The World of Lies on Steroids

29 Adar Aleph 5782

Yom Kippur Katan

The lies that abound in this World of Lies have never been more bold, yet so obvious, and at the same time, so cherished.  Our governments and media were always lying to us, but so very few citizens were aware of it.  That is changing, thank God.  On the other hand, those who continue to trust the 'experts' and the 'authorities' whom they believe have only our best interests at heart cling more fiercely than ever to the lies they tell and anyone who disagrees or questions the official narrative is an enemy, no, worse - a demon in human form - someone not fit to live in the same world with them.  Their hatred for anyone who varies from the official (acceptable) narrative can be palpable.

It's astonishing and disheartening to see the same old emotional appeals and psychological tricks being rolled out all over again and with the same level of success.  From fake pandemic to scripted war - the manipulation is masterful, and in some cases, even deadly.

Is the censorship now old hat?  Does it no longer bother us that it is impossible to hear Russia's side of anything?  All Russian reporting has been banned from platforms and anyone supporting even their right to be heard is censored from social media.  Today, Western diplomats walked out on the Russian Foreign Minister's speech at the UN!  Isn't the UN supposed to be the place where every nation can be heard?  Wow!

The shameful, one-sided, biased reporting that is being allowed does not tolerate any challenge or opposing view.  Is this consistent with human rights in the marketplace of ideas so lauded by the principles of democracy?  Of course not!  The 1% only pays lip service to the ideals of humanism and democracy because in truth it is they who are demonic, who worship the Satan as their god.  

The only reports the world is allowed to hear is what is coming out from Western sources which is again full of over-the-top fear-mongering - "Putin is going to invade Ukraine and take over all of Europe!"  It's so insane in its demonization of Russia and its white-washing of Ukraine that you just know some agenda has to be at work behind the scenes.  There is no other way to explain it.

I am decidedly NOT taking a side because they are BOTH "bad for the Jews."  This is not our fight, but it IS instructive for when it becomes our fight.  In an effort to shake some sense into the heads of my fellow Jews who have joined in this free-for-all, headlong rush to embrace the lies glorifying Ukraine/Zelensky ("Maccabee" indeed!!  He couldn't be more of a Hellenist!), I'd like to give you something else to think about.  Feel free to investigate further on your own.  The truth hasn't been totally expunged - yet.

In his most recent speech, Putin said, in part, that he wants to "de-Nazify" Ukraine and the West made a joke out of it. "Ukraine has a Jewish president for goodness sake - they can't be Nazis!"  Oh, yeah?

Winning ‘hearts’ and PR war, but Ukraine has a “Nazi” problem that NATO and USA do not talk about

...Over the years, neo-Nazism ideology has not only taken root in the Ukrainian conscience but has also gained the Ukrainian government’s imprimatur.

...What the NATO and the United States fail to highlight, either wittingly or unwittingly, is the creeping emergence of the neo-Nazi supporters in Ukraine, who do not baulk at using intimidation and even violence to advance their agendas, and who often do so with the implicit approval of government agencies.

One such neo-Nazi group that enjoys Ukrainian state patronage is the Azov Movement, one of the 30-odd privately-funded “volunteer battalions”, that does much of the frontline fighting with Ukraine’s army against the pro-Russian separatists in the country’s restive eastern region. The Azov is not just known for their reputation of being ruthless on the battlefield but also for espousing a militant ideology that wreaked havoc in Germany in the second world war.

...Azov Special Operations Department or Azov Battalion, as it is commonly known, is a right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi unit of the National Guard of Ukraine. Formed in 2014 as a volunteer militia during the Odesa clashes, the Azov Battalion was soon incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine, serving in the state capacity despite having allegiance to and drawing inspiration from the supremacist Nazi beliefs.

In fact, the Azov Battalion is a source of inspiration for white supremacists around the world. At the time of its formation in 2014, Andriy Biletsky, a veteran fascist and the founder of the volunteer group, stated that the mission of the group is to empower Ukraine to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

...the United States government is partly to be blamed for the ominous rise of the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. Over the years, the cooperation between the Azov Battalion and the American Military has only grown deeper. In 2018, it was reported that Azov Battalion had received teams of American military advisors and high powered US-made weapons. In November 2017, a US military inspection team had also visited the Azov Battalion on the frontlines to deliberate on strengthening cooperation and providing logistical support in their military operations.

Recently, Democrat Senate member in the United States, Bob Menendez, introduced legislation that sought to grant Ukraine $500 million for the purchase of arms and impose what he called “mother of all sanctions” on Russia should it dare to attack. However, what was striking was the absence of any mechanism to oversee if the weapons bought from the US aid would be used by white supremacist organisations like the Azov Battalion. The US legislators had no qualms with the arms they donated to Kyiv going into the hands of anti-semitic outfits like the Azov Battalion so long as they helped them in discouraging Russia from launching an attack into eastern Ukraine.

