Ilhan Omar’s Critics Want Impunity for US and Israeli War Crimes

Democratic Party leaders have accused Ilhan Omar of “moral equivalency” because she rejected the brazen double standard underpinning US foreign policy. But Omar is right: murderous violence against civilians is no less criminal when Israel or the United States are the perpetrators.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill are once again engaged in one of their favorite activities: bashing Ilhan Omar and setting her up for abuse by the American right. Two years ago, they denounced the Minnesota congresswoman and bullied her into apologizing for an innocuous tweet about the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on public debate. Now they’ve issued a statement condemning Omar “for drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban.”

In a repeat of the pattern from 2019, Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues present the results of their harassment as a justification for it: “We welcome the clarification by Congresswoman Omar that there is no moral equivalency between the US and Israel and Hamas and the Taliban.” The most telling phrase in the statement was “moral equivalency.” It has a long and ignoble history as a tool for whitewashing crimes against humanity.

When the likes of Pelosi complain about “moral equivalency,” what they really mean is this: Under no circumstances can you judge the United States and its allies by the things that they do. You must judge them by their rhetorical claims to support peace, democracy, and goodwill among men. No matter how many innocent people they kill, you can never accuse them of terrorism or criminality. Such labels are the exclusive property of designated “bad guys” like Hamas, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin.

The high-sounding rhetoric about “moral equivalency” conceals an ugly truth: the guardians of the US foreign-policy consensus know perfectly well that it can’t be justified by reference to ethical principles. If we applied a consistent set of moral standards to all states and nonstate actors, that consensus would soon crumble into dust.

Their Dictatorships and Ours

The term “moral equivalency” (or “moral equivalence”) has a blood-soaked history. The person who did most to popularize it was Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick. She even published a long essay on the subject, “The Myth of Moral Equivalence,” in 1986.

Kirkpatrick should have ended her life as a pariah figure. In her most notorious public intervention, after soldiers from the military junta in El Salvador kidnapped, raped, and murdered four US churchwomen in 1980, Kirkpatrick told a reporter from the Tampa Tribune that the victims had it coming:

The nuns were not just nuns. They were political activists. We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are.

Kirkpatrick later realized that it might be wise to conceal her enthusiastic support for Central American death squads, at least in public. When the story appeared in print, she claimed that she had never uttered those words, but the reporter had a tape recording to back it up.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration was pumping $2 billion a year into the Salvadorean military regime, without which it would soon have collapsed. The dictatorship was waging a ruthless war against ordinary Salvadorans. State security forces killed over 75,000 civilians in a country that had a population of less than five million people in 1980. Kirkpatrick and her allies fully supported this campaign of mass murder and worked tirelessly to ensure that it would continue without any outside interference.

The death of four US citizens posed a problem for Kirkpatrick because it revealed the true nature of her chosen allies in Central America. When she issued an “unequivocal” denial that the junta was responsible for the killings, she was lying through her teeth. The US ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, left his political bosses with no room for doubt about what had really happened.

Kirkpatrick’s colleague, secretary of state Alexander Haig, suggested to Congress that government soldiers might have killed the women in a fit of absentmindedness because they ran a roadblock or were “perceived to have been doing so.” He ordered White to give the junta a clean bill of health and praise its investigation of the murders. White explained to Haig that he would be unable to carry out this demand: “The Salvadoran military killed those women, and the idea that they’re going to investigate in a serious way their own crimes is simply an illusion.” After White wrote in a cable to Washington that he would have “no part of any cover-up,” Reagan’s government fired him.

Combined with the public statements from Kirkpatrick and Haig, White’s sacking was the clearest possible green light to the Salvadorean military. If they could murder US citizens with impunity and have senior government officials run interference on their behalf, they could certainly let their soldiers loose on the people of El Salvador. In December 1981, the army butchered eight hundred men, women, and children at El Mozote — one of the worst atrocities in the history of the Americas.

Declassified cables later made it crystal clear that Kirkpatrick and her colleagues had the full picture available of what the Salvadorean regime was doing throughout the bloodbath. As New Jersey Congressman Robert Torricelli noted in 1993:

It is now clear that while the Reagan Administration was certifying human rights progress in El Salvador, they knew the terrible truth that the Salvadoran military was engaged in a widespread campaign of terror and torture.

