All Civilized People Should Condemn Vladlen Tatarsky’s Assassination

In the mind of regular Jerusalem Post contributor Seth Frantzman and his fellow travelers, the politically driven acts of bombing, running over, and stabbing someone constitute terrorism, but only if the victim can’t be described as Russian in the ethno-national sense. This hatred towards that group would rightly be condemned as bigoted by the Mainstream Media if it was applied towards Blacks, Jews, LGBT+, Muslims, and other Western minorities and almost certainly result in the culprit being “canceled”, but he and those like him get a pass because Russophobia is in vogue nowadays.

Famous Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was assassinated in a terrorist attack on Sunday after a bomb ripped through the café where he was meeting with his supporters, which also resulted in injuring over 30 people, some of them seriously. Chief suspect Darya Trepova, a 26-year-old who gifted him a figurine during the event that’s now considered to have been packed with explosives, was detained less than 24 hours afterwards.

It doesn’t matter which side of the NATO-Russian proxy war one supports since all civilized people should condemn Tatarsky’s assassination. Targeting an unarmed journalist is always wrong, especially when it’s in a public place and the employed means are intended to cause as much collateral damage as possible to innocent civilians. This was indisputably a terrorist attack that was carried out with the partial purpose of also punishing average folks for their political opinions towards that conflict.

Western governments’ silence, which Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized Sunday evening, strongly implies tacit approval of this terrorist assassination. There’s no doubt that this story would be the leading one on all US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets for the next week at very least had an American or Ukrainian military blogger been killed in the exact same sort of attack that also injured over 30 people in a public café.

Seth J. Frantzman, who’s the founder of both the “Middle East Center for Research and Analysis” and “Israel Gulf Report” as well as a regular contributor to The Jerusalem Post, felt differently about his. He released a tweetstorm the day after the attack ranting about why it shouldn’t be considered a terrorist one despite having previously published a lengthy explanation seven years ago about why people should consider it a terrorist attack whenever Palestinians run over Israelis or stab them.

The only explanation for why he doesn’t regard bombing a public café full of Russian civilians to be terrorism but considers running over and stabbing Israeli civilians to be such, not to mention bombing a public bus full of the latter which he described as an example of terrorism in his tweetstorm, is because he’s bigoted. After all, it’s the embodiment of bigotry to employ different standards towards people of different ethno-national identities who are in the exact same situation.

Frantzman’s hateful rant cuts straight to the core of why some people refuse to condemn Tatarsky’s assassination. Simply put, irrespective of whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re applying Hitler’s discredited fascist conspiracy theory alleging that one’s ethno-national identity predetermines their political views and therefore supposedly justifies harming them on that pretext. That’s why he and his fellow travelers refuse to describe Tatarsky’s assassination as a terrorist attack.

In their mind, the politically driven acts of bombing, running over, and stabbing someone constitute terrorism, but only if the victim can’t be described as Russian in the ethno-national sense. This hatred towards that group would rightly be condemned as bigoted by the MSM if it was applied towards Blacks, Jews, LGBT+, Muslims, and other Western minorities and almost certainly result in the culprit being “canceled”, but Frantzman and those like him get a pass because Russophobia is in vogue nowadays.

This speaks to the newfound prevalence of fascism across the US’ “sphere of influence”, which is reinforced by the West’s liberal-globalist elite and their “woke” army, who gaslight their audience by claiming that they’re supposedly “anti-fascists” in order to disguise their bigotry. As such, it’s become “politically incorrect” to condemn any injustice done to Russians, including indisputable terrorist attacks like Tatarsky’s assassination. Even so, those remaining civilized people in the West should still speak up.