Friday, January 17, 2014

'Gay jihad' and 'Orthodox fascism': Homophobia spreads in Russian media

Homophobia spreads in Russian media

Russian television journalist Dmitry Kiselev Dmitry Kiselev has led state media attacks on Russia's gay community and now heads a major news organisation

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The Russian authorities have been widely criticised for enacting a law banning the promotion of homosexuality among children.
A rising tide of homophobia in parts of the media has accompanied and followed the adoption of that law, including attempts to implicate homosexuals in a recent series of terror attacks.
The controversy surrounding the so-called "anti-gay" law passed by the State Duma (parliament) last June had the paradoxical effect of dramatically raising the profile of homosexuality in both social and mainstream media. But it has also led to an upsurge in homophobia.
On Twitter, for example, the incidence of the main pejorative terms used to describe gays ("pidoras" and its variants) increased ten-fold between the beginning of 2011 and the second half of 2013 - from around 7,000 a month to more than 70,000.
The incidence of the more educated but no less offensive term "sodomite" also soared - from being used just two or three times a day at the beginning of 2011 to more than 100 times at the end of 2013.
'Sodomite tsunami'
These increases may in part be attributable to the overall growth of Twitter in Russia during this period, but similar trends can also be observed in the mainstream media.
The media monitoring organisation Medialogiya says the number of news reports referring to homosexuality on official TV channel Rossiya 1has skyrocketed over the past few years. In 2011, there were just 11, whereas in 2013 there were more than 160.
Almost all of these reports displayed an attitude that was either outright hostile or else noticeably negative towards homosexuals.
The man spearheading Rossiya 1's attacks on the gay community is Dmitry Kiselev, anchor of the channel's flagship weekly news review Vesti Nedeli.
The programme's attacks on the LGBT community have been remorseless. It has portrayed them as an "aggressive minority" opposed to "parents fighting to give their children a healthy upbringing". It has alsosuggested that "40% of children brought up by homosexuals have venereal diseases".
Dmitry Kiselev told another programme on Rossiya 1 in 2012 that the hearts of homosexuals killed in car accidents "should be buried or burnt as unfit for prolonging anybody's life".
Another staunchly anti-gay voice on Rossiya 1 is senior journalist Arkady Mamontov, who on a prime-time talk show suggested that Russia was in danger of being engulfed by a "homosexual sodomite tsunami".
Not all of Russia's state-controlled TV channels share Rossiya 1's taste for gay-bashing. Channel One's news programmes, for example, refer to homosexuality far less frequently and never in the same derogatory terms.
Some of its programmes have exhibited a much more positive attitude to homosexuals. A recent drama series about the Soviet film industry featured a sympathetic gay character being cruelly persecuted for his sexuality.
St Petersburg police guard gay rights activists who were attacked in street, 29 Jun 13Police shield gay rights activists who were attacked in St Petersburg
'Gay jihad'
Still, there is no doubt that hostile attitudes to homosexuals have the blessing of the Kremlin. In December, Dmitry Kiselev was appointed head of Russia Today, a major new news organisation tasked with communicating Moscow's message to a global audience.
Liberal commentators are deeply troubled by the rising tide of homophobia. Russian-born US activist Larry Poltavtsev writes that just as everything Jewish was anathema to the Nazis, so "now everything that stands apart from President Putin and his team is deemed to be 'gay'."
He cited a news agency report referring to a "gay jihad", which suggested that homosexuality was rife among the terrorists responsible for the recent bomb attacks in the city of Volgograd.
This is not the only instance of fingers of blame being pointed at the gay community over the blasts. Controversial Orthodox clergyman Andrei Kurayev suggested that one of the bombers may have converted to Islam because of the "cancer" of homosexuality in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in the Russian region of Tatarstan.
'Orthodox fascism'
Russian Orthodox Church clergy have in general supported the hostility towards homosexuals. One TV presenter, Olga Bakushinskaya, dubs it "Orthodox fascism".
In December an actor and former Orthodox priest, Ivan Okhlobystin, outraged liberals by telling an audience in Siberia that he would "shove all gays live into an oven". Mr Okhlobystin is one of Russia's most influential voices on social media, with more than 790,000 followers onTwitter.
Laws targeting homosexuals and mounting media homophobia are making life ever more precarious for Russia's beleaguered gay community.
A recent report by the Russian LGBT network said LGBT people were facing a climate of "general discrimination and violence". It said a survey showed that over the past year 53% had faced "psychological violence" and 15% actual physical harm. In at least two cases in 2013, this violence proved fatal.
BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. For more reports from BBC Monitoring,click here. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.

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Tuesday, January 14, 2014

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Russia expels US journalist David Satter without explanation