Defending the Indefensible

This was the backdrop against which Kirkpatrick composed her essay “The Myth of Moral Equivalence.” The association of the term “moral equivalence” with this shameful diatribe should be enough to see it expunged from the political lexicon for good.

After railing against “totalitarian ideologies” that were “anti-empirical” and “deny that there is any sort of objective truth,” Kirkpatrick mocked “an earnest young man” who had told her at a public meeting that the regime in El Salvador was responsible for “gross violations of human rights” and therefore “unworthy of US support”: “The fact is, of course, that approximately 50,000 people have died in El Salvador as a consequence of a guerrilla war.” The junta, she claimed, was simply “responding to terrorist assault,” “maintaining order,” and “protecting its citizens.”

Kirkpatrick had the brass neck to refer to George Orwell’s 1984 as depicting a world in which “history is continually rewritten” while brazenly lying about the present. Her own comments were a perfect example of what Orwell had in mind when he wrote the famous article “Politics and the English Language” in 1946:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We could add some phrases to the list in the wake of the Salvadorean horror show that Kirkpatrick endorsed. A government systematically murders tens of thousands of people: this is called responding to terrorist assault or maintaining order. Critics of the government suggest that cold-blooded murder is equally reprehensible no matter who the perpetrator is: this is called moral equivalence.

The Salvador Option

The subsequent history of the phrase “moral equivalence” has been every bit as shabby as you’d expect in light of its origins. Whenever you hear a politician or a commentator using it, it’s safe to assume they’re trying to whitewash atrocities committed by their own government or its client states.

The statement from Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership is no exception. The signatories express their fury at the very idea that Israel and the US could be held to the same moral standards as official enemies like Hamas or the Taliban. They have to maintain an iron conceptual wall between “democracies” and “groups that engage in terrorism,” because the United States and its allies have killed far more innocent civilians than the “terrorists” against whom they rail. As soon as we descend from the level of grand concepts to that of empirical reality, the foreign-policy consensus is bound to disintegrate.

After eight days of fighting last month, there was already a vast disproportion between Israeli and Palestinian casualties: Hamas rockets claimed the lives of 10 people, while the Israeli assault on Gaza killed 212, including 61 children. This is exactly what you would expect considering the imbalance of power between the two sides. As the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote at the time of the last major onslaught in 2014:

The death toll in the current round of hostilities is a grim reflection of the asymmetry of power between the fourth-strongest army in the world and a virtually defenceless civilian population. In the first ten days of aerial bombardment, the “score” was 260 Palestinian dead, mostly civilians, and one Israeli. By launching a ground offensive on July 17, Israel sharply escalated the death toll to over 300; destroyed many more houses, hospitals, and water plants; and displaced some 50,000 people out of their homes. “Operation Protective Edge” has thus turned the densely populated Palestinian enclave on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean into a living hell.

Shlaim also noted that Israel, as the occupying power ruling over an oppressed, stateless people, cannot claim to be acting in self-defense: “The chain of action and reaction is endless. But the underlying cause of the violence is the Israeli colonialism.”

The US military inflicted similar carnage on the people of Iraq from 2003 onward, but on an even grander scale. The most comprehensive survey of Iraqi mortality rates between 2003 and 2011 estimates that there were almost half a million deaths as a result of the war, with approximately 60 percent of that figure directly caused by violence. The United States and its allies were the leading cause of violent death among Iraqis:

US-led coalition forces were reported to be responsible for the largest proportion of war-related violent deaths (35 percent), followed by militia (32 percent). While militia were reportedly responsible for the most adult male deaths in the sibling survey, coalition forces were reportedly responsible for killing the most women.

Not that militia violence in Iraq was unrelated to the US-led occupation. As things began to come unstuck for the Bush administration, US officials started briefing reporters about their plan to foster sectarian paramilitary groups, which they called “the Salvador Option.” The US ambassador to Baghdad, John Negroponte, was a veteran of the dirty wars in Central America. Within a couple of years, Shia death squads were routinely abducting Sunni civilians and torturing them to death with power drills.

