Wiesenthal Center Urges Ukrainian Authorities to Take Action Against General Who Threatened to Murder Jews
May 17, 2017
Jerusalem-The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called upon the Ukrainian government to take legal action against retired Security Service General Vasily Vovk in the wake of a recent Facebook post of his in which he wrote that he intends to murder Jews, among them Jewish MP Vadim Rabinovych. In a letter sent to Ukrainian ambassador to Israel Hennadii Nadolenko by its Director of Eastern European Affairs, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center emphasized the severity of the general’s comments and lack hitherto of an appropriate response by the Ukrainian authorities.
According to Zuroff’s letter:
“I am aware of the fact that the embassy here in Israel responded to express your regret about the ‘highly provocative post of [an] anti-Semitic character,’ but there is no indication that any legal action of any sort has or will be taken against General Vovk. So although the embassy ‘condemns all kinds of manifestations of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance,’ the bottom line as far as the Ukrainian authorities are concerned, is absolute impunity for vicious anti-Semites.
“We urge you to convey our concerns to the authorities in Kiev with a demand that appropriate and resolute action be taken against General Vovk, to send a clear message that in democratic Ukraine there will be no tolerance whatsoever for anti-Semites and bigots of any type.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s alleged intelligence disclosure to Russia has endangered the life of a spy who was placed inside ISIS by Israel, current and former US officials are reported to have affirmed on Wednesday . . . .
When pressed by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, McMaster would not say if Trump disclosed classified information. Trump said in a pair of tweets Tuesday he had the “absolute right” to share “facts” with the Russians.
But many in the counter-terrorism community say what the President did was a mistake.
“Russia is not part of the ISIS coalition,” Olsen said. “They are not our partner.”
What follows are BackChannels earlier remarks, and in light of the seriousness of these allegations, the shrug in the first sentence may have been premature although the democratic and western bonds between Israel and the United States would indeed seem unshakable provided the United States hews to its Constitution, its heritage, its hard won ideals, principles, and values.
This blog contains the essential oaths taken by America’s military and security officers and officials throughout the body of the government. Readers may appreciate visiting those sworn statements:
If the American-Israeli intelligence relationship survived Pollard, it will survive this latest faux pas produced by President Trump’s uninhibited tongue. However, noted in the Reuters article cited below, the additional criticism adds to a parade of such small scandals.
Truth to tell, and at least in the past, Russia (cooperative Chechnya) has embedded spies in the ISIS ranks — and some have been caught and dispatched by ISIS.
Brigadier General Amnon Sofrin, a retired senior official in Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, said such agreements are subject to “unwritten rules” observed for decades.
“They say that you [the US] cannot make any use of sensitive information without any coordination or without asking my [Israel’s] permission,” he told journalists in a call organised by The Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group.
While the president has the authority to disclose even the most highly classified information at will, in this case he did so without consulting the ally that provided it, which threatens to jeopardize a long-standing intelligence-sharing agreement, the U.S. officials said.
“I spoke to him (Lavrov) today,” a smiling Putin told a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.
“I’ll be forced to issue him (Lavrov) with a reprimand because he did not share these secrets with us. Not with me, nor with representatives of Russia’s intelligence services. It was very bad of him.”
In the same Reuters’ piece: “”It’s hard to imagine what else these people who generate such nonsense and rubbish can dream up next,” said Putin, referring to unnamed U.S. politicians” — so says the world emperor when it comes to KGB everything but especially “active measures” and disinformation.
After only a few minutes at the podium, however, the transmission of his speech was interrupted without warning.1 President Maduro had ordered a blanket broadcast across all radio and television stations–what is known in Spanish as a cadena nacional. These presidential broadcasts resemble a US Oval Office address in style, but in Venezuela the law obliges both state‑owned and private media to carry the transmissions, which have lasted as long as eight hours. When Maduro invoked this law to interrupt Torrealba’s speech, Venezuelans had no choice but to listen to Maduro or simply switch off their TVs and radios.
