Anti-Zionism’s Soviet Roots

[canada-man]

Soviet’s Anti-Semitic Operation SIG


Operation SIG was the KGB’s operation to use lies, which the Soviets referred to as disinformation to target Muslims with hatred of Jews and Israel throughout the world. The propaganda was intended to increase terroristic attacks against both using similar means as the Nazi’s. SIG was short for the Russian being translated to Jewish, Zionist Government.

In 2019, Informing Science released, THE KGB’S OPERATION SIG: A 50-YEAR CAMPAIGN TO INCITE HATRED OF ISRAEL AND JEWS. It has numerous pages of citations explaining how Operation SIG continues to impact the world through the misinformation campaign, which is the purposeful spread of false information, including fabricated history. Just about every false notion anti-Semites have about Israel and the Jewish people today, including the belief of Israel being an apartheid state, originated with Operation SIG.

From the section, Inventing a new narrative, Claiming Jews as the aggressor, of the paper:

“In 1948 the fledgling democratic State of Israel was attacked by five Arab armies bent on its destruction. This reality did not support the ambitions of the USSR, and so the KGB created a replacement narrative of Israel as the aggressor. That new narrative started by talking about the Arabs of the region as a distinct people, the Palestinians, even though these Arabs failed to meet the commonly held criteria of peoplehood. Peoplehood typically is understood as having distinctness in language, religion, history, culture, historical sovereignty, national literature, and such. For example, the Kurds, Armenians, Catalonians, Bangladeshis, Slovakians, Slovenes, and Jews are peoples. The uniqueness of Arab Palestinians needed to be constructed whole cloth but was and is essential to claim the land of Israel as the homeland for Arab Palestinians. “Historically, the Palestinian ‘desire for statehood’ and ‘need for liberation’ was invented in large part by the Soviet Union” according to Christopher Fish writing in the Stanford Review (2008). He writes “Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, a historical fabrication born out of a communist thirst for expansion and an Arab resentment of the existence of Israel.”

The Soviets were opposed to all democracies, including Israel. Creating the false narrative of Palestinian nationalism purposely resulted in terrorist attacks against Israel, and violent attacks against Jews throughout the world.

Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, former deputy chief of Romanian intelligence service was directly involved in Operation SIG. He was one of the highest-ranking Soviets to ever defect.

From 2013, Tablet Magazine, Former Soviet Spy Sees the Long Arm of the KG in Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism, stated:

“By 1978, when Pacepa left Romania for good, the KGB had dispatched 500 undercover agents to target Islamic countries, he writes. Most of them were engineers, medical doctors, teachers, and art instructors. They were part of a Soviet force Pacepa estimates at 4,000, whose job was to spread anti-Semitic and anti-Western hate. The KGB, he writes, distributed several hundred thousand copies of the Protocols in Arabic via these agents and others.”

The Protocols referred to are the debunked, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Just like other anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns of the past, the truth had no bearing on the purposeful lies told to bring about hatred of the Jewish people.

Every vile lie embraced by anti-Semites about Israel and the whole of the Jewish people can be traced back to Operations SIG. It is important to counter the hatred started by the Soviets with the truth.

Propaganda, no matter how effective, can never rewrite history.

The Blogs: Soviet’s Anti-Semitic Operation SIG | Bob Ryan | The Times of Israel

 

[canada-man]

Former Soviet Spy Sees the Long Arm of the KGB in Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism




On a reporting trip to Gaza, Amman, and Damascus in 1994, I made a habit of asking Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders whom I met with the following question: Did they think the Jews had a plan to dominate the world? I’ll never forget the enthusiastic answer of a pediatrician named Abdelaziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader, whom I met in his doctor’s office in Gaza. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “I have a copy right here.” And he pulled down from a shelf an Arabic-language copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was a response I heard again and again.

What I didn’t know at that time was that the KGB had supplied the books and was spreading anti-Semitic and anti-Western filth as part of a plan to generate a widespread Muslim revolt. Now, in his new book Disinformation, Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, once the deputy chief of the Romanian intelligence service and one of the highest-ranking Soviet officials to defect to the West, describes a KGB disinformation campaign focused on the Protocols. Code-named Operation SIG—an acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or Zionist governments—it was designed to seed anti-Semitic antagonism to the United States throughout the Muslim world.

Pacepa claims that the KGB and its subordinate services in the Eastern bloc spent more time on disinformation—dezinformatsiya, in Russian—than they did actually collecting intelligence. By carefully planting false stories about prominent leaders, especially those they feared, they sought to convince the public that the falsehoods were true. And they succeeded again and again. “This remarkable book will change the way you look at intelligence, foreign affairs, the press, and much else besides,” former CIA Director R. James Woolsey writes in the introduction.

