Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 16 – By the use of
force and its moves against Ukraine, the Kremlin has managed to suppress the
most outrageous skinheads who attracted international attention for celebrating
Hitler’s birthday and outspoken support for Nazism. But what the Putin regime
has not done is stop the killing of immigrants and Muslims by those who share
skinhead views.
As Yekaterina Ivashchenko of the Fergana news
agency puts it, “the skinheads have disappeared but the attacks on migrants has
not ceased.” Nor, Natalya Yudina of the SOVA analytic center says, does the
reduction in the number of these attacks mean as Moscow often claims that
xenophobia is declining (fergana.agency/articles/111570/).
According to Yudina, “people who on
the whole support xenophobia are quite numerous” even now, “but today far from
all are ready to go into the street and risk their freedom for such doubtful
convictions.” This intolerance among Russians reflects economic problems which
are getting worse and the fear of outsiders promoted in Soviet times and
that has never disappeared.
This week featured three other
reports about Russian attitudes to one minority, Muslims in the Russian
Federation, who overlap with immigrants from Central Asia and the
Caucasus. In the first, Sofiya Ragozina
reported on her research about Islamophobic memes in the Russian media (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/est-li-v-rossii-islamofobiy/).
The Higher School of Social and
Economic Sciences political scientist analyzed 20,669 articles from Russian newspapers
between 2010 and 2018 where there was a mention of Islam, Islamist or Muslim. The most frequently used adjectives, she says,
were “radical” and “traditional,” the basic divide between bad and good as far
as their authors are concerned.
In the second, speaking in Moscow,
Eva Rogaar, a historian at the University of Illinois, discussed the fate of
the several tens of thousands of ethnic Russians who have converted to Islam
over the last generation and in particular the attitudes of other Muslims and
other Russians toward them (mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/est-li-v-rossii-islamofobiy/).
Some ethnic Russians converted to
Islam because of marriage; others, because of a spiritual search; and still a
third group, as a form of political protest, the historian says. Many of them try to prove their value to the
new community by adopting an even more dogmatic and even radical position than
their fellow believers.
On the one hand, this offends many
Muslims who distrust the converts and worry about their impact on Muslim-Christian
relations; and on the other, it offends many Russians who view such conversions
as an act of ethnic betrayal and as an indication of the threats they face from
the increasing number of Muslims in the Russian Federation.
And in the third report, following Russian
government moves to suppress the For Human Rights organization, its head, Lev
Ponomaryev said on Youtube (https://youtu.be/jEQyTIfSk0w)
that one of the reasons he believes the authorities are targeting him is his
willingness to defend Muslims (golosislama.com/news.php?id=37378).
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