>From: "Chris Doss" <itschris13 at hotmail.com>
>Russian Jewish leaders have said clearly, again and again and again, that
>anti-Semitism is not a problem in Russia. Yet this bogus stereotype
>persists. The desire to have a Dark Continent upon which one's fantasies
>can be projected seems to be a strong one in the West. Someone much abler
>than I should really do an Orientalism about this.
>
>So I stand by Woj's vampire statement. The idea that anti-Semitism is a big
>problem in Russia, and probably Eastern Europe as a whole, is a whole lot
>of crap.
By the way, this has already happened in the case of Motherland, which various Western "experts" have already decided must be anti-Semites, without any evidence (any Russian political movement opposed to US interests is invariably branded as anti-Semitic). The rather tedentious translation of Motherland's slogan by Michael McFaul (http://www.exile.ru/180/180210000.html; http://www.exile.ru/141/141060518.html; http://www.raaad.org/article.php?sid=79) "My vernyom sebe Rossiyu" as "Russia for the Russians," which McFaul without basis asserts is ultranationalist, is a case in point. Actually it means "We will return Russia to ourselves." The target of Motherland's rhetoric is very clearly the oligarchs, not Jews of all things.
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