Medvedev Condemns Stalin, Russia may finally bury Lenin - May, 2011

Stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic and hosting virtually limitless reserves of natural wealth, Russia has been coveted by major world powers for centuries. For centuries, various major powers attempted to occupy or destroy Russia. Bolshevism was merely one of the later attempts to destroy a weakened Russian Empire during the First World War.  

Despite what many think these days, ethnic Russians (Christian Slavs) actually suffered by-far the worst fate when Bolsheviks took power in Russia. 

Bolshevism was imported into the Russian Empire to destroy it. It is well known that an overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik leadership (perhaps around 90%) were of Jewish ancestry - the rest being a filthy conglomeration of Georgian, Armenian, Asiatic and Slavic peasantry.

On the eve of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Russian-Armenian forces had liberated the ancient Armenian city of Van in Western Armenia. By the spring of 1918, after the last Russian Czar was dethroned, the Russian army had retreated from Western Armenia and Turks were threatening to occupy Caucasian Armenia. By its bloody emergence, Bolshevism made possible the genocidal dreams of the Young Turks. Thus, it could be said that Bolshevism was indirectly responsible for the Armenian Genocide as well as the loss of Western Armenia.

Those today who blame ethnic Russians for the evils of Bolshevism are either intellectual midgets or agents of the West. Blaming Russians for the evils of Bolshevism is like blaming the hapless victim for the actions of the criminal. The following links are to previous blog entries devoted to this topic -

Stalin's Jews: http://theriseofrussia.blogspot.com/2010/11/im-glad-that-gruesome-story-of-katyn.html

Sarikamish: http://theriseofrussia.blogspot.com/2011/02/battle-of-sarikamish-february-2011.html

The two most bloodthirsty political characters in modern Russian history were Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin; the former a Russian-Jew/Tatar mix, the ladder a Georgian of dubious ancestry. Russians are finally confronting certain fundamental elements of their national history. By the will of the Russian people, Lenin will be buried soon - even as his popularity continues to grow in Israel. Moreover, Joseph Stalin is now widely recognized by Russians as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the murderer of millions. It's refreshing to see Christian Orthodox Slavs retaking their nation, their culture and their history. Needless to say, Russians have learned their history lesson the hard way. The following video presentations are an alternative look at Bolshevism and the Red Army:

The Zionist Red Army: http://vodpod.com/watch/3112156-the-zionist-red-army-by-david-duke

The Jewish Bolshevik Revolution: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkKJmPsV4Tc

Arevordi
May, 2011

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Lenin's Jewish roots put on display in Russian museum

 

Exhibition reveals letter written by Lenin's sister claiming maternal grandfather was Ukrainian Jew; Stalin told sister to keep letter quiet. Documents apparently confirming rumors that Vladimir Lenin had Jewish ancestors can now be seen at Russia's State History Museum, AP reported on Monday.

Among the newly released documents on display at the museum is a letter written by Lenin's sister, Anna Ulyanova, claiming that their maternal grandfather was a Jew from the Ukraine who converted to Christianity to escape persecution in the Pale of Settlement and have access to higher education, the report said.

"He came from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate, the son of Moses Blank, a native of (the western Ukrainian city of) Zhitomir," Ulyanova wrote in 1932 in a letter cited by AP. In the letter written to Josef Stalin, who replaced Lenin after his death in 1924, Ulyanova wrote "Vladimir Ilych had always thought of Jews highly. I am very sorry that the fact of our origin — which I had suspected before — was not known during his lifetime."

Lenin, who was born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov in 1870, identified himself only as Russian under the czarist rule in the country, during which anti-Semitism was rampant. He adopted the name Lenin in 1901 while in exile in Siberia. According to the AP report, Lenin oversaw a brief period of promotion of Jewish culture which ended in the early 1930s when Stalin encouraged anti-Semitic purges and created a plan to relocate all Soviet Jews.

Ulyanova requested that Stalin make Lenin's Jewish background known to combat the rise of anti-Semitism, AP reported. She wrote in her letter, "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists. It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses." Stalin ignored Ulyanova's request and told her to "keep absolute silence" about the letter, according to the exhibition's curator, Tatyana Koloskova.


The documents counter information presented in Lenin's official biography, written by his niece Olga Ulyanova, in which she claims that his family had only Russia, German and Swedish roots. Anna Ulyanova's letter was discovered by Russian historians in the early 1990s, but its authenticity was questioned. 

Source: http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=221996

Russia's ruling party pushes for burial of Lenin

On the eve of the 87th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's death Russia's ruling United Russia party has yet again raised the issue of burying the leader of the 1917 October Revolution. Lenin died on January 21, 1924, but despite his stated wish his corpse was embalmed and placed in a specially built mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square. Over the years of Soviet rule, crowds of Soviet citizens and delegations from Communist-friendly countries visited the shrine.

