The anarchist blog Three-Way Fight [2] wants to know (despite leaving the question marks off their questions):
Why does the media - CNN, MSNBC, FOX, BBC, Harretz, etc - spend today going over and over again, with lots of video footage [3], of the bust of a supposed neo-Nazi group in Israel [4] that beat up people and vandalized synagogues. [Sic] The group, made up of Russian emigres who had at least some direct relative [5] who had been of Jewish religious/cultural descent, were videoed attacking people and sieg heiling in front of a German flag.
But in the same mainstream press there was almost no reporting three weeks ago of the Russian Nazi's (whether real or perhaps created by the Russian state agents as a way to spread propaganda against the regions [sic] actual growing far-right movement, with some estimates reaching 50,000 [6]) who kidnapped and murdered two men - one by beheading and one by blowing the poor mans brains out. The report and video emerged around August 15th. If there was reporting it was brief and buried.
Why do Nazis in Israel get coverage. [Sic] But when Nazis murder two men of possible Muslim origin (one who was from Dagestan and one who was a Tajiki), and issue a video [7] that makes any Jihadi beheading video look amateurish, seem to get a media blackout. Why is there "outrage" and questions of "how is this possible" when it's over threats against Israelis, yet actual killings of Muslims by Russian neo-Nazis seem ignored?
Well, the story about the Russo-Nazi surgence (a phenomenon eerily predicted by Bollywood [8], BTW) certainly does warrant greater attention—but it did get fairly prominent treatment in the New York Times [9] Aug. 14—while the Times' Sept. 9 coverage of the Israeli Nazis [10] rated less ink and less prominent placement.
Also, the Israeli Nazi story has the man-bites-dog quality that the media always find so irresistible. (Although if we—the media, reading public and alienated Russian youth alike—remembered our history [11] better, the notion of Russian Nazis would seem nearly absurd as Israeli Nazis.)
More troubling is Three-Way Fight's use of the word "supposed" for the Israeli Nazis—there is nothing "supposed" about them, unfortunately; they are quite obviously in deadly earnest. The Times also makes clear that these kids are not Jews: "Russia has a problem with neo-Nazi groups, and the phenomenon arrived in Israel with relatives of Jews who came here from the former Soviet Union but who are not themselves Jewish."
But nothing is more fashionable on the left these days than downplaying any threat to Jews. And we'd like to know why that double standard is any better than the one Three-Way Fight is decrying.
See our last posts on the radical right [12], Jew-hatred [13], Israel [14] and Russia [15].
