A group of deputies from the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, has retracted a demand, sent earlier to the Prosecutor General’s Office, to ban all Jewish organizations in Russia.
One of the deputies who signed the open letter to the prosecutor general published in the Rus Pravoslavnaya newspaper, Aleksandr Krutov, retracted the petition. He added that the prosecution had not started to check the facts stated in the letter, Interfax news agency reported.
The letter, signed by over 500 people including about 20 MPs, called the Jewish religion “anti-Christian and inhumane, whose practices extend even to ritual murders”.
“Many facts of such religious extremism were proven in courts,” the letter read. It said that many anti-Semitic acts in Russia had been caused by the “anti-Christian” behavior of Jews or even committed by Jews themselves as grounds to “take punitive measures against patriots”.