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Moscow authorities ban writer from the country in first
expulsion of US journalist since the cold war
Russia has expelled a US journalist living in Moscow for the first time since the cold war, in a move that is likely to strain relations with Washington on the eve of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Satter had been based in the Russian capital since September. Last
month, he travelled to the Ukrainian capital Kiev to renew his
visa where Alexy Gruby, a diplomat at the Russian
embassy, read him a prepared statement that said: "The competent organs have decided that your presence on the territory of the Russian Federation is not desirable. You are banned from entering Russia."
The "competent organs" are the Federal Security Service (FSB), President Vladimir Putin's powerful domestic spy and counter-intelligence agency. Such language is usually used in spy cases.
The US ambassador in Moscow, Michael McFaul, raised Satter's case with Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Rybakov, on the eve of the refusal. Following Satter's expulsion, the embassy issued a diplomatic protest and asked for an explanation. The Russian authorities declined to give one.
On Tuesday Russia's foreign ministry accused Satter of infringing migration rules. In a statement, the ministry said the journalist had waited five days before converting his initial entry visa into a multi-entry visa – "a flagrant violation". He was now barred from the country for five years, it said.
Since 2009, the Obama administration has pursued a pragmatic policy of "resetting" relations with the Kremlin. Critics say this has brought few positive results.
Satter's expulsion is surprising. It comes weeks after Putin gave an amnesty to several high-profile political prisoners including the jailed former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Arctic 30 Greenpeace activists and two members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot. The move was widely seen as an attempt to improve Russia's image ahead of the Sochi Olympics, which begin on 7 February.
Expulsions of western correspondents were a regular hallmark of the cold war era. The Kremlin evicted a string of American reporters in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The last to be unilaterally thrown out was Newsweek bureau chief Andrei Nagorski in 1982. Another reporter, Nicholas Daniloff, was briefly jailed in 1986 after the FBI arrested a Soviet spy in New York.
Under
Putin, the FSB has brought back KGB-style methods of harassment against foreign journalists. These include demonstrative apartment break-ins, surveillance and interrogations. Largely unreported, the FSB is increasingly rejecting visa applications from western academics seeking to visit Russia if their publications are deemed hostile.
Speaking to the
Guardian from London, Satter, 66, said: "My position is that this ban should be reversed immediately."
He said the manner of his expulsion – without any explanation – suggested the security services regarded him as a risk. "This is a formula used for
spies," he said. "To apply it to a journalist is something I have not seen in nearly four decades of writing and reporting on Russia. It is indicative that they consider me, for whatever crazy reasons, to be a security threat."
Satter first visited Moscow in 1969 as an Oxford graduate student. Between 1976-82 he was the FT's correspondent
in the city. In 1979, the authorities threatened to expel him for "hooliganism", only to back down later. He returned to post-communist Russia in the early
1990s and went back to Moscow from the US for another stint last autumn.
Satter's new role was an adviser to the broadcaster Radio Europe/Radio Free Liberty, which is funded by the US Congress. He was also working on a book on Russia's post-communist history.Satter said he had been unable to collect his notes, clothes and other belongings, which remain in his flat in central Moscow.
Asked why Russia had kicked him out, Satter said he did not know the answer. But he speculated
thatthe FSB's decision may be linked to his writings on Russia's 1999 apartment bombings – one of the murkiest episodes in the country's post-Soviet history.
More than 300 people were killed in a series of unprovoked explosions in Moscow and two other cities. Putin blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists. He immediately seized on the blasts to justify a second, punitive and devastating war in Chechnya.
Satter, and others, believe the bombings may have been an undercover FSB operation, designed to boost Putin's popularity and to secure his election as president. In his 2003 book, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, Satter concluded that the evidence of the FSB being behind the blasts was "overwhelming".
In September
1999, FSB officers were caught planting another bomb under an apartment block in Ryazan. The head of the
FSB, a close ally of
Putin's, later claimed the bomb had been an FSB
training exercise. Satter's 2003 book was reprinted in Russia last February, under the title How Putin Became President.
Several other prominent Russians have similarly accused the FSB, including the journalistAnna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko. Both were subsequently murdered. Putin has dismissed the claim as a slander.
Satter said he had planned to expand investigative journalism at Radio Liberty, which has recently been in a state of turmoil after many of its long-standing Russian staff were sacked. It is one of few sources of independent news in Russia, where most of the media is either state-controlled or in the hands of oligarchs linked to the state. Since Putin's return to the Kremlin in 2011, the official media has become increasingly anti-western.
"We wanted to pay attention to historical events including the most critical and tragic events,"
Sattersaid. "I didn't go back to Russia to report on the apartment bombings. I've already done that. But at the same time I don't believe questions of such importance can be ignored." Other sensitive events include the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis, in which 334 people, most of them children, died, he said.
senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow atJohns Hopkins University, Satter is scathing about the White House's uncritical approach towards the Kremlin. He describes Obama's policy as counterproductive and flawed: "I think my expulsion shows the true nature of the reset. It was meaningless from the start. It ignores the realities of Russian life and Russian politics.
"It treats Russia
as a normal democratic country, instead of treating it as a society dominated by a small group dedicated only to itself, both materially and politically. It's self-deluding. It makes it more difficult to deal with the consequences."
Concerns over security at next month's Sochi games have been heightened by twin suicide attacks last month on the city of Volgograd, which
caused 32 deaths. The authorities have blamed Islamist jihadis who are fighting to establish a "caliphate" in the nearby North Caucasus. "In Russia we don't always know who is blowing up whom," Satter
said.
US-Russian ties have been strained for some time. They worsened last year when Putin granted asylum to Edward Snowden. No high-ranking US politician will visit the opening ceremony in Sochi – and the White House has included several openly gay members of its official delegation, a response to anti-gay legislation passed by Russia's Duma last year.
Putin was the FSB's boss before he became prime minister in 1999 and president in 2000. The organisation is known for its conspiratorial world
view and its hostility towards the United States. The FSB now appears to be the ultimate arbiter of who is allowed into the country.

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Russia expels US journalist David Satter without explanation - The Guardian

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The Guardian


Russia expels US journalist David Satter without explanation
The Guardian
Russia has expelled a US journalist living in Moscow for the first time since the cold war, in a move that is likely to strain relations with Washington on the eve of the Sochi Winter Olympics. David Satter – a distinguished former correspondent with ...

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David Satter, a US correspondent for Radio Free Europe, describes the moment he was expelled from Russia without explanation

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Russia expels U.S. journalist critical of Putin

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MOSCOW (Reuters) -
Russia has barred a U.S. journalist who is critical of President Vladimir Putin
for five years, a move that
could upset relations with the United States and has echoes of the Cold
War.