Russia’s propaganda wars: Neo-Nazism and Ukraine - Part Two: Surfing the wave of Russian anti-Semitism

This is the second of a three-part newsletter considering the subject of Russian propaganda and disinformation regarding their purported reasons for invading and destroying Ukraine. President Putin and state-controlled Russian media repeatedly stress  that Ukraine is being run by neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.
 
This second newsletter weighs Russia’s role (both in history past and present) in propagating and encouraging anti-Semitic theories and practices, including its use of terrorism and its strengthening of modern neo-Nazi movements.
 
 
An anti-Nazi invasion?
 
At dawn on February 24, 2022 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced: “Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine . . . We will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”
 
On Friday February 25 Putin also described the leadership of Ukraine as “that gang of junkies and neo-Nazis that are holed up in Kiev and holding hostage the entire Ukrainian nation”
 
And on February 26, the state-run RIA news agency stated that Russia “for the second time in history will take on the burden of responsibility for the liberation of Ukraine from Nazism.”
 
In our upcoming third newsletter, an analysis of Putin’s claims regarding Nazism in Ukraine will be presented. For now, this second newsletter will examine Russian history – its own words and deeds regarding anti-Semitism, its own support for both neo-Nazi activities and anti-Jewish terrorism.  The question to be answered in this newsletter is: What is Moscow’s track record regarding its own moral behavior in these matters? Has Russia’s leadership convinced the Jewish people in recent history that Russia will protect Jewish culture, the Jewish language and Jewish national identity? If Russia fails at both these tests, then her justification for her invasion of Ukraine is both morally bankrupt and ethically fraudulent.
 
 
Putin is surfing on a wave he hasn’t created
 
In Russia, calling someone a Nazi is considered ‘fighting words’ – words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”. An estimated 24 million Soviet citizens died fighting Nazi armies in the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is called. When Putin’s ‘tag-team’ political partner Dmitri Medvedev (Deputy Chairman of the Security Council) accuses Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of have betrayed his ethnic identity to serve neo-Nazis, and that he is acting like a Jewish Sonderkommando (those incarcerated Jews forced on pain of death to dispose of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust), Russia is once again playing its anti-Semitic card in all its putrid glory.
 
Yet the foamy wave of virulent anti-Semitism upon which Putin is surfing is not new; it goes back many centuries, as Senator Joe Biden said in his statement to the 106th Congress on February 24, 1999: “Over the centuries the phenomenon of anti-Semitism has become a sickening metaphor for man's inhumanity to man and, thus, a topic of universal significance. Sad to say, anti-Semitism has a long history in Russia.”
 
Vyacheslav Likhachev, world expert on the ideology and activity of far-right groups in Russia and Ukraine, political extremism, and the history of anti-Semitism, states clearly: “Anti-Semitism was a major feature of both late Tsarist and Stalinist as well as neo-Stalinist Russian politics . . . Anti-Semitism is alive and well in contemporary Russia, in general, and in her political life, in particular.” Likhachev’s book Political anti-Semitism in post-Soviet Russia is a ‘Who’s Who’ of Russian political anti-Semitism.
 
 
Pogroms and Protocols
 
Most of the world is not that aware of Russia or of her history. Winston Churchill expressed these sentiments well, when he said that Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Yet many English-speakers are acquainted with the word ‘pogrom.’ Pogrom is a Russian word meaning ‘to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.’ In 1908 Murray’s New English Dictionary defined the word: “Pogrom. Devastation. Destruction. An organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class, chiefly applied to those directed against the Jews.”
 
The pogrom received international fame in the play/movie ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ where the Gentile constable warns Tevye that there is soon going to be a ‘little unofficial demonstration’ – a pogrom in Anatevka. That violent tragedy occurred at the wedding celebration of Tevye’s daughter Tzeitl and Mottel the tailor. Senator Biden commented: “High ranking government officials blamed the Jews for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and in the succeeding decades officially tolerated, well-armed gangs called the Black Hundreds carried out murderous pogroms against the defenseless Jewish population.”
 
The Black Hundreds (Chernosotentsi - Черносо́тенцы) were reactionary, antirevolutionary, and anti-Semitic groups formed in Russia during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. The most notable were the ‘League of the Russian People’ (Soyuz Russkogo Naroda), the ‘League of the Archangel Michael’ (Soyuz Mikhaila Arkhangela), and the ‘Council of United Nobility’ (Soviet Obedinennogo Dvoryanstva). Active from 1906 until 1914, they conducted pogroms against the Jews and attacks against various revolutionary groups – all with the unofficial approval of the government. Steven Zipperstein in his Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, states “that no fewer than one hundred thousand Jews were murdered in these offhandedly brutal horrors, and at least that many girls and women raped and countless maimed between 1918 and 1920.”
 
The most famous pogrom was that of Kishinev, in the Bessarabia Governate of the Russian Empire. The riot was stirred up by false rumors that local Jews had killed a Christian youth and used his blood for demonic rituals. This anti-Semitic legend (called a ‘blood libel’) has medieval roots, appearing in 12th century England, and then spreading to France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and the Russian Empire.
 
On Easter Sunday, April 19, 1903, after Kishinev church services had ended, gangs of youths began attacking Jewish homes and shops amid shouts of “Kill the Jews!” Their two-day rampage ended with 49 people dead, many women raped, hundreds injured, and much destruction of property. Local police failed to intervene, and the violence ended only when Russian army troops began to patrol the streets and make arrests.
 
 
Protocols and paranoia
 
A literary spark to the highly flammable anti-Semitic tinder blowing across Europe was found in the pen of Pavel Krushevan, a journalist, publisher and official in Imperial Russia. Active in the Black Hundreds and in the Kishinev pogrom, he was known for his ultra-nationalist and stridently anti-Semitic views. He was also the first publisher (Fall of 1903) of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Saint Petersburg’s newspaper Znamya.
 
Krushevan’s booklet was a clumsy fabrication, with approximately 160 passages plagiarized from a French original that never mentioned Jews – the political satire Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, or The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, authored by Maurice Joly in 1864. Ukrainian scholar Vadim Skuratovsky presents extensive literary, historical and linguistic analysis of the original text of the Protocols and traces influences of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s prose.
 
The Protocols are a Russian staple of anti-Jewish propaganda to this day. The book ostensibly reports discussions among a secret group of Jewish elders, regarding plans to subvert Christian civilization and erect a world Davidic-Zionist state. According to the book’s worldview, the rise of liberalism has provided Jews with the tools to destroy Christian institutions – the nobility, the church, the sanctity of marriage. Their plan is to take control of the world as revenge against Christianity. The text focuses on supposed Jewish control of banking, media and elections. It is stated that a new world order will be seized by this cunning elite, who have purportedly schemed throughout the ages, planning to enslave humankind until the end of time. According to the authors of this anti-Semitic propaganda, the attempts to modernize Russia in the late 1800’s were actually a Jewish plot to control the world.
 
Eventually the Protocols became an instrument for blaming Jews for the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were depicted as an overwhelmingly Jewish movement zealously dedicated to executing the Protocol’s ‘plan.’ Russian forces opposed to democratic parliamentarianism, urbanization, and capitalism drew encouragement from this booklet’s twisted perspectives.
 
 
Where Nazism and Communism meet
 
Both Communism and Capitalism are seen in the Protocols as evil means used by Jews in their drive to achieve world domination. And to complicate matters, in real life both Communism and Nazism saw the Jewish people, Judaism and Zionism as the greatest threat to the whole world. Hitler’s speeches and writings incessantly hammered on that theme. Below are some revealing quotes from both KGB and Russian Presidential sources on how seriously they believed in the reality of imaginary Protocol-like threats from all things related to the Jewish people.
 