Jim Steele, a US officer who had served as an adviser to the Salvadorean army in the 1980s, played a central role in organizing these paramilitary gangs. Steele was a close associate of future CIA chief David Petraeus. A New York Times photographer, Gilles Peress, recalled an interview with Steele at an interrogation center in Samarra:

We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I look around and I see blood everywhere, you know. He hears the scream from the other guy who’s being tortured as we speak, there’s the blood stains in the corner of the desk in front of him.

When US politicians denounce the idea of “moral equivalence,” this is the kind of behavior they’re trying to brush under the carpet.

The attacks on Ilhan Omar betray a profound feeling of insecurity. Her critics have to enforce a rigid taboo against speaking plainly, because they know their ideological nostrums will not hold up under sustained scrutiny. Omar’s widely publicized confrontation with Elliot Abrams over his track record in Central America was clear proof of that.

The supposedly offensive tweet from Omar began with the following words: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.” Few people are willing to state their opposition to this principle, but if the Beltway foreign-policy establishment had to apply it consistently, it would cut through their most cherished assumptions and alliances. They’ll fight like hell to stop that from happening, with slogans like “moral equivalence” inscribed on their banner.

Jacobin.

Beware of Michael R. Gordon

Author of Wall Street Journal “Wuhan lab” story wrote lies about Iraqi “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

On May 23, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin.” Citing unnamed “current and former officials,” it claimed that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak” of COVID-19.

Two days later, on May 25, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, speaking at the United Nations World Health Assembly, demanded a “transparent” investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

The next day, on May 26, US President Joe Biden called on the “Intelligence Community” to investigate whether COVID-19 arose “from a laboratory accident” and “report back to me in 90 days.”

Media reports by NBC, CNN, and the New York Times followed. All of them claimed that the Biden Administration’s actions were triggered by the “new evidence” presented in the Wall Street Journal article. Within 24 hours of publication of the Journal’s report, all of these publications declared that the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory was “credible.”

But the article published by the Wall Street Journal—beyond being totally unsubstantiated and presenting nothing fundamentally new in terms of “intelligence”—is presented by a lead author who happens to have helped fabricate the most lethal lie of the 21st century.

The lead author of the Journal piece, Michael R. Gordon, was the same man who, along with Judith Miller, wrote the September 8, 2002 article falsely asserting that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking to build a nuclear weapon.

That article, entitled “U.S. says Hussein intensifies quest for a-bomb parts,” claimed that “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.”

The claim was a lie, funneled to the Times by the office of US Vice President Dick Cheney.

On May 26, 2004, the Times published a letter from its editors entitled “FROM THE EDITORS; The Times and Iraq,” acknowledging that the Times repeatedly “fell for misinformation.” The letter notes,

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been…

On Sept. 8, 2002, the lead article of the paper was headlined “'U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts.'” That report concerned the aluminum tubes that the administration advertised insistently as components for the manufacture of nuclear weapons fuel. … it should have been presented more cautiously… Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length on why this evidence of Iraq’s nuclear intentions demanded that Saddam Hussein be dislodged from power: “'The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argued, may be a mushroom cloud.''

In a 2005 article by its public editor, the New York Times acknowledged in relation to the coverage by Miller, including the article co-authored by Gordon:

Miller may still be best known for her role in a series of Times articles in 2002 and 2003 that strongly suggested Saddam Hussein already had or was acquiring an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Howell Raines was then the executive editor of The Times, and several articles about weapons of mass destruction were displayed prominently in the paper. Many of those articles turned out to be inaccurate.

Polk award-winning journalist Robert Parry subsequently commented on Gordon’s role in the story:

The infamous aluminum tube story of Sept. 8, 2002, which Gordon co-wrote with Judith Miller, relied on U.S. intelligence sources and Iraqi defectors to frighten Americans with images of “mushroom clouds” if they didn’t support President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The timing played perfectly into the administration’s advertising “rollout” for the Iraq War.

