of the Hungarian penal code permits hate speech directed against a racial, ethnic or religious group and punishes only the actual incitement of people to engage in criminal activities such as harassment and murder of members of such groups. (See Bigotry Monitor of October 19, 2001, Vol. 1, No. 15, on the inadequacies of Article 269.)

While the border between hate speech and incitement to violence may be blurred, and many Hungarians believe that the law should be tightened up, the Jewish community feels threatened by the free flow of verbal abuse coming from Hegedus and other MIEP leaders. At the same time, the chief prosecutor 's office jealously guards its judicial independence. Nevertheless, any prosecutorial decision, even a postponement of a decision, will play a role in the campaign, nasty in tone and unpredictable in outcome, for the national elections set for April.

The ruling party Fidesz and its main challenger, the Socialists (the former Communists), are in a very close race, and neither is likely to capture more than 40 percent of the vote. Charles Gati, professor of European studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and an expert on Hungarian politics, thinks that the sensitive issue of antisemitism could swing a few percentage points in a country that has more than 100,000 Jews, the highest figure in Central Europe. "Fidesz cannot win without the far right," Gati told this newsletter. "It must take votes away from MIEP because entering into a coalition with MIEP would provoke a bigger storm in the West than the Austrian cabinet offering a seat to Jorg Haider. But what will Fidesz do if MIEP gets 8-10-12 percent of the vote?" On the other hand, Gati says, "the Socialists could gain by picturing Fidesz as a prisoner of the far right which scares many of the undecided voters. As much as the Socialists need the support of the pro-Western Free Democrats, Fidesz cannot win without the anti-Western MIEP."

A different argument, advanced by a political insider from Budapest, is that Hegedus, more ambitious than bright, wants to be prosecuted and make a name for himself as a martyr - he has already voluntarily canceled his parliamentary immunity -- while attracting a sympathy vote for MIEP. In this scenario, the beneficiary would be the Socialists, and the loser the right-of-center Fidesz. But if Hegedus conducts himself disgracefully before the electorate as many think he might and Fidesz plays its cards well, the insider argues, MIEP could end up losing votes and fail to get the 5 percent minimum it needs to get into Parliament. In that case, Fidesz may be forced to cobble together a coalition by making peace with the Free Democrats, the Socialists' current junior partner and the sworn enemy of MIEP.

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