A lawmaker apart of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government and political party claimed Sunday that family of two Jewish opposition party members brutally killed Christians, AFP reported.
“Christians survived despite the fact that the ancestors of Boris Vishnevsky and Maksim Reznik boiled us in cauldrons and fed us to animals,” Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov said during a protest over the transition of a Russian landmark in St. Petersburg to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Though he didn’t mention Jews specifically, the ultra-conservative Milonov came under fire for the comments from the Jewish community who believe he was, in fact, targeting the people and religion. Milonov also offered no proof of such heinous allegations and stoked fears as many Jews of late have left Russia.
“It is clear to any normal person that these lawmakers are of Jewish descent and that he means Jews,” Russia Jewish Congress president Yury Kaner said to Agence France-Presse.
Another Russian lawmaker, Alexey Kovalev, asked that Milonov’s comments be investigated, and stated the words were possibly “inciting hatred” and “dishonored” other lawmakers.
Today, roughly 194,000 Jews reside in Russia, the sixth-largest Jewish population in the world. Radio Free Europe reported in July 2015 that due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine many Jews were leaving the country for Israel. In 2014 alone, some 4,600 left Russia for Israel.
Milonov’s perceived hate speech were in stark contrast to Putin’s offer to accept Western European Jews in January 2016. According to the Jerusalem Post, Putin said to a Jewish delegation that the Russian Federation was “ready to accept them” and added Jews “should come here, to Russia. They left the Soviet Union; now they should come back.”
The delegation and others received those comments well amid reports last year that anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe. The Jerusalem Post reported last year that anti-Semitic “incidents” in London had risen more than 60 percent in 2015 and as much as 84 percent in the first quarter of 2015.
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