Of course, the story turned out to be false and to have unfairly downplayed skeptics of the nuclear-centrifuge scenario. The aluminum tubes actually were meant for artillery, not for centrifuges. But the article provided a great impetus toward the Iraq War, which ended up killing nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Gordon’s co-author, Judith Miller, became the only U.S. journalist known to have lost a job over the reckless and shoddy reporting that contributed to the Iraq disaster. For his part, Gordon continued serving as a respected Pentagon correspondent.

Over the subsequent decade and a half Gordon continued to serve as a conduit for fabricated “intelligence” emanating from the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.

On April 20, 2014, Gordon co-authored an article entitled “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia,” which claimed to identify masked men operating in eastern Ukraine in opposition to the US-backed coup regime as active-duty Russian soldiers.

Gordon wrote,

Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February.

Four days later, the Times Public editor was again compelled to retract the claims in Gordon’s reporting, calling them “discredited.”

The Times led its print edition Monday with an article based in part on photographs that the State Department said were evidence of Russian military presence in popular uprisings in Ukraine. The headline read: “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia.”

More recently, some of those grainy photographs have been discredited. The Times has published a second article backing off from the original and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict, but hardly addressing how the newspaper may have been misled.

It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak. And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed follow-up story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything …

And the reporter Robert Parry (formerly of Newsweek and The Associated Press) on Consortiumnews.com sees a pattern in Times articles, often based on administration leaks, that “draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations.”

Summing up the role played by the media in the run-up to the Iraq war, WSWS editorial board chairman David North wrote in War, oligarchy and the political lie:

It must be stressed that the mass media was not duped by the Bush administration, but functioned as its willing accomplice in the deliberate deception of the American people. There was nothing that was particularly sophisticated in the government’s propaganda campaign. Much of what it said was contradicted by both established facts and elementary logic. Even when it was established that the administration’s claim that Iraq had sought to obtain nuclear material was based on crudely forged documents, the media chose not to make a major issue of this devastating exposure.

Now the war is over at the cost of countless thousands of Iraqi lives. The country lies in ruins. Much of its industrial, social, and cultural infrastructure has been destroyed. During the past three weeks, US military forces have combed Iraq in search of the weapons of mass destruction that could be seized upon by the administration and media to justify the war. And what has been found? Nothing.

The same kind of “deliberate deception” by the media in relation to “weapons of mass destruction” used to prepare the Iraq war is being reprised in the ongoing campaign by the Biden administration and the media to promote the claim that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Just as the lies of 2002 led to the destruction of Iraq and the deaths of over a million people, the current US propaganda campaign against China risks provoking a military conflict on a far more devastating scale.

Source: WSWS.org.

What's the difference between Roman Protasevich and Julian Assange?

Roman Protasevich is a dissident hated by a regime close to the Kremlin. Roman is a hero to the West.

Julian Assange is a publicist hated by Washington. Julian is a villain to the West.

Simples really, if you want to explain the West's latest Moral Outrage du jour. Meanwhile Assange rots in a British high security gaol, convicted of nairy more than a breach of bail.

'A few rotten apples...'

The IfNotNow Movement

IfNotNow is building a movement of Jews to end Israel’s occupation and transform the American Jewish community.

We are organizing every day to expose the occupation as a moral crisis to American Jews, end the weaponization of antisemitism in our political debate over Israel, and create political space for leaders to stand up for the freedom and dignity for all Israelis and Palestinians.

We are building a vibrant and inclusive movement within the American Jewish community, across generations and organizational affiliations. This movement is open to any who seek to shift the American Jewish public and our political leaders towards a hopeful vision for Israelis and Palestinians.

As we were dehumanized by the oppression we faced, we are now dehumanized by that which we are inflicting. The occupation is a daily nightmare for those who live under it and a moral disaster for those who support and administer it. As a movement, we understand the Occupation as Israel’s military rule over Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. We also know that the discrimination and displacement inside Israel's 1948 borders are connected to its rule in those Occupied Territories. This system of violence deprives all Palestinians of civil, political, and economic rights.

Get involved (click here)

We didn't start the fire. Chubby Checker, Psycho, Neonazis in the Ukraine...

