The ultimate irony

The excuse given by Vladimir Putin, his sycophantic media and his toadies, bots and trolls for the illegal invasion of Ukraine was that the country he attacked was supposedly run by Nazis - ignoring inconvenient truths such as the President of Ukraine being a Jew whose grandfather was one of the few survivors of a family much of which was murdered during the holocaust by the real Nazis - which was supposedly posing a threat to Ukraine.

Much Russian propaganda throughout the conflict has been framed around a hunt for imaginary fascists and Nazis in Ukraine.

So what an irony that Putin's own regime is now showing signs of moving against the Jews in Russia. The former Chief Rabbi is now in exile having resigned rather than go along with pressure from the Kremlin on all religious leaders in Russia to back the war. Many other Jews have fled Russia. Now the regime is moving to "liquidate" the Jewish Agency which helps Russian Jews emigrate to Israel.

(The quotation marks around that word of ill omen are from an article in The Times - which also put the word in quotation marks, apparently inferring that it had been used by the Russian Foreign Ministry.)

Several successive Russian regimes going back to the Tzars have had a long and evil history of stirring up persecution against the Jews when they needed someone to blame for whatever was going wrong.

It hasn't reached the level of pogroms yet but there is enough fear among the country's Jewish population that between 20,000 and 40,000 of Russia's pre February Jewish population of 160k to 200,000 have left the country for Israel since the invasion began.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has been repeating anti-semitic tropes and there are disturbing signs of racial tension.

What an irony if a regime which started a war on the pretext of falsely accusing the country it invaded of being run by Nazis should go full-on Nazi itself.

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