From BBC Russian:
The Russian Ministry of Justice has included in the list of extremist materials the Soviet propaganda film “Secret and Explicit. Aims and Deeds of the Zionists.” The film was shot in the 1970s on the wave of “anti-Zionism” in the USSR, but it never made it to the wide screen because of the fears of the Soviet authorities.The decision to ban the film was made by the Syktyvkar City Court in July this year, but it was only on November 8 that it was officially included in the list of extremist materials.The documentary black and white tape was released in 1973 by the Central Documentary Film Studio.
[T]he script for the film was approved at the highest level – in the international department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, a whole group of reputable consultants from the USSR Academy of Sciences, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the KGB were assigned to work on the picture. The filmmakers were even allowed to travel to Europe to collect material.The well-known historian of the Soviet era Yevgeny Dobrenko wrote: “This film was the Soviet version of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion ,” so odious and wild even by Soviet standards that it was assessed as anti-Semitic and banned even by the KGB and the Central Committee.”
I found a version of the film where it appears that someone added clips from the 1990s (Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak). But it seems to include the original complete film.
I don’t understand Russian but the antisemitism is obvious – scenes of Jews praying, shots of Jewish books that are almost certainly being claimed to demean non-Jews, accusations that Jews collaborated with Nazis on the Holocaust.
Leftist anti-Zionism started off indistinguishable from classic antisemitism. After missteps like this film, the Left learned to hide their Jew-hate a little better, always insisting that they weren’t anti-Jew but only anti-Israel.
That doesn’t change the fact that the anti-Zionists are still motivated by the same hate for Jews that they always were. Hiding it better doesn’t make that any less true.
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