Five years ago, Ukraine’s Maidan uprising ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, to the cheers and support of the West. Politicians and analysts in the United States and Europe not only celebrated the uprising as a triumph of democracy, but denied reports of Maidan’s ultranationalism, smearing those who warned about the dark side of the uprising as Moscow puppets and useful idiots. Freedom was on the march in Ukraine.

Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.

These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.

Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march.

A NEO-NAZI BATTALION IN THE HEART OF EUROPE

“Volunteer Ukrainian Unit Includes Nazis.”—USA Today, March 10, 2015

The DC establishment’s standard defense of Kiev is to point out that Ukraine’s far right has a smaller percentage of seats in the parliament than their counterparts in places like France. That’s a spurious argument: What Ukraine’s far right lacks in polls numbers, it makes up for with things Marine Le Pen could only dream of—paramilitary units and free rein on the streets.

Post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine. Andriy Biletsky, the gang’s leader who became Azov’s commander, once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Biletsky is now a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament.

In the fall of 2014, Azov—which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations—was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard.

While the group officially denies any neo-Nazi connections, Azov’s nature has been confirmed by multiple Western outlets: The New York Times called the battalion “openly neo-Nazi,” while USA Today, The Daily Beast, The Telegraph, and Haaretz documented group members’ proclivity for swastikas, salutes, and other Nazi symbols, and individual fighters have also acknowledged being neo-Nazis.

In January 2018, Azov rolled out its National Druzhina street patrol unit whose members swore personal fealty to Biletsky and pledged to “restore Ukrainian order” to the streets. The Druzhina quickly distinguished itself by carrying out pogroms against the Roma and LGBT organizations and storming a municipal council. Earlier this year, Kiev announced the neo-Nazi unit will be monitoring polls in next month’s presidential election.

In 2017, Congressman Ro Khanna led the effort to ban Azov from receiving U.S. arms and training. But the damage has already been done: The research group Bellingcat proved that Azov had already received access to American grenade launchers, while a Daily Beast investigation showed that US trainers are unable to prevent aid from reaching white supremacists. And Azov itself had proudly posted a video of the unit welcoming NATO representatives.

(Azov isn’t the only far-right formation to get Western affirmation. In December 2014, Amnesty International accused the Dnipro-1 battalion of potential war crimes, including “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” Six months later, Senator John McCain visited and praised the battalion.)

Particularly concerning is Azov’s campaign to transform Ukraine into a hub for transnational white supremacy. The unit has recruited neo-Nazis from Germany, the UK, Brazil, Sweden, and America; last October, the FBI arrested four California white supremacists who had allegedly received training from Azov. This is a classic example of blowback: US support of radicals abroad ricocheting to hit America.

FAR RIGHT TIES TO GOVERNMENT

“Ukrainian police declare admiration for Nazi collaborators”—RFE, February 13, 2019

Speaker of Parliament Andriy Parubiy cofounded and led two neo-Nazi organizations: the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later renamed Svoboda), and Patriot of Ukraine, whose members would eventually form the core of Azov.

Although Parubiy left the far right in the early 2000’s, he hasn’t rejected his past. When asked about it in a 2016 interview, Parubiy replied that his “values” haven’t changed. Parubiy, whose autobiography shows him marching with the neo-Nazi wolfsangel symbol used by Aryan Nations, regularly meets with Washington think tanks and politicians; his neo-Nazi background is ignored or outright denied.

Even more disturbing is the far right’s penetration of law enforcement. Shortly after Maidan, the US equipped and trained the newly founded National Police, in what was intended to be a hallmark program buttressing Ukrainian democracy.

The deputy minister of the Interior—which controls the National Police—is Vadim Troyan, a veteran of Azov and Patriot of Ukraine. In 2014, when Troyan was being considered for police chief of Kiev, Ukrainian Jewish leaders were appalled by his neo-Nazi background. Today, he’s deputy of the department running US-trained law enforcement in the entire nation.

Earlier this month, RFE reported on National Police leadership admiring Stepan Bandera—a Nazi collaborator and Fascist whose troops participated in the Holocaust—on social media.

The fact that Ukraine’s police is peppered with far-right supporters explains why neo-Nazis operate with impunity on the streets.