According to KGB documents in the Mitrokhin archives (smuggled out of Russia and now safely stored in Cambridge, England), the KGB and Politburo heads saw the Zionist and Jewish movements as a clear and present danger to world peace and to the integrity of the Soviet empire – “a danger which is only second to the main enemy, the United States.” “Moscow Center was obsessed with the ‘Zionist subversion’ against the Soviet Union,” notes Professor Christopher Andrew, historian of the British intelligence community.
 
Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent Russian dissident, came back to Moscow as a historian in the early 1990s and managed to photocopy documents in the Kremlin archive. He discovered a transcription of a top secret report that KGB head Yuri Andropov had submitted to the Politburo in March 1975, in which he stated that foreigners sending matzah to Russian Jews was clearly a dangerous counter-revolutionary act: “The delivery of these packages (of matzah) clearly intensifies the negative processes the Jewish population in the USSR is undergoing, strengthens their nationalist feelings and their support of emigration (to the West). The KGB believes the matzah arriving from abroad must be confiscated immediately.”
 
In 1982 all the top KGB brass met in Leningrad for a conference on Zionism. The Mitrokhin archives noted that the conference’s speeches stressed the “extensive subversive activity of the Zionist centers around the world and their infiltration into decision-making centers in different countries,” and claimed that “the Zionist organizations are affecting some countries’ foreign policy and aggravating conflicts around the world.” The conference further stressed that “there is not a single negative incident in socialist countries that Zionists are not involved in.”
  
In the Summer of 1982, Vladimir Kryuchkov (later appointed head of the KGB) issued a “work plan for fighting Zionism” stressed that “Zionism is the main threat to the USSR and to the Soviet bloc.”
 
 
Where Nazism, Communism and Zionism meet
 
The KGB saw the Jewish people, Judaism and Zionism as a devilish trident, the source of much of the world’s evil. Significant efforts were made to block Jewish cultural and religious expressions, and Jewish emigration from Russia. Strenuous efforts were also made to stir up Russian hatred against Jews in general and Zionism in particular.
 
The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (AKSO) was established on March 29, 1983 by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. AKSO activities were supervised jointly by representatives of the Department of Propaganda of the Central Committee and by the KGB. AKSO depicted Zionism as a reactionary appendage of world imperialism. Two main themes of AKSO’s propaganda were:
 


In 1983, a Russian book On the Course of Aggression and Fascism detailed Zionism’s alleged ‘criminal alliance with the Fascists’ and blamed the Zionists for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews during the Holocaust.  In a 1983 a Pravda article announcing the launch of AKSO declared Zionism a concentration of ‘extreme nationalism, chauvinism, and racial intolerance, justification of territorial seizure and annexation, armed adventurism, a cult of political arbitrariness and impunity, demagogy and ideological sabotage, sordid maneuvers and perfidy.’ A 1985 TASS radio broadcast commenting on one of the committee’s English-language brochures announced: “Zionist leaders are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. It is precisely the Zionists who assisted the Nazi butchers by helping them to make up the lists of the doomed inmates of ghettoes, escorting the latter to the places of extermination and convinced them to resign to the butchers.”

In 1977 Soviet Weekly, a Soviet English-language outlet that targeted the United Kingdom, printed a piece titled ‘Why We Condemn Zionism,’ proclaiming Zionism to be a racist doctrine and characterized Israelis as ‘worthy heirs to Hitler’s National-Socialism.’

Where Nazism, Communism and Palestinian terror meet

The current President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was once a KGB agent whose operational name was ‘Krotov,’ according an internal KGB report. Abbas functioned as an authorized and undercover KGB spy within the PLO.

Abbas received his Ph.D. from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University/ Institute of Oriental Studies in 1982. The university's president at the time was Yevgeny Primakov, later head of the KGB First Chief Directorate. Primakov then served as Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and subsequently as Russia’s Prime Minister.

Abbas’s dissertation was published as an Arabic book in 2011 under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. Passages from the book describe alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust and cast doubt on the number of Holocaust victims. Abbas wrote that the Mossad abducted Adolf Eichmann in order to prevent the high-ranking Nazi from revealing the secret of Zionists’ role in the Final Solution.

One year after Abbas’ dissertation was approved, a speaker by the name of Yuri Kolesnikov claimed at a press conference of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (Moscow, June 1983), that during the war the Zionists were “in league with the Gestapo and SS” and that the Israelis executed Eichmann years later “to prevent the ‘sacred secrets’ of this collaboration from becoming public.” From this, it seems that both Abbas and Kolesnikov were studying from the same KGB playbook.

Where Palestinian terror meets Russian training and weapons

Israeli intelligence reporter Ronen Bergman conveys that a former senior Fatah official once told him that the “Soviet Union and its intelligence services greatly and significantly aided the Palestinian struggle for independence.” This can be seen in three ways:

  1. The KGB targeted the Jewish state with deep-cover ‘illegals,’ whose job was to penetrate the highest echelons of Israeli political, military and intelligence worlds
  1. The KGB and related intelligence agencies (East Germany Stasi, Bulgarian and Polish intelligence, Syrian Air Force intelligence, as well as the West German Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Italian Red Brigades) trained terrorist operatives from:
  1. These KGB-trained and KGB-armed terrorists carried out many horrendous attacks against Jews and Israelis, including the few listed below:


 Russian cooperation with Nazis

Russian cooperation with the Nazi regime goes back to the Soviet Union’s Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) – a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that enabled those two powers to partition Poland between them, while delaying open war between Germany and the USSR. It was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and lasted until Nazi Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941. This pact should not be understood as signifying undying love and devotion between Russia and the Nazis. Today, however, it is dangerous to discuss this pact openly on Russian media, due to the threat of penalties (including fines and long jail terms).

Russian concealment of Nazi atrocities

Between September 29–30, 1941, 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in a massacre carried out by the Einsatzgruppe C, located at the Kyiv clay pits of Babi Yar. By November 1941, the number of Jews shot dead at Babi Yar exceeded 75,000, according to an official report written by SS commander Paul Blobel.

In the period after 1945 the Soviet Union refused to recognize Babi Yar as a Jewish Holocaust site, or that mass murder of Jews had occurred at Babi Yar. Victims were only described generically as Soviet citizens. Mention of their Jewish identity was not permitted, nor the mentioning of the participation of the local police. There were plans to turn the site into a park and a stadium. William Korey, Anti-Defamation League director, stated that “Soviet authorities suppressed any public discussion of the Holocaust and attempted to obliterate the Holocaust in the memories of Soviet Jews as well as non-Jews.” The Nazis obliterated Jews, while the Russians obliterated any memory of the victims’ Jewish identity.

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem Babiyy Yar in a leading Russian periodical, protesting the Soviet Union’s refusal to recognize Babi Yar as a Holocaust site. The poem’s first line is “There are no monuments over Babi Yar.”

Finally, public pressure resulted in a memorial placed at Babi Yar in 1976, but the inscription reads: “Here in 1941-1943, the German fascist invaders executed more than 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war.” Despite the fact that more than 30 per cent of victims killed by the Nazis in Babi Yar were Jews, there was no reference to the uniquely Jewish component of this tragedy. Between 1.5 million and 2.5 million Soviet Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and about 200,000 more died in combat. That added up to 10% of all Soviet deaths, while Jews were only 2.5% of the total pre-war Soviet population.

On September 29, 1991 a menorah-shaped monument to specific remember the more than 75,000 Jews murdered there, was dedicated. It had taken the collapse of the Soviet Union to bring to pass an honorable memorial at that site.

Russian propagation of Nazi propaganda and backing of neo-Nazi activism

It is not common knowledge in the West that a startling rise of neo-Nazi speech, action and influence has been going on in Russia over the past 20+ years.

The first stage involved the repetition and dissemination of Nazi tropes about Jews and Judaism (going back to the 1960’s).

