Staunton, December 8 – Vladimir
Putin followed the path of other world leaders and dutifully condemned the
Islamist attack on the French journal “Charlie Hebdo.” But in the minutes after the murderous
outrage, Russian propagandists close to the Kremlin filled social networks with
posts and tweets supporting the attackers, according to a Ukrainian blogger.
In reporting his findings – including
snaps of posts by Russians containing lines like “I just found out about this
and I am for those who shot them. There must be press censorship, and if you
don’t feel the limits, then you pay with your life” -- Newssky.com.ua suggests
that the content was similar enough to raise the question as to whether they
were acting on instructions (newssky.com.ua/v-moskve-raduyutsya-teraktam-al-qaeda-v-parizhe/#.VK5XtI0o5Ms).
That is probably unlikely – such Russians
appear to have been expressing their own views -- but as the news service
pointed out, “there is nothing surprising in this: no hypocritical sympathy
will be able to mask the fact that Putin by diplomacy, money and arms has
helped the Syrian dictator Bashar Asad” and that “the Kremlin has not concealed
its support of terrorist groups in the Middle East.”
Moreover, as Vladimir Varfolomeyev,
an Ekho Moskvy journalist has pointed out, among his acquaintances, those who
“are not condemning the attack on the [French] journal are almost the very same
people with whom we always argue about Putin, Crimea, the Donbas and so on” (echo.msk.ru/blog/varfolomeev/1470028-echo/).
The failure of those who back Putin
in Ukraine to condemn these attacks, the Moscow journalist says, show that
“today there is simply a gulf” between those who do and those who don’t. On one
side are those who support human rights and international order; on the other
are those who don’t.
Yevgeny Ikhlov, a Moscow
commentator, extends that argument. He
says that it is critically important that people understand that “the
difference between the terrorists … in Paris and Putin … is only a matter of
quantity but not quality,” one that reflects the control the Kremlin already
has over Russia compared to the lack of control Al Qaeda and the Islamic State
do (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54AD91A2AE76A).
That difference means that the
Russian government today with its “’Orthodox chekism’ can use “comparatively
vegetarian methods” of imposing its will, Ikhlov says, while Al Qaeda and the
Islamic State must still act “like the Chekists of the 1930s and the Hitlerite
storm troopers and Gestapo officers” who need to shed blood to advance their
cause.
In reality, he continues, “the
ideology of ‘the Russian world’ and the ideology of the ISIL from the point of
view of civilizational processes are twin brothers. The Donbas ‘armies and
Odesssa ‘partisans’ are the ‘Al Qaeda’ of ‘the Russian world,’ the second front
of the struggle with European civilization.”
Estonian parliamentarian Marko
Mikhelson expands on this idea by pointing to an underlying commonality between
the terrorist outrage in Paris and Moscow’s behavior in Ukraine: “The greatest
challenges for Europe have become Islamic extremism … which denies all borders
and revisionism” of borders “by Russia” (regnum.ru/news/polit/1882846.html).
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