STATE-SPONSORED GLORIFICATION OF NAZI COLLABORATORS

“Ukrainian extremists celebrate Ukrainian Nazi SS divisions…in the middle of a major Ukrainian city”—Anti-Defamation League Director of European Affairs, April 28, 2018

It’s not just the military and street gangs: Ukraine’s far right has successfully hijacked the post-Maidan government to impose an intolerant and ultranationalist culture over the land.

In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation making two WWII paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes of Ukraine, and made it a criminal offense to deny their heroism. The OUN had collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust, while the UPA slaughtered thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles on their own volition.

The government-funded Ukrainian Institute of National Memory is institutionalizing the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators. Last summer, the Ukrainian parliament featured an exhibit commemorating the OUN’s 1941 proclamation of cooperation with the Third Reich (imagine the French government installing an exhibit celebrating the Vichy state!).

Torchlight marches in honor of OUN/UPA leaders like Roman Shukhevych (a commander in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion) are a regular feature of the new Ukraine. The recuperation even extends to SS Galichina, a Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS; the director of the Institute of National Memory proclaimed that the SS fighters were “war victims.” The government’s embrace of Bandera is not only deplorable, but also extremely divisive, considering the OUN/UPA are reviled in eastern Ukraine.

Predictably, the celebration of Nazi collaborators has accompanied a rise in outright anti-Semitism.

“Jews Out!” chanted thousands during a January 2017 march honoring OUN leader Bandera. (The next day the police denied hearing anything anti-Semitic.) That summer, a three-day festival celebrating the Nazi collaborator Shukhevych capped off with the firebombing of a synagogue. In November 2017, RFE reported Nazi salutes as 20,000 marched in honor of the UPA. And last April, hundreds marched in L’viv with coordinated Nazi salutes honoring SS Galichina; the march was promoted by the L’viv regional government.

The Holocaust revisionism is a multi-pronged effort, ranging from government-funded seminars, brochures, and board games, to the proliferation of plaques, statues, and streets renamed after butchers of Jews, to far-right children camps, where youth are inculcated with ultranationalist ideology.

Within several years, an entire generation will be indoctrinated to worship Holocaust perpetrators as national heroes.

BOOK BANS

“No state should be allowed to interfere in the writing of history.”—British historian Antony Beevor, after his award-winning book was banned in Ukraine, The Telegraph, January 23, 2018

Ukraine’s State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting is enforcing the glorification of Ukraine’s new heroes by banning “anti-Ukrainian” literature that goes against the government narrative. This ideological censorship includes acclaimed books by Western authors.

In January 2018, Ukraine made international headlines by banning Stalingrad by award-winning British historian Antony Beevor because of a single paragraph about a Ukrainian unit massacring 90 Jewish children during World War II. In December, Kiev banned The Book Thieves by Swedish author Anders Rydell (which, ironically, is about the Nazis’ suppression of literature) because he mentioned troops loyal to Symon Petliura (an early 20th-century nationalist leader) had slaughtered Jews.

This month, the Ukrainian embassy in Washington exported this intolerance to America by brazenly demanding the United States ban a Russian movie from American theaters. Apparently, the billions Washington invested in promoting democracy in Ukraine have failed to teach Kiev basic concepts of free speech.

ANTI-SEMITISM

“I’m telling you one more time—go to hell, kikes. The Ukrainian people have had it to here with you.”—Security services reserve general Vasily Vovk, May 11, 2017

Unsurprisingly, government-led glorification of Holocaust perpetrators was a green light for other forms of anti-Semitism. The past three years saw an explosion of swastikas and SS runes on city streets, death threats, and vandalism of Holocaust memorials, Jewish centers, cemeteries, tombs, and places of worship, all of which led Israel to take the unusual step of publicly urging Kiev to address the epidemic.

Public officials make anti-Semitic threats with no repercussions. These include: a security services general promising to eliminate the zhidi (a slur equivalent to ‘kikes’); a parliament deputy going off on an anti-Semitic rant on television; a far-right politician lamenting Hitler didn’t finish off the Jews; and an ultranationalist leader vowing to cleanse Odessa of zhidi.

For the first few years after Maidan, Jewish organizations largely refrained from criticizing Ukraine, perhaps in the hope Kiev would address the issue on its own. But by 2018, the increasing frequency of anti-Semitic incidents led Jewish groups to break their silence.

