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Russian MPs who signed letter in support of blood libel drop it
All 19 Russian parliament members who signed a letter asking the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to open an investigation against all Jewish organizations throughout the country on suspicion of spreading incitement and provoking ethnic strife, on Tuesday withdrew their support for the letter, sources in Russia said.The 19 members of the lower house, the State Duma, from the nationalist Rodina (homeland) party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and the Russian Communist Party, came under attack on Tuesday for signing the letter. Around 450 Russian academics and public figures also signed the letter. Russia's chief rabbi Berl Lazar said the letter had caused outrage among the country's 1 million Jews and raised questions over the lessons learned from the Holocaust. "Today is a test. People are trying to test how society will react 60 years later," Rabbi Lazar told Reuters on Tuesday. "More than half a century later, when such statements come out openly, this really shows that the famous line 'Never again' has to be taught constantly and fought for." "The majority of anti-Semitic actions in the whole world are constantly carried out by Jews themselves with a goal of provocation," the letter said. The General Prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that the deputies' move had been dropped at their request. No explanation was immediately forthcoming from the deputies. Earlier they denied the letter was anti-Semitic. "There is nothing anti-Semitic in our address, we only ask the General Prosecutor to give a judicial evaluation of the facts we have presented," Alexander Krutov, a Rodina party deputy in the Duma, or lower house, told Izvestia newspaper. The Kremlin had no immediate comment on the issue. President Vladimir Putin will join other world leaders at Thursday's commemoration of the Jan. 27, 1945, liberation by Soviet troops of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland. He has in the past called anti-Semitism unacceptable. "It's in the hands of the government to bring a case against them [the deputies] and not allow them to serve in the Duma," Rabbi Lazar said. "Any kind of anti-Semitic propaganda by government officials should be outlawed and these people should be brought to justice." He said: "Today they are trying to outlaw Jewish organizations, tomorrow they will try and do the same with any religion, any kind of national idea, and this is dangerous." The Israeli embassy in Moscow said the document used the same arguments the Nazis had. "It is a classic example of anti-Semitism," it said in a statement. "The theories in the appeal were used by the Nazi regime as a basis for the mass destruction of the Jews during World War Two." Russia came under the spotlight on Sunday when an Israeli government report expressed alarm at what it said were sharp rises in violent anti-Semitism over the past year. The report ranked Russia third in the world overall for anti-Semitic violence after France and Britain. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-01-26 |
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