The Soviet Roots of Russia’s Modern Disinformation War

Anti-Semitism, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pronounced while repudiating an anti-Israel resolution adopted at the 1967 National Conference for New Politics, is “immoral.” Accordingly, the civil rights leader would surely have been dismayed at the prevalence of that age-old prejudice in the wake of the barbarous October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. Nor would he necessarily have accepted the cynical camouflaging of anti-Jewish prejudice as “anti-Zionism.” At an October 1967 dinner, according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset’s later eyewitness account, King rebuked a student: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”Moreover, Dr. King saw the fight against that age-old hatred as congruent with the civil rights struggle. In a June 1965 message, he wrote, “We deplore anti-Semitism as we deplore discrimination and segregation in Mississippi and Alabama." Given his awareness of Soviet intelligence attempts to discredit him by portraying him as an “Uncle Tom” secretly receiving U.S. government subsidies, King might also have recognized the pattern identified by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center: after October 7,...