In 1963 Judaism without Embellishments was published by Trofim Kichko. Featuring Der Stürmer-like cartoons, the book stated that Judaism and the concept of Jews as a chosen people are inherently racist, Judaism being a religion linked to American imperialism and Israeli colonialism. One of the cartoons in the book showed a stereotypical Jewish capitalist licking a boot with a swastika painted on it. Though published in Russian and for Russians, the style and content of the book is pure Nazi.

In 1975 the Soviet Union was able to pass General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be racism. Though it was later revoked just days before the onset of the First Gulf War on December 16, 1991, the this racist attack on Israel opened a Pandora’s Box of Nazi-like assaults on Israel, Zionism and Jews throughout the world.

The second stage involved Putin’s use of anti-extremism legislation to ‘counter the neo-Nazi threat,’ but in the end it was directed to crush democratic opponents in Russia (early 2000’s).

The third stage involved Putin’s use of ‘managed nationalism’ to co-opt popular neo-Nazi movements into a counterweight to a rising anti-Putin democratic and leftist opposition (early 2000’s).

Russian neo-Nazi movements
 
What follows are the neo-Nazi groups involved (past and/or present) either officially or unofficially with the KGB and the Russian government.
 
National Patriotic Front ‘Memory’ (NPF - Pamyat) - started in 1980, grew to 3,000 members and faded out in the early 1990’s. It was a neo-Nazi, neo-fascist, ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist organization that identified itself as the ‘People's National-Patriotic Orthodox Christian movement.’ In 1991, the organization's newspaper had a print run of 100,000, and a radio station was launched.
 
The group claimed the existence of a so-called ‘Ziono-Masonic plot’ against Russia as “the main source of the misfortunes of Russian people, disintegration of the economy, denationalization of Russian culture, alcoholism, ecological crisis.” They blamed the Zionists for the triggering of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, for the death of millions in the course of the Russian Civil War and for Joseph Stalin’s personality cult. They taught that the Soviet government was infiltrated by ‘Zionists and freemasons’ working as ‘agents of Zionism’ who were subordinating the Soviet government to ‘Jewish capital.’
 
One of Pamyat's founders, Valeriy Yemelyanov,  was the author of the book ‘Dezionization’ (1980) which called on the Soviet Union to get rid of this alleged Zionist-Masonic conspiracy. Yemelyanov was later committed to an insane asylum after being accused of murdering his wife.
 
Rodina - In 2003 ‘Rodina’ (‘Motherland’) was established as a coalition of 30 nationalist and far-right groups. Led by Dmitri Rogozin, Sergey Glazyev, Sergey Baburin and other nationalist politicians, the political ideas represented here ran the gamut from neo-Stalinism to ethno-nationalism, xenophobia and neo-fascism.
 
Russian March - An ill-calculated governmental attempt to ‘harness’ the far right movement was the so-called ‘Russian March’ in 2005. The event turned out to be an openly neo-Nazi action, initially extensively supported by Russian governmental officials. The gatherings embraced reactionary elements within Russian society, from neo-Nazis and monarchists, to neo-pagans and Cossacks.
 
Russkii Obraz (‘Russian Image’; ‘RO’) - In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. The Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (‘Russian Image’/’RO’), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.
 
In touch with its Kremlin supervisors, RO hosted a concert by the infamous neo-Nazi band Kolovrat in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square, within earshot of the Kremlin. RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, those skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000’s. In 2014, RO's Aleksandr Matyushin engaged in terrorism against pro-Ukrainians in the Donetsk region as a major field commander with Russian forces.
 
Dmitri Utkin and the Wagner Group - The Wagner Group was reportedly founded by Dmitri Utkin, a veteran of the First and Second Chechen War. Utkin served as lieutenant colonel and brigade commander of a unit of Special Operations Forces unit operating under Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), in the 700th Independent Spetsnaz Detachment of the 2nd Independent Brigade. The company’s name comes from Utkin’s own military call-sign ‘Wagner’ which he chose in honor of the German racist conductor Richard Wagner (Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer).  Utkin is thought to be a neo-Nazi; a reporter from The Economist reported seeing several Waffen SS Nazi tattoos on Utkin’s collarbone and chest. The Wagner Group and Utkin were first active in 2014 in the break-away Luhansk region of Ukraine, fighting on the side of Russia against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
 
Autonomous Nationalists - This Russian neo-Nazi group has been filmed attacking foreigners and setting fire to buildings. They have ties with neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Europe. Members praise the Third Reich and advocate the supremacy of the white race and the superiority of the Russian people.
 
Neo-Nazi ‘Sparta Battalion’ - Russian warlord Vladimir Zhoga, who headed the Neo-Nazi ‘Sparta Battalion,’ was accused of brutal war crimes and the shooting Ukrainian POWs. Zhoga was shot and killed in Volnovakha, Ukraine fighting on the side of the Russia-instigated break-away Donetsk People's Republic.
 
Russian National Unity -  In August 1990, a split occurred in Pamyat, and Aleksandr Barkashov dubbed his new group Russian National Unity.  The group promoted the veneration of the swastika. The organization was unregistered federally in Russia, but nonetheless collaborated on a limited basis with the KGB’s successor FSB. They advocated neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, the expulsion from Russia of Jews, as well as of Azeris, Georgians,  Armenians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Tajiks. Members wore black or camouflage uniforms, adopting a red and white swastika and expressing admiration for German Nazism. RNU was made illegal in 1999, and had a membership of around 20,000 - 25,000 members at that time.
 
Selected quotes from Russian political figures:
 

 

 

 


From Lenin to Pravda

In 1914 Vladimir Lenin declared, “No nationality in Russia is as oppressed and persecuted as the Jews.”

Seventy-six years later, in July 1990, the top Russian newspaper Pravda published an editorial admitting that Russia’s anti-Zionist campaign of the previous quarter century was in error. “Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascist origin. Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general.”

Can it be said that Russia’s leadership has finally grasped the truth regarding its own toxic contributions to murderous attacks on the Jewish people, their religion, their culture and their national identity? Have the Russian people undergone the necessary heart changes that God is seeking for them to experience?

How should we then pray?

 

 

 
Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA


Donations can also be made on-line (PayPal or credit card) through: www.davidstent.org

Russia’s propaganda wars: Neo-Nazism and Ukraine - Part One: The Jonah paradigm

The word of YHVH came to Jonah, commissioning him to, “arise, [and] go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out against it, because their wickedness has come up before Me.” But instead Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of YHVH” (Jonah 1:1-3).

Jonah was a bona fide prophet who had a spiritually sensitive awareness of Nineveh’s evil, both morally and in world politics. Yet for some reason he did not want to bring a message of repentance to that wicked country. He had even argued with YHVH at his original commissioning about agreeing to obey the call:

Assyria – an evil people

Although Jonah eventually preached God’s message of coming judgment and repentance to pagan Assyria, the text states that he didn’t want them to repent and avoid destruction. Jonah had anticipated that God would extend the scepter of mercy to a penitent Assyria, but he wanted no part of that.

Perhaps Jonah was spiritually aware of the great damage Assyria would soon do to the ten Jewish tribes barely one century later, cruelly carrying them away into Exile in the late 700’s B.C. (2 Kings 17:23-24; Hosea 10:14). The Assyrian siege of Lachish (depicted on the Lachish Bronzes in the British Museum and mentioned in 2 Chronicles 32:9) witnessed Judean soldiers crucified alive on Assyrian stakes, while other Jews had their flesh ripped apart with burning iron rakes.

Jonah could have had many reasons not to go to Assyria. That nation’s repentance lasted barely 100 years, and after that they brought murderous destruction to Israel. Why bring a message of God’s love and mercy to such a corrupt nation? Yet God still chose Jonah to ‘deliver the letter, the sooner the better.’

