Remember when Vladimir Putin said the provisional government in Kiev was brought to power by "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites"? Remember how RT, or Russia Today, the Kremlin's English-language propaganda outlet, actively advanced the fiction—and it is a fiction—that anti-Semitism is now running rampant in post-Yanukovych Ukraine? The stories about Odessa Jews being evacuated, of Ukrainian synagogues being attacked, the stories on the anti-Semitic statements of Ukrainian nationalists involved in the Maidan movement?

Well, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has demanded that Russia Today publicly apologize for a video that aired on its channel, which the Center said was "eight minutes of raw Jew-hatred and unambiguous group defamation." The video, made by an Australian media company, purports to rap its way through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the process marshalling quite a few classic anti-Semitic stereotypes.

"Does screening this repugnance signal an RT policy shift?" the statement went on, quoting Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations at the Wiesenthal Center. "If so, you have made a mockery of Russia’s 9 May Victory commemoration, as you soil the memory of more than 20 million Soviet citizens—among them over 500,000 Jewish soldiers of the Red Army—who fell victim to the Nazi scourge."

In response, Russia Today said that it had no role in the production of the video and simply had beamed it across the universe, unchecked. Then it accused the Simon Wiesenthal Center of anti-Semitism.

Were that this was one, isolated incident. Unfortunately, despite Moscow's assertions that it needs to protect Russian speakers from the fascists and anti-Semites now in power in Kiev, the rise of Russian nationalism at home has brought with it an ugly tide of Russian anti-Semitism.