Another North American country, Canada, is also being accused of fostering neo-Nazis and war criminals in Ukraine. Earlier last year, many Jewish groups raised concerns regarding the involvement of Canadian troops in training neo-Nazis and war criminals from Ukraine. They pointed to a video that highlighted Ukrainian paratroopers singing a song to praise Stepan Bandera, an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator whose organisation was linked to the murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles during the second world war.

A litany of human rights abuses has been listed against Azov and other neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. Even the United Nations and the Human Rights Watch have accused Azov and similar other groups of committing atrocities in the pursuit of fulfilling their bigoted objectives. They are also known for sympathising with the Nazi collaborators, regularly staging torchlight marches for Nazis who wrecked unspeakable atrocities against Jews during World War II. Many of these neo-Nazis are also Holocaust deniers, alleging that the Holocaust was a construct fabricated by the Jews to keep in check white supremacy.

Several Jewish groups, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, Yad Vashem, and the World Jewish Congress, are among prominent organisations that have condemned Kyiv for rehabilitating Nazi collaborators—a distinct characteristic of the far-right movements in Europe.

And yet, Putin is the one being portrayed in prominent Western media with a Hitler mustache! There have been reports all over Twitter of black, Indian, oriental, and Jewish refugees being harassed, denied transport and even being shot and killed while trying to flee the country, very likely by these same Ukrainian Nazis!! 

Ukraine’s Ultra-Nationalist Azov Battalion Pledges to Fight to the Last Man Against Advancing Russian Forces in Mariupol

...there are certainly some Ukrainian territorial defence groups who are overtly and unabashedly hard-right in their ideological orientation. Militarily, forces like the infamous Azov Battalion have been active in southeastern Ukraine, though not exclusively.

These actors have developed media apparatuses to recruit, raise funds, and build international support amongst ideological sympathizers. In recent months, during Russia’s massive military buildup and in the period since the invasion began, said elements have intensified their media warfare against Russia, posting propaganda to build morale amongst its rank and file as well as its supporters around the country, and putting out funding requests for weapons and supplies to fight the Russians.

The ultra-nationalist militants are accused of war crimes (Moscow uses “genocide”) against Russian-speaking people in contested breakaway areas, allegedly committing torture, shelling of civilians, and other atrocities.

The Azov Battalion is a hard-right formation that was formally established during the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard. The broader movement and media network is spread throughout parts of the country, and one of their operational hotspots is Mariupol, a city on the north coast of the Azov Sea.

As Russia was increasing its troop buildup prior to the invasion, Azov Battalion posted propaganda materials showing their fighters training and planning for the coming escalation. Then, when Vladimir Putin issued his official declaration of war, the militia switched gears and quickly began to make their final war preparations in anticipation of advancing Russian forces.

Far-right militias in Europe plan to confront Russian forces, a research group says.

The Russian attack on Ukraine has prompted a flurry of activity among far-right European militia leaders, who have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines to confront the country’s invaders, according to a research group.

In recent days, militia leaders in France, Finland and Ukraine have posted declarations urging their supporters to join in the fight to defend Ukraine against a Russian invasion. The posts have been located and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization that specializes in tracking extremist groups.

Rita Katz, the director of SITE, said that numerous far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe and North America had expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in battling Russia.

The motivation to travel to Ukraine, she said, was to gain combat training. It was also ideologically-driven, she added, since these far right groups viewed the fight against Russia as a fight against communism, clinging to World War II historical narratives, and associating modern-day Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, with the former Soviet Union.

“Instability in Ukraine offers white supremacy extremists the same training opportunities that instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has offered jihadist militants for years,” said Ali Soufan, who heads The Soufan Group, which has been documenting for several years how the conflict in eastern Ukraine has emerged as an international hub of white supremacy.

(JTA): Report: Ukraine had more anti-Semitic incidents than all former Soviet countries combined

MOSCOW (JTA) — In its main annual report on anti-Semitism, Israel’s government singled out Ukraine as unusual in Eastern Europe for the alleged increase in attacks there, triggering protest by Kiev.

The allegation appeared in the anti-Semitism report for 2017 that the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs under Education Minister Naftali Bennett published last week, ahead of the Jan. 27 International Day of Holocaust Remembrance.

“A striking exception in the trend of decrease in anti-Semitic incidents in Eastern Europe was Ukraine, where the number of recorded anti-Semitic attacks was doubled from last year and surpassed the tally for all the incidents reported throughout the entire region combined,” the report said.

The report did not name the total number of incidents reported but a ministry spokesperson queried by JTA said that throughout 2017, more than 130 incidents of anti-Semitism had been reported, including violent assaults, in Ukraine. The data came from Jewish communities and Nativ, an Israeli government agency that used to be part of the intelligence services but today deals exclusively with issues connected to aliyah, or immigration by Jews and their relatives to Israel.