Last year, the Israeli government’s annual report on anti-Semitism heavily featured Ukraine, which had more incidents than all post-Soviet states combined. The World Jewish Congress, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and 57 members of the US Congress all vociferously condemned Kiev’s Nazi glorification and the concomitant anti-Semitism.

Ukrainian Jewish leaders are also speaking out. In 2017, the director of one of Ukraine’s largest Jewish organizations published a New York Times op-ed urging the West to address Kiev’s whitewashing. Last year, 41 Ukrainian Jewish leaders denounced the growth of anti-Semitism. That’s especially telling, given that many Ukrainian Jewish leaders supported the Maidan uprising.

None of these concerns have been addressed in any meaningful way.

ROMA POGROMS

“‘They wanted to kill us’: masked neo-fascists strike fear into Ukraine’s Roma.” —The Guardian, August 27, 2018

Ukraine’s far right has resisted carrying out outright attacks on Jews; other vulnerable groups haven’t been so lucky.

Last spring, a lethal wave of anti-Roma pogroms swept through Ukraine, with at least six attacks in two months. Footage from the pogroms evokes the 1930s: Armed thugs attack women and children while razing their camps. At least one man was killed, while others, including a child, were stabbed.

Two gangs behind the attacks—C14 and the National Druzhina—felt comfortable enough to proudly post pogrom videos on social media. That’s not surprising, considering that the National Druzhina is part of Azov, while the neo-Nazi C14 receives government funding for “educational” programs. Last October, C14 leader Serhiy Bondar was welcomed at America House Kyiv, a center run by the US government.

Appeals from international organizations and the US embassy fell on deaf ears: Months after the United Nations demanded Kiev end “systematic persecution” of the Roma, a human-rights group reported C14 were allegedly intimidating Roma in a joint patrol with the Kiev police.

LGBT AND WOMEN’S-RIGHTS GROUPS

“‘It’s even worse than before’: How the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ Failed LGBT Ukrainians.”—RFE, November 21, 2018

In 2016, after pressure from the US Congress, the Kiev government began providing security for the annual Kiev Pride parade. However, this increasingly looks like a Potemkin affair: two hours of protection, with widespread attacks on LGBT individuals and gatherings during the rest of the year. Nationalist groups have targeted LGBT meetings with impunity, going so far as to shut down an event hosted by Amnesty International as well as assault a Western journalist at a transgender rights rally. Women’s-rights marches have also been targeted, including brazen attacks in March.

ATTACKS ON PRESS

“The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a Ukrainian law enforcement raid at the Kiev offices of Media Holding Vesti…more than a dozen masked officers ripped open doors with crowbars, seized property, and fired tear gas in the offices.”—The Committee to Protect Journalists, February 9, 2018

In May 2016, Myrotvorets, an ultranationalist website with links to the government, published the personal data of thousands of journalists who had obtained accreditation from Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. Myrotvorets labeled the journalists “terrorist collaborators.”

A government-tied website declaring open season on journalists would be dangerous anywhere, but it is especially so in Ukraine, which has a disturbing track record of journalist assassinations. This includes Oles Buzina, gunned down in 2015, and Pavel Sheremet, assassinated by car bomb a year later.

The Myrotvorets doxing was denounced by Western reporters, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and ambassadors from the G7 nations. In response, Kiev officials, including Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, praised the site: “This is your choice to cooperate with occupying forces,” Avakov told journalists, while posting “I Support Myrotvorets” on Facebook. Myrotvorets remains operational today.

Last fall brought another attack on the media, this time using the courts. The Prosecutor General’s office was granted a warrant to seize records of RFE anti-corruption reporter Natalie Sedletska. An RFE spokeswoman warned that Kiev’s actions created “a chilling atmosphere for journalists,” while parliament deputy Mustafa Nayyem called it “an example of creeping dictatorship.”

LANGUAGE LAWS

“[Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk] also made a personal appeal to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, pledging to support…a special status to the Russian language.”—US Secretary of State John Kerry, April 24, 2014

Ukraine is extraordinarily multilingual: In addition to the millions of Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians, there are areas where Hungarian, Romanian, and other tongues are prevalent. These languages were protected by a 2012 regional-language law.