The science of dezinformatsiya is complex, and Pacepa learned its rules from his Kremlin masters. Pacepa explains how Soviet leaders saw these efforts. “As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will—all by itself—generate a horde of unwitting but passionate advocates.”

Disinformation expands on Operation SIG, one of Andropov’s signature programs, which Pacepa described in an essay for the National Review in 2006, during the Second Lebanon War. “By 1972, Andropov’s disinformation machinery was working around the clock to persuade the Islamic world that Israel and the United States intended to transform the rest of the world into a Zionist fiefdom,” Pacepa writes. He explains that Andropov told him the goal was to “whip up their illiterate, oppressed mobs to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against Israel and America would flow naturally from the Muslims’ anti-Semitic fervor.”

The Romanians, Pacepa claims, were tasked with infiltrating Libya, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria—all countries where Romania was contributing expertise for infrastructure projects—with agents trained in anti-Semitic dezinformatsiya and terrorist operations. Pacepa’s intelligence service, known as the D.I.E., received an Arabic-language translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with “documentary” material “proving that the United States was a Zionist country whose aim was to transform the Islamic world into a Jewish fiefdom.”

By 1978, when Pacepa left Romania for good, the KGB had dispatched 500 undercover agents to target Islamic countries, he writes. Most of them were engineers, medical doctors, teachers, and art instructors. They were part of a Soviet force Pacepa estimates at 4,000, whose job was to spread anti-Semitic and anti-Western hate. The KGB, he writes, distributed several hundred thousand copies of the Protocols in Arabic via these agents and others.
Disinformation has become “the bubonic plague of our contemporary life,” Pacepa writes. Lenin used it to bring communism to life. Hitler used it to “rationalize” the Holocaust.

Khrushchev used it against the pope to “widen the gap” between Christians and Jews. Andropov used it to “turn the Islamic world against the United States and ignited the international terrorism that threats us today.” More recently, the conspiracy-laden Jew-hatred that permeates the Muslim world reared its head in the ugly rumors that Mossad was behind the 9/11 attacks. The so-called proof? The canard that 4,000 Jews received cell-phone messages early that morning warning to stay away from their jobs at the Twin Towers. That story was purveyed not only by Arabic language media, but by the conspiracy theorists like Thierry Meyssan, who wrote the French best-seller The Big Lie. As I unpacked that chain of disinformation in my book Preachers of Hate, I pointed out that Meyssan and his ilk conveniently ignored all the Jewish names in the public list of the 9/11 victims.
Henry Kissinger once playfully dismissed critics who accused him of paranoia. “Even a paranoid can have enemies,” he quipped to Time. Reading Disinformation will open one’s eyes to those enemies.

Soviet Spy Sees KGB Fingerprints on Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism - Tablet Magazine

 

[canada-man]

In this provocative video, we dive deep into the controversial theory that the Palestinian identity was crafted by the KGB as part of a Cold War strategy. Through the lens of historical sources, including Yves Mamou’s compelling arguments, we investigate the geopolitical shifts post-1947 and the role of UNRWA in institutionalizing this identity. Discover how Soviet propaganda and foreign influence shaped Palestinian nationalism, creating narratives centered on grievance and victimhood. With insights from former intelligence officials and contemporary voices, this exploration challenges perceptions and ignites critical discussions.

 

[Frankfooter]

In this provocative video, we dive deep into the controversial theory that the Palestinian identity was crafted by the KGB as part of a Cold War strategy. Through the lens of historical sources, including Yves Mamou’s compelling arguments, we investigate the geopolitical shifts post-1947 and the role of UNRWA in institutionalizing this identity. Discover how Soviet propaganda and foreign influence shaped Palestinian nationalism, creating narratives centered on grievance and victimhood. With insights from former intelligence officials and contemporary voices, this exploration challenges perceptions and ignites critical discussions.

Wow, now your form of genocide includes wiping out the entire Palestinian people by label as well as by bombs and starvation.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1918321227602550978

 

[wigglee]

Anti-Palestinian genocide has Zionist roots. 50,000 killed after 1200 Israelis were killed on Oct 7, and they are still bombing aid ships and children. It is obscene.

 

[Frankfooter]

Anti-Palestinian genocide has Zionist roots. 50,000 killed after 1200 Israelis were killed on Oct 7, and they are still bombing aid ships and children. It is obscene.

Worse than even the bombing is the intentional starving of 2 million people, for the second time.
This is nazi level evil.

As Israelis Blockade Food to Gaza, 9,000 Children have been Admitted for Acute Malnutrition

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1917733617721118929

 

[niniveh]

"Remember Kids the post 1964 Palestinian movement and anti-Zionism are created of the Soviet Union and its KGB"


Amusing and pathetic that hasbara provocateurs are raking up the remains of the Soviet Union when little else is working in defense of racism, apartheid and genocide.
Their refrain, nonetheless, persists. You dare criticize Bibi's brutality and we will paint you a Jew-hater.

