From the KGB to Gaza: How Soviet 'Active Measures' Still Manipulate the West
by Pierre Rehov • September 18, 2025 at 5:00 am
What some now call the "pro-Palestine movement" in the West is, in many respects, the residue of decades of KGB-backed manipulation. The cultural self-hatred, moral relativism, and selective outrage that dominate today's progressive circles were seeded by Soviet strategists who understood that eroding Western confidence from within could be more decisive than any tank battalion.
Between June 2015 and May 2017, Facebook identified roughly $100,000 in advertising spending tied to Russian operators — around 3,000 ads and 470 fake accounts. These "false amplifiers" were not fringe experiments; they were coordinated tools to manipulate American discourse around the most sensitive of issues: race, violence and justice.
Algorithms that reward outrage over truth became Moscow's best allies. Viral posts spread disinformation with an efficiency no Cold War-era propaganda organ could ever have matched. Silicon Valley unwittingly handed Russia the perfect conduit for digital warfare.
What began with the KGB's creation and sponsorship of radical Palestinian organizations has evolved into a kaleidoscope of identity-based movements that serve the same destabilizing purpose.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran's revolutionary regime, and the emirate of Qatar eagerly seized onto the momentum of Soviet-inspired subversion.
By turning every regional or global grievance into an indictment of the Jewish state, they perpetuated the Soviet narrative while adding their own religious zealotry.
The moral relativism of progressive elites, the selective outrage of campus radicals, and the obsessive fixation on "Palestine" are not organic: they are the downstream effects of decades of collaboration between Moscow's active measures and Islamist subversion, turbocharged by Qatari money and Iranian militancy.
In 1984, Yuri Bezmenov, a former Soviet KGB officer turned defector, issued a chilling warning to the West. As a specialist in the USSR's propaganda and subversion, he revealed how Moscow's "active measures" were designed not only to mislead but to fundamentally destabilize societies from within. The West, convinced that victory in the Cold War would be purely military or economic, ignored his words. Yet Bezmenov understood what few in Washington or Brussels could grasp: the battlefield was psychological, cultural and moral.