“A people who can’t discern between their right hand and their left” (Jonah 4:11)

Jonah had received a clear commission and message. Perhaps he even had the prophetic discernment to know that Nineveh’s repentance would end up being as stable as the morning mist. Yet Jonah missed out on grasping the love God had for these corrupt people. The aching of YHVH’s heart is revealed in Jonah 4:11 – He saw 120,000 people (whether children or adults) totally lacking in spiritual sensitivity and discernment. Therefor He was sending His prophet to them, to share His heart of mercy and forgiveness with that crooked nation, and to call them to repentance.

The first of a three part newsletter

This is the first of a three-part newsletter considering Russian propaganda and disinformation regarding their purported reasons for invading and destroying Ukraine. Their main supposed justification, repeatedly stressed by both President Putin and state-controlled Russian media, is that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis.

The first newsletter (this one) looks briefly at some charges being propagated by Russian sources and even by some in the West who are not that well-informed about relevant history and biblical presuppositions. The second newsletter will deal with Russia’s historical and present role in officially and unofficially propagating anti-Semitic theories and practices. The third newsletter will consider Ukrainian anti-Semitism and fascist/neo-Nazi movements – their history, influence and threat. These facts are necessary for anyone who wants to draw accurate conclusions about this aspect of the propaganda war.

Do you want to have the heart of Jonah?

“Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more matters of this life?” (1 Corinthians 6:3). The Apostle Paul assumes that healthy believers in Yeshua will continually be growing in maturity, able to discern matters from the perspective of the God of Jacob. That was a challenge for Jonah, and it is the same for us.

At this moment in Ukraine, it can be said that “her cities have become an object of horror” (Jeremiah 51:43). Hour by hour there are aerial bombardments and artillery barrages of cities. Civilians are penned in by enforced sieges at the hands of Russia’s armies, and famine is weakening and killing over a million people. The words of Isaiah the prophet cry to us: “And [God] was amazed that there was not one to intercede” (Isaiah 59:16).

While it is true that some are interceding, others are manifesting a self-satisfied judgementalism regarding the body blows raining down on the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson and Chernihiv. Some American cable TV personalities, some Evangelicals and charismatics, some (but not all) in the prophetic, apostolic and messianic Jewish movements, are declaring:

Others are proclaiming:

Here is a telling quote from an open letter penned by India’s advocate of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi, on July 2, 1940. In it he offered advice to Winston Churchill, the British King George VI, and everyone in between on how to deal with the Nazi menace:

Those who label Ukraine as ‘a corrupt state’ are probably not thinking in percentages: is Ukraine more corrupt that China, than Russia, than Yemen, than Syria, than the USA – and if so, by how much?  And what if the God of Israel decides to focus His divine rod of discipline on all the corrupt nations of the world, all at once? “If You, YAH, were to keep an account of crooked deeds, O YHVH, who could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, so that You may be feared” (Psalm 130:3-4).

Joshua the non-aligned general?

Over the years Christian pacifists have misinterpreted the meaning of Joshua’s encounter with the Angel of YHVH, mistakenly advocating that believers should not take sides in military conflicts.

The context of this passage concerns the military attack that YHVH the Lord of armies has commanded Joshua to prosecute on the morrow. Note the clear use of the phrase ‘the Captain of the army of YHVH’ here. King David refers to God by His military title – “YHVH of armies, the God of the armies of Israel” (1 Samuel 17:45). According to David, the armies of Israel are also YHVH’s armies.  At Jericho, Joshua is the acting general while YHVH is Joshua’s direct Commander. Make no mistake about it – the God of Israel is fighting on behalf of Joshua and against Canaan. God is explaining to Joshua that He is not simply another participant in a two-sided battle (that is the sense of the ‘no’ in Joshua 5:14), equal in stature to Jericho or Israel.  He is above both Jericho and the Jewish people, yet at the same time Israel is on YHVH’s side and under His command.  A ‘non-aligned’ interpretation of this passage owes more to a pacifistic worldview than to biblical exegesis or exposition.

At this point in history it is becoming progressively easier to fathom how, prior to WWII, so many refused to take a stand against the rising threat of fascist and communist dictatorships. In our day some people are looking straight into the face of 21st century totalitarian despots (whether in Moscow or in Tehran), but then blinking and quickly averting their eyes.

A non-aligned response to Hitler?

On September 1, 1939 the Nazi juggernaut crashed its tanks into Poland, and Stuka bombers dropped their blitzkrieg bombs onto defenseless Polish cities. How would we have responded on that day had we heard people commenting from the safety of foreign armchairs, that Poland ‘had it coming to them because they were a corrupt country’? How would we respond to hearing these ‘specialists’ stating that both sides (Nazis and Poles) are evil, so let us be content to simply pray for both sides – while Polish cities are being leveled and Jews are being herded into ghettos? No, reprehensible inactivity and cowardice never go over that well. Such pontifications would not stand the test of time, nor endure the unblinking gaze of the Holy One of Israel.

In the same way, I suggest that moral equivalencies between Russia’s evil and Ukraine’s evil are eminently unhelpful in terms of clearly understanding or pro-actively responding to the threats here. We need to grasp that Russian threats are not only coming against Ukraine – they apply immediately to the entire European theater, and their ramifications and blowback will affect the entire world.

We remember the words that Lutheran German pastor Martin Niemöller wrote after the defeat of Nazism: “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.” Now is the time to ask ourselves, “How shall we respond when they first come for the Ukrainians?”

How should we then pray?

Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal) through: www.davidstent.org

When history repeats itself

Mark Twain was noted for the one-liner: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” As the world attempts to focus on recent events in Ukraine, let’s consider some sobering historical parallels from nearly thirty years ago.

Those events revolve around the September 1999 KGB false-flag bombings of Russian civilian apartments, which were then falsely ascribed to Chechen Islamic terrorists. This triggered the Russian army’s invasion of Muslim Chechnya and the massive artillery and aerial bombing destruction of Chechen cities (including the capital Grozny). And, of course, another important side-effect of that ‘special military operation’ was the rocketing of Vladimir Putin into the Kremlin, where he has since held the Presidency of modern Russia in his iron grip.

This above-noted history is an essential key to deciphering Russian realpolitik and present military strategies in Ukraine.

From unemployed spy to Tsar of Russia

Back in 1985 Vladimir Putin worked for four years as a young KGB spy in Dresden, GDR (Socialist Germany). After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the USSR, Putin returned to Russia. He quickly found work at St. Petersburg’s City Hall, where his former law professor, Anatoly Sobchak, had just been elected Mayor. Within a brief time, Putin became both Deputy Mayor and Chair of the Committee on Foreign Economic Relations. This position afforded him significant financial benefit and political influence, eventually positioning him to be both Sobchak’s consigliere and his deliverer from serious corruption charges.

In March 1997, then-President Boris Yeltsin named Putin his Deputy Chief of Staff. In July 1998 Putin was made the chief of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB). And in August 1999 Yeltsin appointed Putin to be his Prime Minister.

On December 31, 1999 Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and, according to the Constitution of Russia, Putin became Acting President of the Russian Federation. The first presidential decree that Putin signed on 31 December 1999 was titled “On guarantees for the former president of the Russian Federation and the members of his family” This ensured that corruption charges against outgoing President Yeltsin and his relatives would not be pursued. This was most notably targeted at the Mabetex bribery case in which Yeltsin's family members were involved. On August 30, 2000 a criminal investigation in which Putin himself (who, as a member of the Saint Petersburg city government, was one of the suspects) was dropped. A case regarding Putin's alleged corruption in metal exports from 1992 was brought back by Marina Salye, but the case was silenced and she was forced to leave Saint Petersburg.

