--Financial Times: the stench of propaganda in today’s coverage of the Makhachkala riots is overwhelming
This morning’s Financial Times online issue of Europe Express compiled by Brussels bureau chief Henry Foy directs readers to an article about violence at the Dagestan airport of Makhachkala with the following remarkable and totally false words: “…our Russia team explains the antisemitic violence wracking the country.” Wracking the country?
The Russians have a law designating those who operate against the interests of the country whose passport they carry and in the interests of a foreign state. The term inoagenty is a mark of opprobrium that brings with it legal restrictions. This badge of dishonor should now be handed out to the FT journalists Max Seddon and Polina Ivanova, whose disgraceful four pages of lies and distortions based on press releases from the U.S. State Department are being run under the eye-catching headline “What anti-Semitic attacks in Dagestan say about Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” Contrary to what their editors think these journalists are accomplishing, the article is very telling about the death wish of UK elites, because time and again they are painting targets on their backs for the Russian missile programmers.
The lies?
First, that Putin never has criticized the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians of 7 October. He has spoken out repeatedly against terrorism, making reference to Russia’s own domestic experience with this plague in the Caucasus in the 1990s when it was fanned by U.S. intelligence operatives. He extended his condolences to the bereaved in Israel.
Second, that Putin’s mention of outside forces, namely the United States acting with and through the Ukrainian intelligence services as those responsible for the riot in Makhachkala had no basis in fact. This is an outrageous lie because in a video interview published in Ukraine the founder of the Telegram channel that disseminated instructions to the Dagestan rioters, Ilya Ponomaryov, a former Duma deputy who treasonously went over to the other side and lives in Kiev, proudly took responsibility for this would-be pogrom. It was planned and carried out precisely so that propagandists at the FT and other Western mainstream media would assert what Seddon and Ivanova are insinuating, that Russia today is the same anti-Semitic, pogrom sponsoring land as Black Hundreds infested tsarist Russia of 120 years ago.
Vladimir Putin has made every effort to ensure that tolerance reigns among the hundreds of ethnic groups and dozens of religious faiths that constitute the Russian Federation. To say otherwise, as Seddon and Ivanova do, is to engage in vile propaganda.
Since religious fundamentalism seems to be the order of the day, I will take the plunge and set down my own special prayers: that these journalists get the company of John Kirby and other U.S. miscreants in the special zone in hell reserved for dishonest fomenters of war. Oh yes, there surely will be a nearby padded cell for the criminally insane, with reserved places for Bibi Netanyahu and Isaac Herzog. For those who have not been following closely, Herzog also has gone on air denouncing Russia for the Dagestan “pogrom.”
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
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