It is clear that Islam plays a large role in Russian war plans. Since the beginning of the Soviet era, spies have not only succeeded in penetrating deep into Muslim countries and increasing dependencies, but also in firmly anchoring the classic, anti-Jewish conspiracy ideology there: The alleged Jewish world conspiracy supposedly controls Europe and the USA. Together with Moscow, Muslims could free themselves. Climate activist Greta Thunberg shocked Twitter with a photo in which she and fellow activists expressed solidarity for Palestinians. Next to her is a plush octopus, which some on social media interpret as an anti-Semitic cliché about Jewish financiers who were supposedly able to decide on war and peace on their own. Britain had originally preferred to maintain ties with Arab kingdoms and forbid Jews from fleeing Europe in significant numbers to the Palestinian region, which had devastating consequences. Later, the small state of Israel was permitted; surrounded by Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The framing that is repeatedly used against Israel is “anti-imperialism,” which was already set by Lenin in the early Soviet Union. It is not known whether Greta and her colleagues believe in the fairy tales about a global Jewish conspiracy and, like Hamas, refer to the “Protocols of Zion”. The French early socialists, still read today and who influenced Karl Marx, first popularized the idea of a parasitic Jewish mega-conspiracy behind capitalism. Most leftists then eliminated Jews from their ideology, but retained the essential “parasitic” attributes for the “capitalist pig”. The right-wing ethnic movements copied the ideas about the supposed Jewish conspiracy.
Soviet framing
Islam was the second largest religion in the USSR. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, there were 25,000 mosques throughout the Russian Empire, which was reduced to just 500 by the 1970s of the Soviet Union. In the years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, between 45 and 50 million Soviet citizens identified themselves as Muslims. In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, a text that later led to a policy of cultivating left-wing nationalists within Muslim communities in the Soviet era. Soviet secret services also exerted influence beyond the borders of the USSR; such as the Palestinian groups, in Egypt, Syria, etc. An anti-Western attitude among Muslims was recorded as “anti-imperialist” with the appropriate framing according to Lenin.
Before the Bolshevik Revolution, the first Muslim All-Russian Congress took place in Moscow in May 1917. In 1928, a large-scale purge of the leadership of the Muslim-majority Soviet republics began with the execution of Veli İbraimov of the Tatar Communist Party and Milliy Firqa, who sought to impose a nationalist ideology in favor of the Crimean Tatars. This was followed by the elimination of the leaders of the Muslim Social Democratic Party, the Tatar Communist Party, the Tatar Union of the Godless and the Young Bukharians. Stalin’s policies led to the initiation of Huyum, a Soviet campaign aimed at strengthening Islamic systems in Central Asia. Soviet intelligence disseminated “The Protocols of Zion” and similar texts on a large scale throughout the Muslim world. Lenin’s socio-political analysis of empire as the final stage of capitalism was derived from Imperialism: A Study (1902) by John A. Hobson, an English economist. Hobson’s writings on the Second Boer War, particularly in The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, attribute the war in part to Jewish influence, including references to Rothschild bankers.
But they actually had been subject to the high nobility from the beginning, starting with the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Other banks such as Barings, Lloyds and Barclays were also integrated into the new “fractional” banking system together with the central bank “Bank of England”. To ensure that competing empires did not immediately copy the new system, right-wing and left-wing propaganda channels on behalf of the British secret service badmouthed it as an absurdity and a Jewish conspiracy. John Hobson spoke of “men of a single and distinct race.” They have “centuries of financial experience” and “are in a unique position to control the politics of nations.” The leader of the British Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, wrote a foreword for the 2011 edition of Hobson’s work and referred to Hobson’s analysis as brilliant. In April 2020, an internal Labor Party report entitled “The work of the Labor Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019” was leaked to the media. It included 10,000 emails and thousands of private WhatsApp communications between former senior party officials. A major scandal arose about anti-Semitism. Corbyn supports the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from NATO and the dissolution of NATO. In April 2014, Corbyn wrote an article for the Morning Star in which he blamed the crisis in Ukraine on NATO. Corbyn is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. At a Stop the War Coalition meeting in 2009, Corbyn said he had invited “friends” from Hamas and Hezbollah to an event in Parliament.
After the defeat of the Soviet-controlled Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Soviet Union launched a comprehensive covert campaign against Israel that included propaganda as well as direct military support (financing, weapons, training) to terrorist groups that declared Israel their enemy. In addition, the USSR decided to increase anti-Israel sentiment by spreading anti-Zionist propaganda. The overall goal of the campaign was to spread the idea that the State of Israel was an oppressive, imperialist state. Former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov said:
“We just have to keep repeating our theses that the United States and Israel are fascists, imperial Zionist countries financed by rich Jews.”
The book “KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View” was written by Ladislav Bittman, a former intelligence officer who specialized in disinformation for the Czech secret service (1985). The book “Disinformation”, written by former spy chief Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa and Prof. Ronald Rychlak (2013), revealed further details. According to Pacepa, the “Palestinian Liberation Army” was created by the KGB. The KGB drafted the Palestinian National Charter and carefully selected the 422 members of the PLO Council. According to Pacepa, the KGB had selected Yasser Arafat.
The KGB trained Arafat at “its special forces school, Balashikha, east of Moscow, and in the mid-1960s decided to train him to become a future PLO leader” (Pacepa, 2003). In a conversation with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972, Andropov told Pacepa that the KGB was converting Arafat’s Marxist ideals into a fanatical anti-Zionism. Dalin (2005) writes:
“The PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department, and Willy Berner, an SS officer at the Mauthausen death camp.”
Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was caught supplying weapons to Fatah. The Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi La Nation Européenne, was also on Fatah’s payroll. Another Belgian, the neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, was recruited by the PLO. Up to 81% of Palestinians believe the Palestinian Authority institutions are corrupt. In 1977, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, admitted in an interview with a Dutch newspaper (Dorsey, 1977):
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of the Palestinian state is only a means of continuing our fight against the State of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today of the existence of a Palestinian people… to oppose Zionism.
The oldest academic journal that described Arab Palestinians as a people was the Journal of Palestine Studies, founded in 1972, five years after the start of Operation SIG. US Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt is quoted as saying the Palestinian Authority pays more than $13,000,000 a month to terrorists. (Jaffe-Hoffman, 2019a). David Meir-Levi (2007b) writes:
“Arafat was particularly impressed by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing leftists. Left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States at universities enthusiastically followed the [propaganda] line of North Vietnamese activists and succeeded in reframing the Vietnam War from a communist attack on the South into a struggle for national liberation.
Arafat and his lieutenants said that they, too, would have to redefine the framing of their struggle to be successful.
Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345350341_The_KGB_and_Anti-Israel_Propaganda_Operations
https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-officials-were-part-of-kgb-spy-ring-report