 

[Frankfooter]

"Remember Kids the post 1964 Palestinian movement and anti-Zionism are created of the Soviet Union and its KGB"


Amusing and pathetic that hasbara provocateurs are raking up the remains of the Soviet Union when little else is working in defense of racism, apartheid and genocide.
Their refrain, nonetheless, persists. You dare criticize Bibi's brutality and we will paint you a Jew-hater.

They are getting desperate, they need to add new villains in order to keep trying to claim they are the victims of their own occupation.
Even after killing so many journalists, trying to attack US press freedom and their own media, the story still is getting out.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1918651437258547224

 

[Klatuu]

Christians….pay attention

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1919094715644788912

 

[canada-man]

The Three Best Books on Soviet Anti-Zionism, recommended by Izabella Tabarovsky




7 October brought on an explosion of vicious, conspiratorial propaganda about Israel and Zionism. From accusing Israel of perpetrating a genocide, to equating Zionism with Nazism, to whitewashing Hamas’ atrocities (it’s just decolonisation, silly!), to denying empathy to the tortured, murdered and kidnapped Jews: manipulations, fabrications and incitement that have flooded global media over the past nine months have been shocking. But have they been unprecedented? From the technical standpoint, the answer is yes: never before has it been so cheap and easy to pump out lies and antizionist conspiracy theory to so many people simultaneously. In terms of content, however, the current campaign is hardly innovative, borrowing wholesale from the global antizionist propaganda campaigns the USSR ran in the wake of the Six-Day war. The books I’d like to recommend today shed light on that campaign and the geopolitical and cultural context that made it so successful, to help us better understand the current wave of anti-Israel demonisation.

Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin: The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World

This book is one of two that Andrew, a historian with the University of Cambridge, and Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, co-wrote based on documents the latter smuggled out with him when he defected in the 1990s. Zionism, Israel, and Palestinian terrorism occupy only a small part of the book but what makes the book valuable is that it sets these in the context of the broader Soviet strategy to use the Third World in its proxy war against its Cold War adversary, the United States. Moscow coopted the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and anti-racist concerns of these countries, positioning itself as their chief advocate in that struggle and deploying that language in its sweeping anti-Western and anti-American propaganda and disinformation campaigns.

Israel’s victory over the Soviet Arab clients in the Six Day War—unexpected and inexplicable from the Soviet perspective—set off major alarms in Moscow. With antisemitic conspiracy theory firmly part of KGB’s thinking, the agency’s head, Yuri Andropov, elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis. Wherever he cast his gaze, Andropov saw the hand of Zionism operating against Soviet interests. With the enemy this omnipresent, the response had to be global as well.

KGB residencies across the world were instructed to increase collection of intelligence on ‘the plans, forms and methods of Zionist subversion’ and work to ‘weaken and divide the Zionist movement.’ Obsessed with the supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, the KGB sought to discredit it by forging racist letters in the name of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League and sending them to Black American leaders and heads of Arab missions in New York. Believing that ‘virtually no major negative incidents’ happened in the socialist bloc without Zionist involvement, the KGB blamed Poland’s Solidarity movement on the few Jews within its ranks. At the UN, it helped engineer the passage of the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. When the British chief rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits came to the USSR, the agency got eleven ‘highly trained’ KGB agents to talk to him under the guise of ordinary Soviet Jews to convince him that only a small minority among them wanted to emigrate.

In a separate chapter the authors examine Moscow’s relationship with Palestinian terrorist groups. Moscow’s policy was ‘to distance itself from terrorism in public’ while promoting ‘Palestinian terrorist attacks’ in private, they write. KGB had contacts with most Palestinian factions and had agents within both the PLO and the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, where it had recruited the deputy leader and head of foreign operations Wadi Haddad. It trained and armed the groups.

One thing the book makes clear is how much influence the USSR had across the Third World, ‘national-liberation’ movements, and leftist intellectuals. It was this influence that helped Moscow turn its post-1967 antizionist campaign into a global one, which is the subject of my next recommendation.

Baruch A. Hazan, Soviet Propaganda: A Case Study of the Middle East Conflict

Baruch Hazan’s 1976 book provides a detailed look at the themes, techniques and infrastructure of the Soviet anti-Israel campaign up to that point. (In fact, these didn’t change in any fundamental ways in the years that followed.) Hazan’s account helps us grasp the scale and reach of the operation and recognise that while communications technology has improved immeasurably since then, the basic methods of anti-Jewish psyops have largely stayed the same.