The post-Maidan government alarmed Russian-speaking Ukrainians by attempting to annul that law. The US State Department and Secretary of State John Kerry sought to assuage fears in 2014 by pledging that Kiev would protect the status of Russian. Those promises came to naught.

A 2017 law mandated that secondary education be conducted strictly in Ukrainian, which infuriated Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Several regions passed legislation banning the use of Russian in public life. Quotas enforce Ukrainian usage on TV and radio. (This would be akin to Washington forcing Spanish-language media to broadcast mostly in English.)

And in February 2018, Ukraine’s supreme court struck down the 2012 regional language law—the one Kerry promised eastern Ukrainians would stay in effect.

Currently, Kiev is preparing to pass a draconian law that would mandate the use of Ukrainian in most aspects of public life. It’s another example of Kiev alienating millions of its own citizens, while claiming to embrace Western values.

THE PRICE OF WILLFUL BLINDNESS

These examples are only a tiny fraction of Ukraine’s slide toward intolerance, but they should be enough to point out the obvious: Washington’s decision to ignore the proliferation of armed neo-Nazi groups in a highly unstable nation only led to them gaining more power.

This easily predictable outcome is in marked contrast to Washington’s enthusiasm over the “Revolution of Dignity.” “Nationalism is exactly what Ukraine needs,” proclaimed a New Republic article by historian Anne Applebaum, whose celebration of nationalism came out right around the time that Ukraine green-lighted the formation of white-supremacist paramilitaries. A mere four months after Applebaum’s essay, Newsweek ran an article titled “Ukrainian nationalist volunteers committing ‘ISIS-style’ war crimes.”

In essay after essay, DC foreign-policy heads have denied or celebrated the influence of Ukraine’s far right. (Curiously, the same analysts vociferously denounce rising nationalism in Hungary, Poland, and Italy as highly dangerous.) Perhaps think-tankers deluded themselves into thinking Kiev’s far-right phase would tucker itself out. More likely, they simply embraced DC’s go-to strategy of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Either way, the ramifications stretch far beyond Ukraine.

America’s backing of the Maidan uprising, along with the billions DC sinks into post-Maidan Kiev, make it clear: Starting February 2014, Ukraine became Washington’s latest democracy-spreading project. What we permit in Ukraine sends a green light to others.

By tolerating neo-Nazi gangs and battalions, state-led Holocaust distortion, and attacks on LGBT and the Roma, the United States is telling the rest of Europe: “We’re fine with this.” The implications—especially at a time of a global far-right revival—are profoundly disturbing.

Source: The Nation.

Hartlepool: Labour's landcrush

‘Obsessed with the flag’: Labour recriminations begin in Hartlepool

A union jack hangs limply from Labour’s campaign headquarters in Hartlepool. The flag has flown for six weeks over the former vape shop, next to an outlet called We Sell Owt, in the town where Labour fought its most bruising byelection campaign in decades.

As Hartlepool woke up on Friday as the seat of a Conservative MP for the first time in 57 years, Labour figures pointed to the flag as being emblematic of the deep identity crisis behind the party’s shattering loss.

Labour head office was “obsessed with us getting a flag”, said one organiser, bemoaning what they felt was a lack of substance to justify it. “There was no fleshing out what the flag means, or what policies have changed because we’re now patriotic. It was just: bung a flag up.”

A fortnight before polling day, party activists were told to hand out St George’s flag leaflets urging voters to “display this poster with pride in your window”. Labour, a party searching for direction after 11 years out of power, wrapped itself in the flag to try to win back voters who deserted it over Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. The plan failed.

Labour’s share of the vote plunged to 29% on Thursday, its lowest in almost 100 years, while the Conservatives won a nearly 7,000-strong majority in a north-east England town they recently thought unwinnable. “It’s seismic,” beamed Mike Young, the Conservative deputy leader of Hartlepool borough council, as the ballots piled up for its candidate on Friday morning.

Source: Grauniad.

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No sympathy from me, Labour. The assassins of Jeremy Corbyn have no clothes on and it shows!