Putin became President of Russia in March 2000. But prior to becoming President, he intensified a scorched-earth ‘special military campaign’ in Chechnya. His popularity ratings soared from 2% to 53% as a result. The once unemployed spy was about to become the beloved master of Russia.

Grozny means ‘fearsome’ in Russian

The country of Chechnya is located in the Eastern Europe’s North Caucasus, close to Georgia and the Caspian Sea. The majority of Chechens, though darker-skinned, could be described as the original ‘Caucasians.’ Between 1600 and 1800 A.D. the country was Islamized, with Iranian occupiers eventually giving way to Russian Tsarist control. Today many Chechens hope for an independent country free of Russian control. Other Chechens are Saudi-financed jihadis associated with al-Qa’eda or ISIS.

On April 17, 1999 Chechen jihadi leaders Shamil Basayev and Samir ibn al-Khattab met in Grozny and declared the formation of a jihadi army “the main purpose of which is the creation of the Independent Islamic State in the range of Chechnya and Dagestan.” On August 2, 1999 Basayev and Khattab launched an armed invasion by 2,000-3,000 jihadis into Dagestan from their bases in Chechnya. Their forces were pushed back into Chechen territory by August 26, 1999.

With Putin’s accession to the role of Russian Prime Minister on August 9, 1999, Chechnya-related events immediately moved into high gear. Intensive bombings (over 1,700 sorties) and missile attacks on Chechen cities and civilians began on August 25, 1999, leading to a wave of over 100,000 refugees.

Starting September 4, 1999, apartment buildings began to blow up in various places around Russia. Although Putin on September 23, 1999 blamed these on Chechen Islamist terrorists, an active KGB/FSB team had already been caught on September 22, 1999 having just placed such a bomb in the basement of a civilian apartment block in Ryazan, Russia. The bomb’s active ingredient was hexogen (RDX), a military explosive available only to Russian security services. False-flag KGB/FSB activities were the unofficial trigger for Putin’s invasion of Chechnya.

Russian accounts show that Putin’s plan for a crushing military crackdown on Chechnya had been drawn up months earlier than the campaign itself. Russian air strikes and artillery forced at least 100,000 Chechens to flee their homes. Neighboring Ingushetia appealed to the UN regarding over 78,000 refugees that had crossed their borders. Civilian refugees were later estimated to total between 200,000 to 450,000, out of the approximately 800,000 residents in the Chechen Republic.

On October 21, 1999, a Russian Scud short-range ballistic missile strike on the central Grozny marketplace killed more than 140 people, including many women and children, leaving hundreds more wounded. A Russian spokesman said the busy market was targeted because it was used by ‘separatists’ as an arms bazaar.

Human Rights Watch called on the Russian military at that time to stop using FAE, known in Russia as vacuum bombs, in Chechnya. Large number of civilian casualties were caused by what it called “widespread and often indiscriminate bombing and shelling by Russian forces.”

The Russian assault on Grozny began in early December 1999, ending on February 2, 2000 when the Russian army seized the city. Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said that 2,700 ‘separatists’ were killed trying to leave Grozny.  The siege and fighting devastated the capital like no other European city since World War II. In 2003 the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth.  The estimated total number of casualties: 80,000 killed in Chechnya; 40,000 - 45,000 civilians in neighboring regions.

Similar dynamics and tactics have been used by President Putin in other conflicts, such as Syria/Aleppo (2015), and at this present time in Ukraine (2022). History may not be exactly repeating itself but, as Mark Twain noted, there is a definite rhyme here.

Syrian Aleppo – history repeating itself

The Arab Spring protests in 2011 catalyzed a civil war in Syria, with Aleppo (ancient Halab) being a key rebel center. Many of these rebels were Western-friendly and opposed to Assad. Others were run-of-the-mill jihadis. And finally, some were full-blown ISIS jihadi Islamists. By the summer of 2015, it looked likely that Syrian President and dictator Hafez al-Assad was about to lose control of the country. Russia stepped in, sending bombers, attack helicopters, artillery and missiles, and many military advisors. Iran sent in paramilitary operatives as well as Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.

By September 2015, Assad's forces gathered against Aleppo. On September 30, 2015 Russian bombers and attack fighters hit rebel forward military positions and supply lines, and by October 2015 up to 2,000 Lebanese Hezbollah, Afghan and Iraqi Shi’a militia fighters (led by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] – Quds Force commander Major-General Qassem Suleimani) initiated their ground attacks.

By February 2017 Assad’s forces had nearly surrounded the city. In July 2017 Assad imposed an all-out siege of the city’s rebel-controlled eastern region, blocking even humanitarian assistance. With significant support from Iran, Assad cut off supplies to 320,000 people. Assad then had his forces systematically destroy the medical facilities in rebel-held parts of the city, killing or wounding many of its remaining doctors and nurses. These attacks are considered to be war crimes.

Russian forces used weapons in Syria that are currently being used in Ukraine as well, including the TOS-1A, a surface-to-surface rocket system that fires “fuel-air explosive” (FAE) thermobaric-type warheads. The Russian bunker-buster BETAB-500s was also used, able to take out entire buildings in one hit.

The UNHCR reported in July 2018 that 270,000 people in southern Syria had been displaced by a two-week escalation in fighting alone that erupted after a Russian-backed army offensive to recapture rebel-held southern Syria. By October 1, 2018 the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that Russian air strikes and artillery shells killed 18,000 people (including nearly 8,000 civilians).

According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, by August 2017 Russia had carried out 28,000 sorties in Syria, with 90,000 air strikes. The graphic destruction of these airstrikes in Syria can be seen in this drone footage of Aleppo from Euronews. Such scenes were also commonplace in Grozny. They now are being repeated (and available on drone footage) throughout Ukraine in Kharkiv, Mariupol region, Kiev region, etc.

“A destroyer will come to every city” (Jeremiah 48:8)

The Bible is a comprehensive history book, a compendium of how evil dictators destroyed cities and countries before they were ultimately extinguished from the pages of antiquity. And today, as we watch Russian weapons level the apartments of Ukraine, we can ask ourselves the question: do we think that we are living in times which are so different from those of Assyria, Babylon, Rome and Hitler? This outbreak of a land war in Europe is a wake-up call for us all. Are we ready? Have we counted the cost of what is about to happen? Where does God want us to be, and what does He want us to be doing as we prepare for these challenging times?

Those who plot wickedness

The Scriptures speak strongly against those who shed innocent blood or who attack peaceful people:

Purim – from defeat to victory

The Scroll of Esther has recently been read aloud in synagogues across the world. We heard how Haman had purposed to destroy, kill and eliminate the entire Jewish people (see Esther 7:4). Yet the God of Abraham kept His protective covenant with the exiled sons of Jacob, and turned the tables on His murderous enemies at Purim: “In the letters, the king granted the Jews who were in each and every city the right to assemble and to defend their lives, to destroy, kill, and eliminate the entire army of any people or province which was going to attack them, including children and women, and to plunder their spoils” (Esther 8:11).

The prophet Ezekiel lets us know that the God of Jacob has commissioned Israel to be His mighty army (see Ezekiel 37:9-11). The Jewish nation has been called to be His secret weapon in the affairs of men.

As war slogs forward in Ukraine, as cruel and murderous dictators accelerate the speed of their chariots and tanks, and as they direct their cannons, missiles and bombs against civilian supermarkets, shopping centers, hospitals, schools and theaters, let us pray for God’s mercy, His justice and His breakthroughs both in men’s hearts and on the battlefield.

How should we then pray?

Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal) through: www.davidstent.org

The Jewish Exile and the hidden face of God

As a little Jewish boy growing up in Montreal I used to sing a Yiddish Purim (Feast of Esther) song: “Haynt is Purim, kinder; S’iz der yontif groys!” (‘Today is Purim, children! It’s the great holiday!’). And once again, according to the Jewish calendar we have arrived at the yearly celebration of the Feast of Esther.

