Bellingcat, the UK-based enablers of Western narratives in Syria and Ukraine now fueling US race riots, selectively translated a satirical post from Russian social media shared by RT’s editor in chief to get her “canceled.”
On Sunday, Margarita Simonyan shared a Telegram post by Dmitry Steshin, a war correspondent for the newspaper KP, which purported to give “advice” to rioters in the US how to make their uprising more “successful” along the lines of the US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine.
Given that the post was entirely in Russian, it was obvious that the real objective of Steshin – and Simonyan – was to comment on the Maidan in Kiev and the ensuing war in Ukraine. Not so, declared the self-proclaimed experts on “open-source” intelligence. Bellingcat selectively translated a handful of sentences from Steshin’s post and accused Simonyan of – what else? – racism.
“You deliberately missed [the]point of the post. It was satirising behaviour of Maidan supporters in 2014, through [the]prism of current unrest. It wasn’t aimed at black protestors in 2020,” RT responded on Twitter.
Indeed, Simonyan’s post starts with “good advice to black people of Minnesota from a journalist who covered seven Maidans and color revolutions” – referring to US-backed astroturfed protests that often escalated into riots for the purpose of regime change. Being in Russian, though, the advice was clearly not meant for Minnesotans.
While Steshin’s post might use rough language, “humor norms vary by country. More so in countries not dealing with [the]burden of once being such enthusiastic African slave traders,” RT noted in retort to Bellingcat.
Russia had no history of African slavery and has treated fairly the people of African heritage who ended up living there voluntarily, from the great-grandfather of the famous 19th century poet Aleksandr Pushkin to Chernobyl liquidator Igor Khiryak, to use a more modern example.
None of that apparently matters to outfits like Bellingcat, because Russia must be bad and accused of everything and anything – from Ukraine to Syria, the “highly likely” case of the Salisbury Skripals, and now racism in the US.
It needs to be said that Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins declared that “Russia is behind the killing of George Floyd to provoke protests and riots” is a stupid take. It’s also a straw man, because even the media outlets stoking the riots only talk of some “Russian playbook” and sowing discord, and other such vague and unprovable insinuations, just as they’ve done for years with ‘Russiagate.’
Even as Bellingcat accuses Simonyan of racism when it comes to US protests, it is busily throwing fuel on the fire of the riots, promoting the narrative that US police are deliberately targeting journalists “as the president of the United States continues to stoke hatred of the media.”
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