HOW THEY -P.E. THINK!!!!!

RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT FANTASIES ABOUT ISRAEL

Tom Gross adds: One reason this isn’t the lead story in Western newspapers is that Western liberal newspapers generally don’t care about crimes by “third world,” Islamist or far-left dictatorships. Below I attach a new article by the Istanbul-based, American journalist Claire Berlinski, from City Journal. She asks why the mainstream right has been willing to learn, absorb and record the horrible lessons of Fascism, but the mainstream left is still reluctant to do so regarding the crimes of communism.

The article is not directly related to the Middle East, but does have one or two illuminating anecdotes suggesting interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy.

Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place between then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then Syrian President Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:

ASSAD: To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .

GORBACHEV: I think so, too. . . .

ASSAD: Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.

GORBACHEV: But this is racism, combined with Messianism!

ASSAD: This is the most dangerous form of racism.

Berlinski notes: “One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.”

 

A LESS FAVORABLE VIEW OF MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

In other ways too, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the largely sympathetic one in which he is generally regarded in the West.

In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983. And these minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

“Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.”

Gorbachev: “We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?”

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending the April 9, 1989 massacre of peaceful protesters in the Georgian capital Tbilisi by Soviet troops.