SPEECH AT THE MOSCOW RUSSOPHILE CONFERENCE

A year ago, when teaching Dostoyevsky became an issue in Italian universities and the greatest living soprano and conductor were forced to either denounce their Russian homeland or lose their jobs, I thought “Welcome on board!”.

Russophobia is only the last of many phobias purposely built for modem formulas of colonization. Its manifesto can be considered the will by which Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, established the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxons and their right to rule the world and exploit its resources.

I come from Sicily, a multicultural island of the Mediterranean which was - for thousands of years - the crossroads of refined civilizations that built a glorious and still very lively heritage. Yet for the last 70 years Sicily has mostly been known for the evil deeds of a criminal group, the mafia, brought back by the US army when it landed on the island to liberate Europe from Nazism. It was the first ISIS, a terrorist organization freely committing all sorts of abuses and massacres and simulating a strong religious affiliation. Although heroic Sicilians from all walks of life fought it back, the big movie industry built a blemishing image of my country, meant to legitimise its occupation with huge military basis operating in the front line against Russia and the Arab world.
This form of hate campaign had already been successfully launched against Native Americans, in order to substantiate and legalize confiscation of their property and territorial rights through systematic slander: carried out by “western” movies, starting from the 1899 British silent film ‘'Kidnapping by Indians", hate campaigns became - in the name of so-called “civilization” - the instrument of a strategic geopolitical occupation “justifying” ethnic cleansing, biological warfare, enslavement and forced assimilation. To put it in Benjamin Franklin's words, it proved the “Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth”.

As a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies, president of DAG, the Deutsch-Arabische Gesellschaft, one of Europe’s most glorious bridge-building institutions, which has been fighting arabophobia thanks to its determination and the remarkable cultural level of my predecessors such as Peter Scholl-Latour, I must remind all of you here of those terrible years when - after 9/11- you could not read an Arabic newspaper in public without being considered a terrorist. The spate of harmful and even contradictory stereotypes of the Arabs, described as lazy and yet violent, suspicious but gullible, mysterious and fraudulent, has however much earlier roots, which Edward Said dates back to Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. The Palestinian scholar, considered to be the founder of postcolonial studies, shows how Orientalist ideologies perpetuate views of Middle Eastern people as inferior, subservient, and in need of saving. As a result, these often racist or romanticised stereotypes created a worldview that justified Western colonialism and imperialism as well as the destruction and occupation of entire countries, starting from Algeria, North Africa, most of West Asia, and then Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. Not to speak of Palestine, where it was the Arabs that had to pay - with the drama of the Nakba - for the Eugenic Society’s project of race selection launched by Cecil Rhodes, Arthur Balfour and Alfred Miller, and carried out by Hitler, whom “they had appointed Chancellor in 1933 by exerting their influence over the German banking system, with the aim to point Germany towards war with Russia and France"¹.
It could seem that the latest onslaught on the Arabic and Islamic world was essentially aimed at illegally acquiring its economic and strategic assets. Yet this is only part of the true story, since the Caucasian Wahhabi jihadist groups, created, trained and financed to fight also in Lybia, Syria and Tunisia, have openly declared that their aim was to disrupt the Russian Federation and the ex-soviet Islamic republics.

The multipolar religious and ethnic system of the Caucasus and Central Asia has resisted since the times of the Tsars thanks to the great Sheikhs of the Qadiryia, the Naqshbandiya and other Sufi orders who were strongly opposed to fighting for the so-called “Islamic state”. The Imperial family itself as well as Russian nobility was not only cosmopolitan, but multi-ethnic. Native non-Russians such as the Poles, Georgians, Lithuanians, Tatars, Azerbaijanis and Germans, always formed an important segment of the noble estate. My own cousin, a US citizen, was married to Prince Alexander Romanov, a great-grandson of Tsar Alexander 3,d who now rests in our mausoleum in Palermo.

Cancelling these strong links that connect, through Russia, Europe to Asia, is a dangerous and selfdestructive process which we must be committed to hinder, for the sake of peace and human harmony.
Russophobia is none other but the post-production of a long-term project: that of destroying Russia for exactly the same reasons for which so many Arab countries have been destroyed or are presently under attack, like Lebanon. And these reasons are not only oil, wealth and geostrategic issues, but also the capacity to stick to various models of traditional multicultural societies. One of the major instruments used to carry out this project are women, the first victims of "orientalism", which concocted an image of promiscuity, slavery and ignorance, as shown in the many books and essays I devoted to the subject, starting from my 1980 bestseller "Harem". Its success backlashed with terrific violence and I was attacked in every possible way for having demolished 2 centuries of fake news built on arabophobia.

All of you have certainly noticed that when a Palestinian woman, a child or even a journalist with a US passport like Shireen Abu Aqleh or a young American activist like Rachel Corrie are brutally killed, none of the mainstream media reports the story correctly, nobody marches for justice and no open society groups attack government buildings - as was the case in Iran when an unfortunate young girl collapsed due to the consequences of a previous brain tumor. When Daria Dugina, a philosopher, a writer, a devoted Christian, a beautiful athletic woman representing Europe at its best with her intellectual ability to draw together Greek philosophy and Russian tradition, was murdered in a terrorist attack, no outraged feminists demanded international sanctions for the crime or nominated her for a human rights award.

Women are the first and major force used to disrupt traditional societies in sovereign countries. The Foreign Minister of Germany, a lady who is so unpopular across the planet that at her arrival in India for the G20 she was only met by her own ambassador, has recently issued and financed with 96 million euros a law on "Feminist foreign policy" in order "to promote gender sensitivity in the world”. The aim of this instrument, developed by a number of European institutions, is to "deconstruct supposedly “natural" power structures...as unjust, discriminatory and oppressive and demand abolition of the patriarchy and equality of the sexes in all spheres of society". In its detailed analysis of the law , the German Institute for International and Security Affairs further explains that "The emancipatory goal of feminism is to abolish every form of domination between the sexes. Some approaches argue that this presupposes the abolition of capitalism. Certain interpretations question the existence of the State, which is regarded as a patriarchal repressive apparatus. An inclusive understanding of feminism also embraces further identities such as LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersexual, asexual and others) and breaks with the fixation on cis-gendered men and women whose gender identity corresponds to the gender assigned at birth.”

This is obviously yet another way to interfere into the politics of countries who are reluctant to apply such legislation and intend to protect their traditional structures. To win the media war against phobias we should therefore enforce the image of those women who represent the best of the traditional world. As the West has built an icon of Lady Diana for her elegance and style, we must make Daria Dugina the symbol of all those women who still consistently fight for the respect of a multipolar traditional world. We have to give them the strength to defend their position. Not every woman can be a hero like Daria Dugina. But every woman can give some of her love to build a better world.

Moscow, March 14th 2023

Notes

1. Matt Ehret, Cecil Rhodes, the Roundtable Movement and Eugenics, The Canadian Patriot, 2015.

2.Claudia Zilla, Feminist Foreign Policy: Concepts, core components and controversies, SWP Comment 2022/C 48, 18.08.2022, 7 Pages