In addition to popularising general themes that remain a staple of antizionist campaigning to this day (such as equating Zionism with every evil under the sun, including imperialism, colonialism, racism, Nazism, fascism, terror, apartheid and even antisemitism), Moscow spread sensationalist lies often sourced from Arab media. For example, it accused Israelis of sterilising Arab women or using herbicides to exterminate entire populations of Arab villages. (Variations on these blood libel-like lies frequently pop up on social media today.) The Al-Aqsa blood libel, which remains central to the anti-Israel demonisation today, appeared in Soviet propaganda too, and so did accusations of genocide, with Soviet media harping on the Zionist ‘criminal plan of liquidating the Palestinian people.’ Another theme that appeared in Soviet agitprop and remains in the anti-Israel propagandists’ arsenal to this day is accusing the IDF of intentionally targeting Palestinian children for extermination.

Disseminating lies that evoked powerful emotional responses was a tool Soviet propagandists used deliberately, recognising that no amount of subsequent fact-checking could erase the initial emotional impact. (We’ve seen this dynamic at work in recent months with the Al-Ahli hospital bombing hoax.) Another technique was to accuse Israel of masterminding the very acts of terror that were directed against it—including the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games and the Ma’alot massacre. (The post-7 October Apache helicopter conspiracy theory, claiming that Israeli Air Force intentionally murdered Israelis on that day, is a contemporary version of the same.) All this helped build the image of Israel as inherently and irreparably evil, while denying Israelis any measure of empathy—a fundamental process of dehumanisation that paved the way for today’s college students to assert that ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live.’

Hazan describes Soviet anti-Israel propaganda going into overdrive during major conflicts, drawing on Moscow’s global influence for maximum impact. For example, when Arab states attacked Israel on Yom Kippur of 1973, Moscow announced that it didn’t matter ‘who fired the first shot’ and immediately began to transmit, via its state newswire service TASS, hundreds of denunciations of ‘Israeli aggression,’ coupled with ‘solidarity messages’ hailing the Arab people’s ‘heroic resistance.’ Messages came from heads of non-aligned states and socialist countries, GDR youth associations, the governing party of India, Italian Communist Party, ‘the people of Pakistan,’ Guinea, Malaysia, Mauritania, Upper Volta, Nigeria, Congo, Iran: all of these condemned Israel in unison, in virtually the same language, even as Israel fought for survival.

‘Distortion, falsehood, exaggeration and misrepresentation of facts’ coupled with endless repetition, in multiple languages, tailored to specific audiences across the globe: these were basic tools of the Soviet global anti-Zionist propaganda. Anti-Israel propagandists of today are following down a well-trodden path.

Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society

Hollander’s book doesn’t touch on Zionism or Israel, but it’s an invaluable read for anyone trying to understand the phenomenon of Western intellectuals standing with Hamas in the wake of October 7. With subtle humor and keen eye for detail, Hollander follows the intellectuals who went to faraway lands (Stalin’s USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, North Korea) in search of utopia—and found it. The regimes they visited knew exactly what to give them to fulfil their fantasies (flattery was an important tool, among others)—and turn them into their mouthpieces.

Why did so many writers, thinkers, academics choose to disengage their primarily professional skill—critical thinking—when faced with ‘repressive and mendacious totalitarian systems and movements’? Why were they drawn to them in the first place? How did these self-described ‘humanists’ and ‘humanitarians’ succeed at overlooking and excusing the ‘repression, corruption, social injustice’ and ‘organized lying’ staring them in the face? One factor Hollander points to in answering these questions is the unexamined legacy of the 1960s, with its ‘revolutionary romanticism’ and feelings of ‘alienation and estrangement’ from ‘American society’ and ‘its major values and institutions.’ There were, of course, also plenty of personal interests and political agendas involved. The real citizens of these countries—their actual struggles, their longing for dignity and freedom—were irrelevant to this enlightened bunch, who had domestic friends and foes to impress, social ladders to climb, and new op-eds and books to publish and promote.

In the preface to the 1997 edition, Hollander observes that while many had come to acknowledge intellectuals’ past ‘propensity’ for misjudging ‘societies which claimed to be socialist,’ this tendency was by no means a matter of the past: the intellectuals of the late 1990s, he wrote, remained just as susceptible ‘to the claims of certain countries and their political systems.’ This remains astoundingly true today—and possibly has gotten even worse. Not only do today’s intellectuals continue to espouse variations on the manifestly failed Marxist doctrine: they’ve also become an easy mark for Islamist regimes and movements, which skillfully manipulate the latest academic and progressive jargon to get these ‘thought leaders’ to do their bidding: namely, to help destroy a country millions of Jews call home, while claiming, Soviet propaganda-style, that they are only being antizionist and not at all antisemitic.



Fathom – The Three Best Books on Soviet Anti-Zionism, recommended by Izabella Tabarovsky