No less a person than the Jewish president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has accused Russia of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Ukrainian people. This compels unavoidable and untenable analogies with the genocide Germany perpetrated against the Jewish people during World War II.
More to the point, though, it demands Israel explain why it is shunning Ukraine’s request for help to defend itself. This, especially given that it is simultaneously begging the United States to spare a Russian oligarch the burden of financial sanctions.
After all, just yesterday, the Times of Israel and the Middle East Monitor were among the newspapers reporting on Israel shunning Ukraine. The latter did so as follows:
Israel has rejected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s request to supply his country with weapons, according to a report in Yedioth Ahronoth. The request came during a telephone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Friday.
Surely the moral and political hypocrisy inherent in that rejection is damning enough. But only an Israel that has lost its soul explains it compounding that hypocrisy the way The Washington Post is reporting today:
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Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum, is embroiled in controversy after attempting to intervene in planned sanctions against Israeli Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, owner of the Chelsea Premier League soccer team and a longtime supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In a letter to U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides, Yad Vashem, together with the country’s chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau and Sheba Medical Center Director Yitshak Kreiss, asked that the United States not sanction Abramovich, a major donor to the memorial and other Jewish causes. They said that sanctioning him would cause harm to Jewish institutions that rely on him for donations.
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Irony is dead. Of course it’s no surprise that Putin demonstrated this with his Hitlerian diatribe about invading Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it. Not to mention his bombs ironically defiling the Holocaust memorial of Babyn Yar in Kyiv, which commemorates the murder of tens of thousands of Jews by Nazis during World War II. “Never again”…?
But it beggars belief that even the premier keeper of the famous Niemöller admonition is demonstrating the death of irony in this respect in spades. Because only that explains Israel’s Holocaust Museum showing such willingness to sacrifice the Ukrainian people to a Nazi-style genocide just to continue receiving its share of ill-gotten gains from a Russian oligarch.
For there’s no denying that the directors of Israel’s Holocaust museum now know that, like all Russian oligarchs in Putin’s inner circle, Abramovich misappropriated his billions from the Russian people.
Clearly there isn’t a hell on earth hot enough to burn those guilty of this kind of genocidal hypocrisy. After all, the moral imperative to honor Zelensky’s request is such that even Germany abandoned its post-Nazi “special duty” to shun any involvement in armed conflicts by agreeing to send lethal weapons to Ukraine.
And no, Abramovich cannot purchase absolution by promising to donate $2-3 billion from the forced sale of his soccer team to Ukrainian victims of Putin’s war. After all, this is tantamount to Albert Speer expecting the same by promising to help Holocaust survivors rebuild their lives while being complicit as Hitler is destroying their homes and killing over six million Jews. I mean, this Abramovich SOB has yet to even denounce the war, let alone condemn Putin.
The New York Times ran a banner headline on January 27, 2020, to highlight the Nazis dark crimes against humanity, which the Russians are now committing in broad daylight. It read, “At Auschwitz, Holocaust Survivors Plead ‘Never Forget’.”
Alas, the irony of ironies seems to be that the Jewish state of Israel itself has forgotten.
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sanction Putin and oligarchs… Israel apartheid state…