Nearly 2,500 years ago Persia/Iran’s leader Ahasuerus (Old Persian, Xšayāršā) signed off on a Holocaust decree (Esther 3:12) and initialed it with his signet ring: “Scrolls were sent by runners to all the king’s provinces to destroy, kill, and annihilate all the Jews, from the young to the old, the women and toddlers, all on one day (the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, the month of Adar) and to seize their possessions as war plunder” (Esther 3:13).

A Jewish bird in a gilded cage

The Scroll of Esther lays out the plot. The Jewish people had been exiled by God (Leviticus 26:14-39) to Babylon for 70 years (Jeremiah 25:11-12), and were now sheep without a shepherd (Jeremiah 50:6). Their Davidic dynasty was shattered. It would be millennia before it would be fully restored (Amos 9:11-12; Jeremiah 23:5-6). The new Persian conquerors took over from Babylon and in 539 B.C. King Cyrus issued a decree (2 Chronicles 36:22-23) allowing Jews to return to the Promised Land. But less than 50,000 Hebrews took up that challenge, wending their way back to Judea as pioneers and settlers. Most Jews preferred the gilded cage of Iranian and Iraqi Exile for the next 2,500 years. Today most Jewish people avoid the term ‘the Exile,’ but adopt a euphemistic and more ‘politically correct’ term ‘the Diaspora’ (διασπορά, Greek for ‘the scattering’).

Miss Tehran, Persian hit teams and narcissists galore

The Book opens in the middle of a royal Middle Eastern drinking party, MCed by the hot-tempered, impulsive and narcissistic King Ahasuerus. The story segues quickly into an Imperial beauty contest, where a ‘new and improved’ beauty queen (Esther 2:2-14) would soon become the new bride in the harem. Fast forward to an Iranian assassination squad led by two offended royal officials (Esther 2:21-23) whose plot is exposed by Esther’s Jewish cousin Mordechai (Esther 2:7). Nearly all the players are now stage front and center, except Haman, a bully and a high official whose ambitions are only outdone by his murderous bent.

Haman’s hatred for Mordechai sparked a demonic anti-Semitic hatred, and triggered his genocidal plans against all the Jews on planet earth (since all Jews were basically living under Persian control at that time – Esther 1:1; 3:10, 13). In David Pryce-Jones’ classic ‘The Closed Circle: an interpretation of the Arabs’, he explains that “acquisition of honor, pride, dignity, respect and the converse avoidance of shame, disgrace, and humiliation are keys to Arab motivation, clarifying and illuminating behavior in the past as well as in the present” (page 34). This dynamic is found throughout the Middle East, among non-Arab peoples as well, he adds. Pryce-Jones notes that “by definition, honor and shame involve publicity” (page 40).

The God who is hiding

The writer of the Book of Esther never mentions the name of God or His existence. YHVH’s sovereignty in protecting and rescuing His Jewish people is silently brooding over the book, even though it may seem that He is ignoring the clear and present dangers facing His people. God seems to be ‘hiding His face’ (‘hester panim’ in Hebrew, a word play on the Hebrew name ‘Esther’), but in no way is He sleeping or slumbering. He protects us, preserves us and will fulfil every prophetic promise over us to bring us back ­both to the Land of Israel and to Himself. Though in the Book of Esther the fate of the Jewish people seems to turn on something as capricious ­as the ‘purim’, the lot, the ‘toss of the dice’ – the Jewish people’s survival rests in very secure divine hands.

Even today, as the world nervously considers a similar scenario – the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear conspiracy to destroy Israel (the Jewish state) and to wreak havoc on pro-Western forces and neighbors – we can draw encouragement that the same Rock of Israel is watching over His Jewish people.

De-nazifying Purim

Hitler and his fellow Nazis took demonic delight in twisting Jewish themes and traditions into murderous weapons to be used against the sons and daughters of Jacob. Here are some examples of how Nazis perverted the Biblical Purim account:

Two other historical events happened on Purim which have relevance here:

Purim – YHVH’s revolutionary feast

U.S. Corporal Sidney Talmud of Brooklyn was marching through Germany with the 38th Signal Construction Battalion in 1945 when a rare opportunity came his way. Schloss Rheydt, the Renaissance-era palace in Mönchengladbach had been use by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as a vacation home. The Allies called it ‘Goebbels’ Castle.’ Since Goebbels had played the key role in the attempted destruction of Europe’s Jews, Army brass thought that it would be poetic justice to use that newly liberated venue to commemorate Jewish holidays (Purim and Passover) celebrating the liberation of the Jewish people.

In the US Army Weekly ‘Yank’ on April 12, 1945, a photo was published from that unusual Purim: a Jewish Welfare Board flag with the Star of David laid out on a table. The Jewish chaplain’s symbol hangs on a flag in the window. The German swastika is left visible in the center, but surmounted by the Torah and the ark.  In the magazine, it was written that the Jewish clergy “raised their voices in an ancient Hebrew hymn of jubilation sung at Purim to celebrate the deliverance of the Jews from an earlier Hitler–Haman of Persia, who long held the Hebrew in captivity in Biblical Times.”

The God of Israel has not changed His heart about His Jewish people, nor has He stopped protecting them from the Pharaohs, the Hamans, the Hitlers, the Hamasniks and the Ayatollahs of this world. As we remember the suspenseful victory brought about by the God who is hiding, let us redouble our prayers, intercession and proactive measures for the salvation and survival of the Jewish people!

How should we then pray?

Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal) through: www.davidstent.org

Last Days discernment

“So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud over the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled” (Exodus 19:16)

“It will come about also on that day that a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were perishing in the land of Assyria and who were scattered in the land of Egypt will come and worship YHVH on the holy mountain in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 27:13)

“And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet blast, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other” (Matthew 24:31)

“If any of your scattered countrymen are at the ends of the earth, from there YHVH your God will gather you, and from there He will bring you back” (Deuteronomy 30:4)

“And if those days had not been cut short, no life would have been saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short” (Matthew 24:22)

“For false messiahs and false prophets will arise and will provide great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24)

The days are getting more challenging. We are being confronted with scenarios that surprise and trouble us. Humanity is being called upon to ramp up our discernment and our powers of judgment. Especially for those of us who have had our eyes opened and our spirits made alive in Messiah Yeshua, there is an earnest longing for increased spiritual sensitivity, faithfulness and biblical accuracy. May the following thoughts be both a challenge and an encouragement for us, today and in the days ahead.

Discernment – the desire of our hearts

God’s heart yearns for us, that we would gain and exercise discernment: “If only they were wise and they understood this! If only they would discern their future!” (Deuteronomy 32:29)

Our earnest request of God is that He teach us discernment based on His Scriptures: “Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments. Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word” (Psalm 119:66-67).

A wise and discerning person has a mind hungry for truth and knowledge: “The mind of the discerning acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge” (Proverbs 18:15).

Solomon was the wisest and most discerning of men in his day: “‘And Your servant is in the midst of Your people whom You have chosen, a great people who are too many to be numbered or counted. So give Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, to discern between good and evil. For who is capable of judging this great people of Yours?’ Now it was pleasing in the sight of YHVH that Solomon had asked this thing (1 Kings 3:8-10). Now God gave Solomon wisdom and very great discernment and breadth of mind, like the sand that is on the seashore. Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt (1 Kings 4:29-30).

Hindrances to discernment

Each one of us struggles with internal stumbling blocks which prevent us from having clear discernment. The Scriptures call this dynamic ‘sin’: “Who can discern his errors? Acquit me of hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12). Yeshua tells us that our own sins can hold us back from clearly discerning what is going on around us. “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘There will be a storm today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but are you unable to discern the signs of the times?” (Matthew 16:2-3).