The report also said that 2017 was the second consecutive year that Ukraine had the largest number of anti-Semitic incidents of any other country from the former Soviet Union.

Violent Anti-Semitism Is Gripping Ukraine — And The Government Is Standing Idly By  (May 2018)

A wave of anti-Semitism has swept over Ukraine. In the past three weeks alone, a far-right leader publicly called for cleansing Ukraine of zhidi (a slur equivalent to “kike”); a Holocaust memorial in Ternopil was bombed; hundreds marched through Lviv, in honor of an SS unit, complete with Nazi salutes; “Death to Zhidi” graffiti was scrawled in two cities; a revered rabbi’s tomb was vandalized; a Romani camp in Kiev was attacked and burned by far-right nationalists, and hundreds rocked out at a neo-Nazi concert clad in swastikas and throwing up Nazi salutes.

This outpouring of hatred got the attention of the World Jewish Congress, which put out a short video condemning the surge of anti-Semitism.

Shortly afterward, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko issued a press release affirming his commitment to combating anti-Semitism. In turn, WJC president Ronald Lauder thanked Poroshenko for his statement, which made Lauder feel “gratified.”

But we shouldn’t heave a sigh of relief just yet. Unfortunately, WJC’s willingness to accept Poroshenko’s word is premature. Over the past four years of Poroshenko’s presidency, Ukraine has experienced a steady growth of anti-Semitism, including the glorification of Nazi collaborators, vandalism of Jewish sites and public threats against Jews — and the rate of anti-Semitic incidents appears to be escalating.

Indeed, the day after Poroshenko issued his empty promise, which was so effusively celebrated by Lauder, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry flatly denied the growth of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. How can Poroshenko combat anti-Semitism when his own Foreign Ministry (which he theoretically has control over) refuses to acknowledge the problem?

After the WJC welcomed Poroshenko’s commitment to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred, a Ukrainian mayor was caught spewing vitriol about Jews seeking to kill gentiles; the Ukrainian consul in Hamburg was suspended following allegations of writing anti-Semitic Facebook posts, including blaming the Jews for WWII; the tomb of the daughter of a revered rabbi was defaced for the fifth time in two years; far-right thugs stormed the home of a TV station co-owner; the neo-Nazi C14 gang carried out another Roma pogrom, torching an encampment in L’viv; and ultranationalists affiliated with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion shut down an LGBT event sponsored by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in Kiev while authorities refused to act.

Poroshenko became president following the bloody Maidan uprising of 2013-2014, in which ordinary Ukrainians died for the right to live in a democratic, Western nation. But at best, Poroshenko’s government has ignored the anti-Semitism problem in its midst; at worst, it has actively encouraged it.

The April 28 march in L’viv, during which a thousand people honored SS Galichina, a Ukrainian division in Hitler’s Waffen-SS, was not an isolated event planned by a fringe group. The march was the culmination of a weeklong celebration of SS Galichina promoted by the L’viv city council. Bizarrely enough, this included a contest encouraging teenagers to submit fan artwork of the SS.

How does a European city come to glorify an SS unit whose members took a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler? It helps to have a healthy dose of historical revisionism. Last year, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory — an official department of the Kiev government — declared that SS Galichina fighters were actually “war victims.” This, of course, raises the question: if the SS were victims, what does that make the Jews and other ethnicities they slaughtered?

SS Galichina is far from the only WWII-era paramilitary sanctioned by modern Ukrainian authorities. In 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed laws that proclaimed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with the Nazis and was responsible for liquidation of thousands of Jews, and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which carried out the ethnic cleansing of 70,000-100,000 Poles, as well as other ethnicities on its own accord, to be heroes of Ukraine.

Thanks to Kiev’s laws, as well as public campaigns conducted by the Institute of National Memory (whose 2018 budget is around two million dollars), these butchers are now celebrated across the land.

It should come as no surprise that state-sponsored glorification of anti-Semites is often accompanied by anti-Semitic outbursts. On January 1, 2017, thousands marched through Kiev in honor of OUN leader Stepan Bandera. Chants of “Jews Out!” rang through the crowd, yet the next day, police denied hearing anything anti-Semitic. Last June, L’viv had a three-day festival in honor of UPA leader Roman Shukhevych, and a synagogue was firebombed during the festivities. In November, Radio Free Europe reported seeing Nazi salutes as 20,000 torch-wielding men marched in honor of the UPA.

MAY I REMIND YOU THAT JEWISH LAW REQUIRES THAT BOTH SIDES MUST BE HEARD AND INVESTIGATED BEFORE JUDGMENT CAN BE RENDERED?

THIS WE KNOW, UKRAINE IS NOT LILY-WHITE!  AND REMEMBER THIS...

THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS

NOT TO PLAY THE GAME