Saturday 19 January 2019

Washington Post columnist compares Putin-supporting American Jews to Stalinists


Published time: 18 Jan, 2019 19:14
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Washington Post columnist compares Putin-supporting American Jews to Stalinists
Orthodox Jews at a ceremony in Moscow © Reuters

A Washington Post columnist is being put on blast for a tweet that apparently rolls ‘Russiagate’ hysteria, anti-Semitism, and Nazi-esque conspiracy theory together.
“Has anyone written an article comparing the American Jews who support Moscow and Putin today with those who supported Stalin in the 1930s?”columnist Isaac Stone Fish tweeted on Wednesday.
Articles on the great Russian boogeyman are ten a penny in 2019, but why Fish – who is Jewish – thought this particular niche needed to be filled is anyone’s guess. Accusations of anti-Semitism and poor foresight flowed on Twitter. The columnist was called out by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is also of Jewish descent.
“Here's a Washington Post columnist taking one of the central tenets of Nazism – that Jews harbored covert loyalty to Moscow – and urging US media outlets to investigate and expose the US Jews of today guilty of similar allegiance to Moscow,” he wrote. “This is real, unadorned anti-semitism.”
Fish doubled down, claiming that “Many Jews – and other intellectuals – in the 1930s did support Stalin” and arguing that “Many Jews today are surprisingly sympathetic towards Putin.”
Fish did not back up his claims. Stalin did enjoy some support from communists in the West during the 1930s and beyond, like the Communist Party USA, who before liberalizing in the latter half of the decade worked towards building a “Soviet America.” Its members, however, were drawn from multiple faiths, many of them seeing the party as an alternative to the capitalism that led to the Great Depression.
However, accusations of Jewish loyalty to communism were indeed a core tenet of Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler saw Marxism as a Jewish plot to subjugate Germany, and accused the Bolshevik revolutionaries of serving “Jewish international finance.”  
Given the heavily loaded historical context, commentators were perplexed at Fish’s tweet.
Fish then tripled down, calling Putin-supporting Jews “the useful idiots of our generation compared with the NYC-based former shtetlnicks who saw Stalin as a savior.”
The ‘useful idiot’ phrase has been frequently used in the Russiagate era to talk about people who dare to question the mainstream narrative.
With no substantial proof of ‘Russian collusion’ or ‘Russian meddling’, something else is needed to sell stories on the ‘scary Russians’. To that end, comparing the Russians of today with the villains of the past is one schtick that the mainstream media seemingly never gets tired of.

posted by Satish Sharma at 08:00

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