russia-insider
Something a little bit different…
On its face the article below is a travel log of one person who visited Lviv – his father’s original hometown.
Beneath it is the outraged, desperate cry for truth and justice of one Jew who can not stand the whitewashing of the holocaust or the glorification of its perpetrators on display in Ukraine, and most of all the support for people who do so by the West and even his own state – Israel.
Essay by Arkady Molev. Translation and introduction by Vladimir Golstein.
Introduction
The warnings, published as early as March of this year, in Tablet, a leading Jewish journal, and that explicitly claim that “Supporting Ukraine Means Opposing Anti-Semitic Nationalism Now, Not Later,” has fallen on the dead ears.
Instead, the press prefers to take the easy way out that the three prominent historians, the authors of this warning, have specifically described: the nearsightedness of criticizing Russia, while ignoring the real dangers posed by the Far Right in Ukraine.
They wrote: “the far right is building influence and symbolical capital at this very moment, cleverly exploiting both the successful Maidan revolution and Russia’s threat to its sovereignty.”
In other words, by resorting to the endless criticism of Russia when discussing Ukrainian issues, the press acts as an accomplice to the Far Right; it helps them to accumulate “influence and symbolic capital.”
It gives credibility to the Far Right’s exploitation of “Russia’s threat.”
Nowhere can it be better seen than in the recent article ran by the same journal that have published the early warning: The Tablet.
In a rather cavalier fashion, this recent article takes at face value the nationalistic whitewashing of reality provided to them by the Right Sector party speaker and the newly elected member of Ukrainian parliament, Borislav Bereza.
By giving the space to Bereza’s anti-Russian diatribes, it allows him to divert the attention from the dangers that its extreme nationalism poses for everyone Ukraine. Here is the quotation:
“Look at this country where the governor of Dnipropitrovsk [Kollomoisky] is a Jew, where numerous heads of administration are Jews, where the speaker of Right Sector is a Jew! How can one speak of anti-Semitism? How can one speak of fascism?
To be a Jew is to yearn for freedom; that is why we left Egypt. To be a Jew is to reject being a slave. This is the essence of Judaism. That is also why we stand strong against Russian imperialism, which is a form of enslavement.
With some exceptions like [Boris] Nemtsov or the dearly departed [Valeriya] Novodvorskaya who see through the propaganda, the Russians are currently slaves.”
When I asked the editor of the Tablet – simply to publish a complimentary piece to the Bereza revelations, the travel notes that suggest that not all the Jews who live or visit Ukraine agree with Bereza, the Tablet wasn’t interested.
It is a rather straightforward piece that simply describes what one eye-witness saw in Lviv.
I believe that the readers of the Tablet, and the western readers in general, besides their usual staple of “Russian Imperialism” warnings should know what a rather objective observer, an Israeli blogger, named Arkady Molev, has experienced in Ukraine.
That type of description does address the situation in Ukraine, rather than hiding behind the usual staple of Russophobia.
Here is my slightly abbreviated translation. (It is as a travel diary so I deleted several paragraphs that describe logistics of traveling).
Isn’t it the Jews who created the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Israel in the 20th century? How come there are more Jews after WWII?