RUSSIA: Jews Face Growing Attacks

By Kester Kenn Klomegah Reprint | | Print |

Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Jan 25 2006 (IPS) - Russia’s Jewish community has asked Duma deputies to speed up a review of legislative bills that would provide tougher penalties for religious extremism.

The call follows a recent escalation in xenophobic attacks where Jewish communities have been targeted.

“We are witnessing all kinds of manifestation of anti-Semitism through indiscriminate distribution of literature, some resulting in brutal killing of our members,” Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar told IPS. “Today, extremism and terrorism are the same things.”

He said the number of anti-Semitic publications doubled last year. Existing laws to regulate ethnic and religious relations have not been implemented to the fullest, he said.

Berl said the fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism and xenophobia should be the main focus of attention for authorities with the presidential and parliamentary elections due next year. Jewish activists on their part are ready to do all they can to prevent such ideas from spreading, he said.

“Russia is covered with the brown plague and we have to unite and fight this destructive tendency,” he said. “Where fascist ideas are spread, they will eventually manifest themselves.” A recent attack on a city synagogue was not an isolated instance of attack either on Jews or other minorities, he said.

Last week suspect Alexander Koptsev was charged with bursting into the Chabad Synagogue and stabbing eight men, including an American, an Israeli and a Tajik with a hunting knife. Koptsev told investigators the next day of his intolerance of ethnic Jews.

According to excerpts from his testimony released by city prosecutors, he committed the crime out of envy because of the higher living standards of the Jews.

U.S. ambassador William Burns condemned the attack, and said Russian authorities should stop any such attacks..

The Russian government is talking of the need for worldwide efforts to address such problems. “The Russian foreign ministry is trying to fine-tune international dialogue dealing with the issues of how these things can be countered at the international level,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a meeting on the issue.

“Be it the events at a synagogue, be it nationalist attacks on foreigners, or be it a situation somewhere in the United States when a pupil massacres his teachers and peers – this all proves the necessity for governments, religions and societies to pay more attention to the fight against extremism.”

Head of the Holocaust Foundation Alla Gerber said xenophobia flows freely in the Russian media, and that this raises the specter of more attacks. “Authorities don’t care to undercut extremism, courts don’t see racial hatred, and no one makes any effort to introduce a project – be it a television show or a publication – that would teach tolerance,” she told IPS.

“More significantly, this points to the inability of our law enforcement agencies, which have been unwilling to stop occurrences of Nazism in this country for many years,” Gerber said.

The Duma (parliament) committee for pubic associations and religious organisations is urging the interior ministry to introduce additional security measures to protect religious institutions and buildings, committee chairman Sergey Popov told the Duma. Popov also called for tightening legislation to fight extremism. “We suggest more liability for individuals for radical activities,” he said.

The Duma is considering legislation to prohibit dissemination of extremist information via the Internet and computer games. “We consider it right to establish the dissemination of extremist information through the media of any kind as a factor contributing to crimes which are damaging the reputation of our country abroad,” chairman of the legislative committee Pavel Krasheninnikov told IPS.

“The wave of religious extremism poses a serious threat to our national security, and there is a need to toughen immediately the penalties for inciting ethnic hatred. The nationalist ideology implies unrestrained hatred not only for Jews, but for other nationalities, and should be checked through legislative instruments.”