Archive/File: fascism protocols.001
Last-Modified: 1993/11/29

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Article: 5371 of alt.revisionism
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From: lbueno@dorsai.dorsai.org (Louis Bueno)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: RUSSIAN COURT RULES 'PROTOCOLS' AN ANTI-SEMITIC FORGERY
Date: 28 Nov 1993 18:34:20 -0500
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	RUSSIAN COURT RULES 'PROTOCOLS' AN ANTI-SEMITIC FORGERY

	By Michael A. Hiltzik
	Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1993
	
	MOSCOW -- In what observers called a historic ruling, a Russian
court has pronounced the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" an
anti-Semitic forgery -- the first such verdict in the land where the fraud
originated 90 years ago.
	"Up to now every country had disengaged itself from this shameful
book, except Russia, where it was concocted," Tancred Golenpolsky, the
publisher of the Moscow Jewish newspaper that won the ruling, said
Saturday.
	The court case arose 10 months ago after Golenpolsky's Jewish
Gazette accused the radical nationalist group Pamyat ("Memory") of printing
anti-Semitic sentiments.  Fostering ethnic conflict is punishable under
Russian law.
	Pamyat responded with a $19,000 libel suit, saying it has nothing
against Arabs, who are also Semitic.
	In its defense, the Gazette noted that Pamyat's newspaper published
extracts from the Protocols.  The document, which details purported
meetings of Jewish elders at which they plotted to seize control of the
whole world, became the focus of the trial.
	On Friday, a Moscow district court judge ruled that the document
was indeed a forgery.  She turned down Pamyat's claim and fined the
organization court costs of about $190.
	The ruling by Judge Lyudmila Belikova was hailed by the Los
Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which provided financial support for
Golenpolsky and documentary material to the court.
	"The ruling today under Russian law destroys any veneer of
respectability that hatemongers around the globe have tried to bestow on
this hateful work," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean,
in a statement.
	Pamyat was unrepentant.
	"They have no decency left to say the Protocols are a fake when the
entire history of Russia after 1917 is solid proof that they are genuine,"
said Dmitri D. Vasiliev, head of the organization, in an interview
Saturday.
	Referring to the fact that such communist theoreticians and
luminaries as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky were Jewish, he said: "Who made
the revolution? Who ruined and sold out the country? Take time and read the
Protocols; the answers are there gaping at you from every page."
	But Golenpolsky argued that the significance in the ruling lies not
in its prospect of eradicating anti-Semitism in Russia. "Anti-Semitism will
appear every time prices on potatoes and bread go up," he said in an
interview.  "What's important is that law and the government will take a
stand."
	For most of this century, the Protocols has been a key manifesto of
anti-Semitism.  It was used as a pretext for Eastern European pogroms, was
a centerpiece of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and permeated Nazi propaganda.  It
consistently surfaces across the globe as purported documentation of a
Jewish conspiracy.
	At the same time it has been consistently condemned by courts
around the world.  In 1927, an American judge ordered auto magnate Henry
Ford to destroy a large printing of the book he had personally financed; as
recently as 1991 the South African government banned it as an immoral
publication.
	Contemporary evidence shows that the Protocols were written by
members of Czar Nicholas II's "Okhranka," or secret police, in 1903.  Its
very birth was particularly unsavory; as much as 60 percent of the document
is a bald plagiarism from an anti-Semitic tract published in France around
that time.
	The Okhranka fashioned the document as the purported agreement of a
group of Jewish elders meeting in Switzerland in 1897 to plot Jewish
hegemony through the destruction of Christian civilization. It was first
published in Russia on the eve, and as the instrument, of the vicious 1903
Odessa pogrom.
	Judge Belikova based her ruling in part on testimony by a
three-member panel of Russian academic experts who examined the document
and its textual and legal history.  The experts were agreed to by both
sides, although Golenpolsky said his only stipulation was that they not be
Jewish.
	"My conclusion was that this is prima facie apocryphal and that
this is an anti-Semitic document," said one of the experts, Lionel Dadiani
of Moscow's Institute of Sociology, who wrote a 67-page opinion for the
court.
	Pamyat's Vasiliev said Saturday that he intends to bring further
cases against the Jewish Gazette.

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