However, proposals that Lenin's mummy should be removed from the heart of Moscow arose immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the two decades since discussion of the issue traditionally flares up prior to all of the memorable dates of Lenin's life. "Lenin is an extremely controversial figure and his presence...in the heart of our country is an absurdity," United Russia deputy Vladimir Medinsky said in comments on the party website.

He said only about 10 percent of the revolutionary's original body has been preserved over the years. "The rest was ripped up and replaced long ago." Deputy Robert Shlegel agreed with Medinsky: "His hands are covered in the blood of millions of Russians, he is a symbol of social disruptions and terror, a symbol of the grief that was suffered by the huge country."

The Liberal Democrats also stand for a burial, but for a different reason. "Merely on Christian and humane considerations his [Lenin's] body should lie in the ground," said Igor Lebedev, a leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

And as tradition dictates, the Communists slammed the calls to burry Lenin's mummy. "I do not understand these proposals, which come from the right and from United Russia. It looks like they can not find any other work," Communist deputy Viktor Ilyukhin said. Gennady Gudkov, member of the A Just Russia party also took a stand against the proposal. "Prices grow, electricity cables snap, fires burn, and we have not carried out reforms yet. Do we really have nothing to do except dip into the discussion of whether to bury [Lenin's mummy] or not?"

"For a portion of Russian people, Lenin is a kind of icon," Gudkov said. "The rights of the minorities and their religious feelings must be respected."

The discussion seems set to continue for some time as the opinion of Russia's top leadership remains non-committal. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in 2010 that the time when the Russian people decide on the fate of Lenin's mummy is still to come, adding that history shows a strong dislike for haste and disturbances.

Source: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20110120/162227463.html

Over 60% of Russians say Lenin must be buried - poll

Over 60 percent of Russians want Vladimir Lenin to be removed from his mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square and buried, a pollster said on Wednesday. Forty three percent of the polled were in favor of burying the leader of the Bolshevik revolution immediately, according to the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM). Meanwhile, 18% believe that this should be done at a later date. Thirty percent are in favor of leaving Lenin in the mausoleum as they believe it has long become a major tourist attraction. The survey was held on January 29-30 in 138 Russian residential areas, with the participation of 1,600 people. The margin of error is no more than 3.4%. Lenin died on January 21, 1924, but despite his stated wish, his corpse was embalmed and placed in a specially built mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square. Throughout the years of Soviet rule, crowds of Soviet citizens and delegations from friendly countries visited the tomb.

Source: http://en.rian.ru/society/20110202/162424816.html

Related:

Stalin's Jews

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB. We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags. Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself. In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World, "Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.

Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate. All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."

Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women. Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.

Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist. In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things. Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

Source: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

Medvedev Condemns Stalin’s Russia

Tomorrow, in their annual Victory Day observances, citizens of the former Soviet Union mark the 65th anniversary of the end of their four-year war with Nazi Germany and its allies. A recent Russian source calculates that the loss of lives on the Soviet side was more than 35 million. According to Soviet and today’s Russian leaders, the Soviet victory saved Europe from Fascist rule and guaranteed the flourishing of Western democracy. In Moscow the occasion will see the largest military parade for many years. Similar commemorations were slated for Kyiv and Minsk. In Belarus, the war eliminated about 25 per cent of the population and the republic remained under Axis occupation longer than any other part of the U.S.S.R.

The Ukrainian sacrifice was equally significant. In the city of Zaporizhzhya in the past week, on the territory of the Communist Party headquarters, a new statue of Stalin was erected that is about 2.5 metres in height. It is the first such statue to appear in Ukraine since 1953 and its supporters defend it with the statement that Stalin deserves recognition for his role as a war leader.

Today it is difficult to conceive of the scale of such a conflict. Over 3,000 tanks were involved in a single battle at Prokhorovka on July 12, 1943, when the Germans mounted their last offensive on the Eastern Front at the battle of Kursk Salient. Russia and Belarus have equated their contemporary states directly with the war victory. Ukraine was ambivalent until the recent election victory of Viktor Yanukovych, who has opted to ignore the fact that thousands of Ukrainians fought against the return of the Soviet occupants between 1944 and 1953.

The sacrifices are one aspect. The other is mythmaking on an epic scale. Soviet writers developed a narrative that went as follows: a treacherous attack by the Germans in the summer of 1941 met with bitter resistance but succeeded initially because of its suddenness. Nevertheless, the U.S.S.R. mounted a stand outside Moscow as winter approached and halted the German Blitzkrieg. In the following year the tide of war turned at Stalingrad in January 1943 and thereafter the war saw a continual advance as the population united behind the Red Army all the way to Berlin, led by Stalin in Moscow and commanders such as Georgii Zhukov at the front.