A central element in the dynamics of discernment – a man or woman who is obedient to God and to His word will have greater clarity here: “But a natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).

“For everyone who partakes only of milk is unacquainted with the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to distinguish between good and evil” (Hebrews 5:13-14).

The calling to help people distinguish right and wrong

The tribe of Levi has been gifted with a prophetic calling to strengthen Israel’s discernment: “Moreover, they shall teach My people the difference between the holy and the common, and teach them to distinguish between the unclean and the clean. (Ezekiel 44:23; see Deuteronomy 33:8, 10).

It is no small matter to help God’s people grow in discernment: “Do not become teachers in large numbers, my brothers, since you know that we who are teachers will incur a stricter judgment” (James 3:1).

A prophesied day is coming when the remnant of Israel will move naturally in spiritual and practical discernment: “So you will again distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve Him” (Malachi 3:18).

Drawing incorrect conclusions based on faulty discernment

Messiah Yeshua was once interacting with some Jewish Galileans about the reason for two specific and recent tragedies – one in Galilee and one in Jerusalem. Some were blaming the victims of those tragedies, ascribing greater sin to them than to the unharmed bystanders.

Yeshua’s point was stark: those people who had suffered harm or death were not worse sinners than the ‘innocent’ bystanders. Actually, all were in need of heartfelt repentance, especially in light of the fast-approaching judgment on 68-80 A.D. – the destruction of the Second Temple and the Roman Exile.

Two sides of the same rod

The ten northern tribes of Israel had embraced other loves, other gods and other morality, rather than that of YHVH. The God of Jacob is a jealous God determined to win His bride back to His heart. In order to turn their hearts back to Him, He extended a severe mercy to His Jewish people, which involved drawing the cruel and heartless Assyrian empire (His ‘rod’) down to the Promised Land to wreak havoc and exile on the ten tribes.

Isaiah the prophet gives us insight into how Assyria’s leader understood his own calling, and how Assyria’s perspective was totally the opposite from YHVH’s.

God calls Assyria the rod of His anger, stretched out against His Chosen People who had embraced idolatry and grievous social sin. Yet this ‘divine rod’ intended to go far beyond his divine commission. Assyria would boast that their military success was due to the superiority of their national demonic gods and the strength of their armies and weapons. This hubris – Assyrian hutzpa – would bring the full curse of Genesis 12:3, the full wrath of Israel’s God, down upon their heads. But even in the midst of horrific judgment, Israel was encouraged to draw strength from the prophetic future, when God would wipe Assyria off the map:

YHVH’s burning judgment on Assyria in days to come would be significantly greater than the Assyrian judgment that fell upon Israel.

The destruction of the prideful destroyer

Another example of God’s fearful dealings with prideful and destructive empires is laid out in great detail in Ezekiel. Though the prophet recognizes that YHVH has allowed Edom/Esau to invade and wreak havoc on Judah’s cities, pastures and civilian population, the God of Jacob warns that He is always watching, and that He Himself will repay Edom for all the evil they have done against the Jewish people:

Talking heads and other experts

Yeshua once responded to some theologians in His day, “You are mistaken, since you do not understand either the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). My life experience has underscored the truth of Yeshua’s words. Much of the body of Messiah is divided here – on one side are those who don’t know the Scriptures well, and on the other side those who have not experienced the Holy Spirit’s power (and therefor deny its charismatic reality). In the same way, there are some popular media ‘experts’ who, though they may be forceful speakers and fast talkers, nevertheless seem bereft of biblical compassion, historical perspective and godly discernment.

Someone has said that an expert is “somebody who is more than 50 miles from home, has no responsibility for implementing the advice he gives, and shows slides.” The greatest refugee crisis since World War II has now broken out in Ukraine. The destruction of Ukrainian cities, villages and essential infrastructure (replete with bone-crushing civilian casualties) continues with a cruelty that would bring a faint smile to Hitler’s lips. On a personal note, two days ago in the Ukrainian Jewish village of Yasnohorodka (west-south-west of Kyiv) where my grandmother was born in 1888, Russian troops attacked and murdered five civilians.

Yet I have been dumbstruck to hear some self-proclaimed ‘experts’ insist that this pre-World War III situation is no real tragedy, because of the following supposed reasons:

Hitler redux

On September 30, 1938 Prime Minister Chamberlain met with Adolph Hitler in Munich, signing away a portion of Czech Sudetenland to Nazi annexation. One year later, on September 1, 1939 the Nazi juggernaut blitzkrieged into Poland with tanks, mobile artillery and Stuka bombers, destroying cities and annihilating civilians. WWII had broken out, the Holocaust following close on its heels. Would Christians in those days have been apologists for Hitler, lamely bleating that there are two sides to every story, that righteous leaders exist in Germany, and that we need to make sure to focus equal time on the many other countries in Europe instead?

Russia illegally seized sections of Eastern Ukraine in February-March 2014. Eight years later, on February 24, 2022 it invaded Ukraine from the territories of Russia, Belarus, and annexed sections of Crimea, with over 190.000 troops attacking over 20 Ukrainian locations. This is Sudetenland revisited. Will the world act any differently than it did in 1939?

How should we then pray?

Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal) through: www.davidstent.org

The Kremlin Statements

This is part two of a two-part newsletter. Here is the link for part one.

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen” (Vladimir Lenin).

“They took counsel together to devise a plan, but it came to naught. They talked about a strategy, but it will not stand, for God is with us!” (Isaiah 8:10)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, recently gave two addresses in the Kremlin, one on February 21, 2022 and one on February 24, 2022.

In the first address, he outlined what he sees as Ukrainian and Western threats to Russia. He then warned the West of measures Russia was about to take. At the end of his speech, he recognized the independence and sovereignty of the regions which broke away from Ukraine in Donetsk and Lugansk under Russian oversight and military support. The subsequent ratification of these two Treaties of Friendship and Mutual Assistance now paved the way for ‘legal justification’ of Russia’s planned invasion of the rest of Ukraine three days later, on February 24, 2022.

In Putin’s second address on February 24, 2022, he classified the current situation as a ‘clear and present danger’ to Russia’s security and survival. He then announced that Russia was invading Ukraine:

Putin has triggered a land war in the heart of Eastern Europe. Michael Kofman (Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CAN, Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, DC) states: “This is not an operation limited to the Donbas. It is a military operation with maximalist war aims, whose aim is regime change.” A senior U.S. defense official said, “We haven’t seen a conventional move like this, nation-state to nation-state, since World War II, certainly nothing on this size and scope and scale.” “It’s our assessment that they have every intention of decapitating the government and installing their own method of governance, which would explain these early moves towards Kyiv.”

In light of the fact that President Putin has been both ‘telegraphing’ his moves and openly carrying them out, his other declarations and threats in these two speeches will now be considered. The following quotes are from the above-linked transcripts of Putin’s two addresses. 

“Russia’s enemies – sub-human and evil”

Western leaders possess “attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” The West has “low cultural standards and arrogance.” “Where did this insolent manner of talking . . . come from, . . . this contemptuous and disdainful attitude?”

“A stable statehood has never developed in Ukraine. Its electoral and other political procedures just serve as a cover, a screen for the redistribution of power and property between various oligarchic clans. Corruption . . . has gone beyond the usual scope in Ukraine. It has literally permeated and corroded Ukrainian statehood, the entire system, and all branches of power.”

“Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism . . . have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy.” Ukrainian authorities are “radicals [who have become] increasingly brazen in their actions.”

Ukraine’s “nationalists who have seized power have unleashed a persecution, a real terror campaign against those who opposed their anti-constitutional actions . . . A wave of violence swept Ukrainian cities, including a series of high-profile and unpunished murders . . . But we know their names and we will do everything to punish them, find them and bring them to justice.”

