The anti-Jewish riots yesterday in Dagestan, a heavily-Muslim area of Russia, are thought to have been instigated by inflammatory material from a Telegram channel called “Utro Dagestan” (Dagestan Morning). This involved rumors that Israeli settlers were flying into Dagestan, assumedly to now settle there. RT reports that, despite portraying itself as a local outlet, the channel had been exposed by both Russian officials and the Killnet hacker community as a Ukrainian intelligence service project, set up to stir unrest in Russia. They report that the channel experienced rapid growth right after the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in February 2022 and has been the recipient of major funding.
One lead is that the provocateur Ilya Ponomaryev has claimed that “Utro Dagestan” is one of “their” operations. (Ponomarev has claimed many operations, including the Moscow assassination of journalist Darya Dugina.) Recently he seems to have attempted to distance himself from “Utro Dagestan.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press today: “It’s clear that considering the TV footage showing the horror of what is happening in the Gaza Strip—the deaths of ... children, elderly men, medics, others—it’s easy for malevolent actors to abuse the situation, escalate it, [and] agitate the people.” He said that President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed the importance of interfaith harmony in Russia and announced that he would chair a high-level meeting today on “the attempts by the West to use the events in the Middle East to divide the Russian society.”
In Dagestan, anti-riot police were deployed and at least 10 people, including civilians and police officers, required medical assistance after the clashes. The head of Dagestan Sergey Melikov delivered a clear message: “There is no courage in mobbing unarmed people who did nothing wrong. There is no honor in tossing curse words at strangers, getting into their pockets in attempts to check their passports. No good intention can make one attack women and children.” Further, stoking religious animosities is the “act of a scoundrel” and a “foul game.”
Otherwise, the Russian Council of Muftis yesterday issued a statement, saying, as reported by RT, that “the recent escalation between Israel and Hamas had understandably aroused tensions worldwide, there can be no justification for transplanting these onto Russian society, which is composed of numerous ethnic and religious groups. They stressed that internal religious conflict should be prevented at all costs, urging Russian Muslims to prioritize stability and peace in their homeland and not to allow the influence of external factors. A scenario where various religious groups within Russian society are pitted against one another would play into the hands of the country’s enemies.”
Then RT directly quoted the statement: “Unacceptable to our religion are injustice, collective punishment, lynching, as well as such forms of racism and hubris as anti-Semitism and Judeophobia.” Otherwise, it cited the Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a Jewish woman named Safiyya, and called for Russian Muslims not to fall for provocations.