There have been variations on this theme but generally the interpretation has survived the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. As the Red Army veterans gradually die out, the narrative of the war filters down the generations. Contemporary youth can hardly escape the war, such is the epiphany of propaganda pervading television networks, monuments, museums and official commemorations that have reached a crescendo in 2010. Not all are convinced of the official interpretations, as one can see in an exchange on the website of a Belarusian newspaper following publication of an article by Yurii Rubashevsky, entitled “And who will approach us with a sword?” about the defence of the Brest Hero Fortress in the summer of 1941, one of the first battles of the war

In the article, the author declares “the Victory of 1945 began at the walls of the legendary citadel in June 1941.” There follows a Sovietstyle rendition of selfless resistance, though the citadel ultimately fell into German hands. One reader questions how the statement that “even the first hours of the war demonstrated that the Germans would not have an easy victory” squares with the fact that in these early weeks 400,000 Red Army soldiers perished and 280,000 were captured. Despite having forces comparable to or superior to those of the German Wehrmacht, he continues, the Red Army fled. “No such example is to be found in all the theatres of World War II.”

Another reader joins in by noting that even “good” journalists and historians are taken in by such ideological nonsense. In this reader’s view, there is no reason to take pride in the achievements of the defence of the fortress or the city of Brest. People fled in their pyjamas, throwing away their weapons and burning their Communist Party cards. Officers betrayed their troops. After two readers defended the article, a third critic wrote that Victory Day should be declared a “national day of mourning in memory of the innocent souls of all the nationalities who perished under the leadership of the talentless Red commanders.”

The currently venerated Stalin hardly exuded gratitude. The surviving defenders of the Brest Fortress were arrested once the Red Army liberated German prison camps and deported to the Far East, where most remained until the late 1950s. The Brest Hero Fortress, as well as several Hero Cities, was not recognized until the 1970s when the Brezhnev regime elevated the war to its contemporary propagandistic level.

It is accurate to say that after the battle of Stalingrad (where the Germans surrendered on February 2, 1943), the Red Army bore the chief responsibility for the defeat of Hitler. But it has become impossible in Russia in particular for historians to criticize the official narrative of the war. The result is a version of events that bears little relation to reality and where memories are only valued if they conform to the prevailing line. However, in contrast to the prevailing views in Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged yesterday that the figure that led the Soviet forces cannot be separated from his misdeeds.

Not only did Stalin’s purges, deportations and imposed mass famine on Ukraine cause the death of millions of his compatriots, but also he impeded the Soviet war effort by his lack of readiness for the German attack, victimizing and executing his own commanders, and exhibiting a lack of concern for Soviet losses that few generals would tolerate in modern warfare. The 65th anniversary of Victory Day is a time for sober contemplation and commemoration, but not for celebration.

David Marples is a professor of history at the University of Alberta.

Source: http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/medvedev-condemns-stalins-russia/

Solzhenitsyn Breaks Taboo: The Role Of Jews In Soviet-era Repression

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges. In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia. But Jewish leaders and some historians have reacted furiously to the book, and questioned Solzhenitsyn's motives in writing it, accusing him of factual inaccuracies and of fanning the flames of anti-semitism in Russia.

Solzhenitsyn argues that some Jewish satire of the revolutionary period "consciously or unconsciously descends on the Russians" as being behind the genocide. But he states that all the nation's ethnic groups must share the blame, and that people shy away from speaking the truth about the Jewish experience. In one remark which infuriated Russian Jews, he wrote: "If I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw - their life was softer than that of others." Yet he added: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."

Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, spent much of his life in Soviet prison camps, enduring persecution when he wrote about his experiences. He is currently in frail health, but in an interview given last month he said that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides - and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them. "My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews - their spiritual component," he said. "I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us."

But Solzhenitsyn's book has caused controversy in Russia, where one Jewish leader said it was "not of any merit". "This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," said Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews. "This is not a book about how the Jews and Russians lived together for 200 years, but one about how they lived apart after finding themselves on the same territory. This book is a weak one professionally. Factually, it is so bad as to be beyond criticism. As literature, it is not of any merit."

But DM Thomas, one of Solzhenitsyn's biographers, said that he did not think the book was fuelled by anti-semitism. "I would not doubt his sincerity. He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel. In his fiction and factual writing there are Jewish characters that he writes about who are bright, decent, anti-Stalinist people." Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history, said that from what he had read about the book, Solzhenitsyn was "absolutely right". Researching a book on Lenin, Prof Service came across details of how Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin, asked the politburo in 1919 to ensure that Jews were enrolled in the Red army.