“Ukrainian society . . . far-right nationalism . . . rapidly developed into aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism. This resulted in the participation of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis in the terrorist groups in the North Caucasus and the increasingly loud territorial claims to Russia.”

“The Kyiv authorities . . . have opted for aggressive action, for activating extremist cells, including radical Islamist organizations, for sending subversives to stage terrorist attacks at critical infrastructure facilities, and for kidnapping Russian citizens. We have factual proof that such aggressive actions are being taken with support from Western security services.”

“The Ukrainian authorities . . . began by building their statehood on the negation of everything that united us, trying to distort the mentality and historical memory of millions of people, of entire generations living in Ukraine. It is not surprising that Ukrainian society was faced with the rise of far-right nationalism, which rapidly developed into aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism.”

“The United States and other Western partners . . . immediately tried to put the final squeeze on us, finish us off, and utterly destroy us. This is how it was in the 1990’s and the early 2000’s . . .  before we broke the back of international terrorism in the Caucasus! We remember this and will never forget”

“The leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine . . . They will undoubtedly try to bring war to Crimea just as they have done in Donbass, to kill innocent people just as members of the punitive units of Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler’s accomplices did during the Great Patriotic War.”

“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime . . . We had to stop that atrocity, that genocide of the millions of people who live there and who pinned their hopes on Russia, on all of us. It is their aspirations, the feelings and pain of these people that were the main motivating force behind our decision to recognize the independence of the Donbass people’s republics.”

“Russia is facing a life and death threat”

“The US-built Maritime Operations Centre in Ochakov makes it possible to support activity by NATO warships, including the use of precision weapons, against the Russian Black Sea Fleet and our infrastructure on the entire Black Sea Coast.”

“American strategic planning documents confirm the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike at enemy missile systems. We also know the main adversary of the United States and NATO. It is Russia. NATO documents officially declare our country to be the main threat to Euro-Atlantic security. Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead for such a strike . . . The Pentagon has been openly developing many land-based attack weapons, including ballistic missiles . . .  If deployed in Ukraine, such systems will be able to hit targets in Russia’s entire European part. The flying time of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic missiles from Kharkov will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic assault weapons, four to five minutes. It is like a knife to the throat. I have no doubt that they hope to carry out these plans.”

“For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”

“The showdown between Russia and these forces cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.”

“I would like to be clear and straightforward: in the current circumstances, when our proposals for an equal dialogue on fundamental issues have actually remained unanswered by the United States and NATO, when the level of threats to our country has increased significantly, Russia has every right to respond in order to ensure its security. That is exactly what we will do.”

Russia threatens her enemies

“I reiterate: we are acting to defend ourselves from the threats created for us and from a worse peril than what is happening now.”

“If Ukraine acquires weapons of mass destruction, the situation in the world and in Europe will drastically change, especially for us, for Russia. We cannot but react to this real danger, all the more so since, let me repeat, Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.”

“Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the subsequent deployment of NATO facilities has already been decided and is only a matter of time. We clearly understand that given this scenario, the level of military threats to Russia will increase dramatically, several times over. And I would like to emphasize at this point that the risk of a sudden strike at our country will multiply.”

“The old treaties and agreements are no longer effective. Entreaties and requests do not help.”

“Those who then embarked on the path of violence, bloodshed and lawlessness did not recognize then and do not recognize now any solution to the Donbass issue other than a military one . . . We want those who seized and continue to hold power in Kyiv to immediately stop hostilities. Otherwise, the responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will lie entirely on the conscience of Ukraine’s ruling regime.”

“Today’s Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states. Moreover, it has a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons. In this context, there should be no doubt for anyone that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.”

“They did not leave us any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action.”

“I would now like to say something very important for those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside. No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.”

“At the end of the day, the future of Russia is in the hands of its multi-ethnic people, as has always been the case in our history. This means that the decisions that I made will be executed, that we will achieve the goals we have set, and reliably guarantee the security of our Motherland.”

The plans of a Tsar

What does Putin mean when he says the following “We will seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation”?

Demilitarization means that Ukraine will no longer be allowed to have an army which can defend itself against Russia. That would turn Ukraine into a puppet colony of Russia.

De-Nazification means the removal and/or assassination of Ukraine’s leadership, which Putin classifies as neo-Nazi. A senior U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity said, “It’s our assessment that they have every intention of decapitating the government and installing their own method of governance, which would explain these early moves towards Kyiv.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russian “sabotage forces had entered the city to hunt him and his family down.”

“Bring to trial” means that Putin is planning to have show trials similar to those hosted by the Soviet Union (the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period – 1937–38) where guilty verdicts were unanimous and pre-approved.

Putin has made two threats to use nuclear weapons against the West in his speeches. The latest and strongest one was on February 24, 2022: “The consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.”

On Sunday February 27, 2022 Putin further announced, “I'm ordering the Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff to switch the Russian army's deterrent forces onto a high alert mode of combat stand-by duty.”  This command was publicly announced, raising missile alert preparedness to Russia’s nuclear forces.

According to a former head of Britain’s MI6 external intelligence agency, Alex Younger, President Putin is “playing poker rather than chess” to create options for himself. “At the moment I cannot see a scenario where he can back down in a way that satisfies the expectations that he has created . . . It feels dangerous and it’s clearly getting more dangerous. It’s hard to see a safe landing zone given the expectations that President Putin has created.” 

Not much has changed since 1944

The observations of George Kennan (former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union) made in Moscow of 1944 are penetrating in their insight. They shed helpful light on the mind, perspectives and strategies of both Russia and President Putin.

“Soviet leaders have never forgotten the weak and vulnerable position in which the Soviet regime found itself in the early days of its power . . .  These left in Soviet minds an indelible and undoubtedly exaggerated impression of the dangers which threatened Soviet power from without. Fed by the traditional Russian mistrust of the stranger . . . this feeling of fear and insecurity lived and flourished and came to underlie almost all Soviet thought about the outside world.”

Russia’s goals focus on “the concrete task of becoming the dominant power of eastern and central Europe.” They involve “new territorial acquisitions designed to strengthen Russia’s strategic and political position, and in the creation of a sphere of influence even beyond these limits. In drawing up this expansionist program, Soviet planners leaned heavily on the latter-day traditions of Tsarist diplomacy . . . The men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists.”

Geographic and military strategic goals include: “the re-establishment of Russian power in Finland and the Baltic states . . .  eastern Poland, a protectorate over western Poland . . . the establishment of dominant Russian influence over all the Slavs of central Europe and the Balkans . . . intended to prevent the formation in central and eastern Europe of any power or coalition of powers capable of challenging Russian security.”

“For the smaller countries of eastern and central Europe, the issue is not one of communism or capitalism. It is one of the independence of national life or of domination by a big power . . . It is not a question of boundaries or of constitutions or of formal independence. It is a question of real power relationships”

On the edge of a cliff

Vladimir Putin is a world-class poker player playing the game of his life here. He is going toe-to-toe with world leaders who are not as able to project similar sang froid – cold-blooded purpose and unflappable intensity. The lives of many are hanging in the balance, as does the balance of nuclear terror and mutually assured destruction. As we speak, the citizens of Ukraine are resolutely withstanding the unsheathed fist of Russia’s military juggernaut, paying dearly in blood and destruction. It is time to be praying with all sobriety.

How should we then pray?

Your prayers and support hold up our arms and are the very practical enablement of God to us in the work He has called us to do.

In Messiah Yeshua,

Avner Boskey

Donations can be sent to:

FINAL FRONTIER MINISTRIES

BOX 121971 NASHVILLE TN 37212-1971 USA

Donations can also be made on-line (by PayPal) through: www.davidstent.org

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