On His Telegram Channel, Kadyrov Drops Putin’s Reference to Jews as Having fought for Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 29 – In his address to the Federal Assembly, Vladimir Putin listed several religions whose followers had fought for their common motherland of Russia. On this list were among others Jews. But when he talked about Putin’s speech on his telegram channel, Chechnya head Ramzan Kadyrov engaged in a kind of censorship and dropped that reference.

            This is not only the latest indication of Kadyrov’s sense that he can do things other regional leaders can’t as few of the latter would ever dream of editing Putin in this way. But it is also an example of his own anti-Semitic approach and his catering to anti-Semitism among people in the North Caucasus.

            In reporting this incident, the Kavkaz-Uzel news portal notes that on his telegram channel which has been coming out since May 2017 and has two million followers, Kadyrov has mentioned Jews only once and then to denounce “Zionist Jews who are killing the peaceful Muslims of Palestine on November 10^th of last year (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/397653).

            The conflation of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic tropes has long been a part of narratives in the North Caucasus, something that officials like Kadyrov have done nothing to oppose and often as now appeared to support. (For background on these attitudes, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/shmulyevich-and-mukhametov-debate.html windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/fsb-controlled-muslim-hierarchies-in.html windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/anti-semitic-outrages-like-those-in.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/11/anti-jewish-pogroms-in-north-caucasus.html.)