Trotsky said that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka. "Trotsky's idea was that the spread of anti-semitism was [partly down to] objections about their entrance into the civil service. There is something in this; that they were not just passive spectators of the revolution. They were part-victims and part-perpetrators. "It is not a question that anyone can write about without a huge amount of bravery, and [it] needs doing in Russia because the Jews are quite often written about by fanatics. Mr Solzhenitsyn's book seems much more measured than that."

Yet others failed to see the need for Solzhenitsyn's pursuit of this particular subject at present. Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), said: "The question of ethnicity did not have any importance either in the revolution or the story of the NKVD. This was a social revolution and those who served in the NKVD and cheka were serving ideas of social change. "If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now."

Source: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7033-1.cfm

Was the Soviet Union a force for good or ill during the Nazi years?

That question is at the core of a controversy between and among some Jewish groups and former Soviet republics over the issue of Holocaust revisionism, and it erupted last week at a conference in Berlin organized by the World Congress of Russian-Speaking Jews on "The Legacy of World War II and the Holocaust." Some former Soviet republics view Stalin's Soviet regime as evil and laud those who fought it as nationalist heroes. The problem, many Jewish groups say, is that some of those nationalists were Nazi collaborators and vicious anti-Semites. In their bid to condemn these nationalists and their murder of Jews, some Jewish groups are trying to promote the image of Stalin's Red Army as liberator, not occupier, of Eastern Europe. It's a hard sell in countries such as Ukraine and Moldova, and in the Baltic states, where many say glorification of the nationalists is on the rise.

Others say, however, that the problem of nationalist extremism is exaggerated, and a Ukrainian diplomat and some Ukrainian Jewish leaders denounced the conference as an exercise in propaganda. "From the very beginning it was obvious that the conference was not aimed at a constructive approach but at politicizing this issue and extremely over-exaggerating," charged Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Natalia Zarudna, who spoke at the conference. “Russia never misses an opportunity to bash Ukraine,” concurred Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, a chief rabbi of Ukraine. Bleich said he was invited to the conference but “did not come because I think it was orchestrated by a Russian propaganda machine.”

Boris Shpigel, president of the World Congress of Russian-Speaking Jewry, insisted that his concerns about nationalism in Ukraine and elsewhere were genuine, and that he wants to spur a new movement to combat revisionism in former Soviet bloc countries. “At a time when a new generation doesn’t know about the history of World War II, about the Holocaust, we will be a foundation for consolidating all civilizations to fight against new forms of revisionism," said Shpigel, who is also a senator in the Russian parliament. “We are not going to fight with these countries. Ninety percent of the people in these countries are good. It is the other 10 percent who are lying, and it is our goal” to reach them.

The conference passed resolutions to establish an international, anti-fascist umbrella organization to monitor historical revisionism and resurgent neo-fascism; called on the people of Ukraine not to cooperate with fascist and Nazi groups, and to stop glorifying wartime nationalists such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who helped Nazis kill Jews; and demanded that the international community decry the Iranian regime's Holocaust denial and verbal threats against Israel. Among the some 500 people from 28 countries attending the conference were many Soviet World War II veterans, who came with medals pinned to their jackets. Zarudna said groups like Shpigel's exaggerate the degree of neo-fascism in Ukraine, and the envoy condemned what she described as attempts by conference organizers to interfere in the country's upcoming presidential elections next month.

Joseph Zissels, the head of Ukraine's Jewish umbrella group, the Vaad, said the conference “can be seen as an indirect attempt to have an impact on the election.” In a telephone interview from Ukraine, Zissels also said ultranationalists were not as big a problem in Ukraine as described, and that it is Russia that is attempting to portray Ukraine as extremist in order to weaken Ukraine's ties with the West. “Ultranationalists in Ukraine have the support of less than 1 percent of the population,” Zissels said. “Russia’s concern is European integration of Ukraine, and that is why they play with the impression that Ukraine is very nationalistic, which it is not.”

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, told JTA that any country that ignores the war crimes of nationalist figures encourages extremists. "There is a need for an organization that will monitor these issues," Zuroff said. Israel's Foreign Ministry declined to send representatives to the conference because "We don’t want to get into internal politics in this regard," said Aviva Raz Schechter, head of the ministry's Department for Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Issues. Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee, said there has been “genuine progress” on issues of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet bloc countries.

Source: http://jta.org/news/article/2009/12/20/1009819/controversy-erupts-over-holocaust-revisionism-in-e-europe