The aggressive rhetoric used by today’s left-wing protestors outside the DNC convention in Chicago to demonize Israel as a racist colonialist state and equate it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa is eerily familiar.

It should be. Because it is a rehash of narratives from a decades-old highly successful Soviet disinformation campaign against the Jewish state. That information warfare effort began in the 1950s when Israel first aligned with the West and intensified after the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, where Israel’s victory represented a crushing defeat for the USSR- trained and funded Arabs.

The goal of the Soviet’s dezinformatsiya operation was to equate Zionism with Nazism and racism in order to portray Israel as an evil implant in the Middle East, create chaos and promote terrorism, all of which it hoped would lead to political and military advantages in its “cold” war against the West.

Understanding the USSR’s critical role in spreading anti-Zionist antisemitism is essential to contextualize subsequent events:

• The 1975 UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Soviet-endorsed Resolution 3379 falsely declaring “Zionism is Racism.”
• The 2001 “anti-racism” U.N. conference in Durban, South Africa, which weaponized the slander that Israel is a fascist apartheid state.
• The current left-wing libel that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
• The justification of terrorism, euphemistically called “resistance,” against Israelis and Jews.,

In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda claimed that Judaism, with its concept of Jews as a chosen people, was an inherently racist religion and that Zionism, an outgrowth of Judaism, asserted Jewish racial superiority. The Soviets promoted this defamation, including at the U.N. which, in 1975 adopted a virulently antisemitic resolution cloaked as anti-Zionism.

Shortly after the 1967 Israeli victory, the KGB launched Operation SIG (Russian acronym for Jewish or Zionist government), a massive worldwide campaign of lies, distortions and deceptions against Israel and the West. This disinformation offensive strategically linked Israel, Jews and Zionism with racism, colonialism, imperialism and fascism to attract and indoctrinate both Leftist activists and Islamist jihadis against the Jewish state.

The message was clear: Israel, the Jewish collective, is the most illegitimate and criminal state on the planet and Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination, is a monstrous bogeyman.

In Latin America, the Soviets framed Zionism as an extension of American imperialism. In Africa, democratic Israel was falsely accused of South African-style apartheid against its supposed “aboriginal” Arabs.

In Europe, where Nazism was reviled as humanity’s greatest evil, the USSR defamed Israel as a Nazi state. In the Middle East, SIG fabricated a storyline that Israel is the eternal home, not of the indigenous Jews, but of a “Palestinian nation” they secretly helped create, a nation fighting for its liberation and human rights.

This insidious defamation campaign included thousands of articles and hours of Radio Moscow broadcasts in multiple languages, distributed globally. Communist front organizations disseminated the propaganda. In 1967, the Soviets sponsored a meeting in New Delhi with representatives from 50 nations and 70 organizations and declared that Israel violates all standards of human decency, justifying Palestinian terrorism as “righteous resistance.”

Operation SIG relied on age-old antisemitic canards and conspiracy theories including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, substituting “Zionists” for “Jews.” Tropes about “Jewish power” became propaganda about “Zionist power” and the Jew as the devil was replaced by the evil Zionist Nazi committing genocide against innocent Arabs.

The KGB understood that promoting Jew-hatred as anti-Zionism made it palatable to audiences who may otherwise have recoiled from their rhetoric. But Jew-hatred it is, camouflaged with new labels.

Drawing on Nazi propaganda tactics, the KGB manipulated emotion and used repetition to inculcate its “big lies” as truth. They capitalized on images of suffering Arabs to evoke sympathy and sway public opinion, a strategy adopted by modern Palestinian propaganda.

According to Izabella Tabarovsky, a Wilson Center scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism, “Today’s progressives are speaking the language of the old Soviet propaganda” against Zionists, Israel and Jews, “reproducing the Soviet demonization, slogans and explanatory logic verbatim as their essential talking points.”

Initially, Soviet defamation of Israel was adopted only by the fringe Left, but it has since migrated into the mainstream Left, influencing discourse and policy on campuses, in government and on our streets where Israeli and American flags burn.

The Soviet’s dezinformatsiya campaign succeeded beyond its creators’ wildest dreams, legitimizing antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism and weaponizing it in a terror war against the Jews.

Former USSR premier Yuri Andropov observed, “We have only to keep repeating our themes that the United States and Israel are fascists, Imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews.” Lies told and retold become a force multiplier.

The past is prologue. The USSR created this shameful heritage and today’s Left perpetuates it with devasting consequences for Israel and the Jewish people.

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