The poor countries from Latin America and Africa need an international bailout plan such as the Marshal Plan to Europe after the world war, with economic loans at low bank interest of 1% and 2% and more than 40 years to pay, which is could extend to 60 years term to pay and up to 80 years term, not as now happens with the perversion of the capital market with economic loans to 7% and 8% bank interest with only 5 year to pay to poor countries due to moral degeneration of Wall Street people who lives in Park Avenue … it is also necessary to allow the transfer of technology from rich countries to poor countries to build cars, trucks, buses, industrial machinery, tractors, televisions, computers, cell phones, build nuclear power plants and ensure that poor countries can grow at 5% of GDP per year over the next 50 years to reduce poverty, violence, migration, pay the foreign debt also and maintain world peace…
Source of the above will remain unattributed.
Below: recent documentary coverage of the collapse of Venezuela’s economy.
Look at it. Read about it. Weep. And then read the update . . . .
First, The Donald dissed Israel with the astonishing statement delivered by a diplomat that the Western Wall was a part of “the Israeli-occupied West Bank”.
“This isn’t your territory. This is in the West Bank. It is a private visit by the president, and it’s not your business,” responded one US official, according to the Times of Israel.
Israel’s Channel 2 identified the official as David Berns, the political counselor at the US Consulate in Jerusalem, and said he was accompanied by economic adviser Jonathan Shrier, who also was involved in the row.
BackChannels much appreciates the dogged primary journalism.
BackChannels also feels David Berns should have been briefed as to the significance and sovereign possession of the Western Wall. If he had been apprised of the history involved, then shame on him with little mercy for what he may be suffering through today.
Notes Aaron Klein writing for Breitbart and angling for another knock at the Obama Administration: “Berns is a career officer at the State Department who has been working at the U.S. Consulate since August 2015. In other words, he received his position there during the Obama administration. According to his LinkedIn profile, Berns served from January 2002 until present as a foreign service officer with the State Department.”
If you’re informed, you know what just took place, especially if you have been fighting ISIS as part of the “YPG” (People’s Protection Units) or “YPJ” Women’s Protection Units).
One correspondent noted that in the joint appearance, “The Donald cited PKK @ 5:20, whereas Erdoğan cited YPG/PYD @ 11:50.”
True.
In essence, Erdogan appears to have just gotten President Donald J. Trump to not only endorse his dictatorship but the potential for the continuing suppression and potential cultural annihilation of the Kurds who in his benighted opinion should have no defenses at all.
Regarding BackChannels statement about the Kurdish People’s struggle for a unified state:
. . . Turkey pretends on the surface that they are willing to help Kurdish President Barzani in Iraq but behind the scenes, they are doing everything in order to prevent an independent Kurdistan: “They view the Kurdistan issue as a matter of survival for them. As the Kurds of Syria move closer to America and walk away from the PKK and the Marxists, the Turks are trying to paint them as Marxists, Iranian agents, Assad agents and terrorists. It is all in order to prevent the Kurds of Syria from getting access to the sea. That is the primary reason why Erdogan came to the US.”
Sherkoh Abbas speaking on behalf of the Kurdish People and as quoted in the following publication and URL:
Slinging mud stops working when one catches the spatter and gives it a good look.
By way of research a decade ago, BackChannels has come to view the PKK as a marginalized organization with its leader Abdullah Ocalan sitting in a Turkish jail. The conflation of the old PKK with the whole of Kurdish forces and their aspirations may misguide the public. BackChannels will try to obtain an up-to-date clarification involving the integration of Kurdish political movements across the several suzerains maintained by adverse hosting/subjugating states.
Millions of Christians in the United States and the Jewish People recognize political defamation and demonization — and readers worldwide should as well. That the same may be meted to the Kurds by Turkish President Erdogan bodes ill for the western democracies against the feudal absolutism embraced and promoted by Moscow-Tehran.
President Erdogan has turned Turkey into a now de facto dictatorship while the ruling powers in Moscow have resumed their promotion of disingenuous speech — actually . . . lying — and the distribution of “active measures” and related propaganda (just look up “alternative media” and “alternative news” and the garbage that fills the minds of those who patronize the biggest dump of Orwellian “untruth” that has ever been milled out of a basement — where it should have stayed.
Update – On American Cooperation with Turkey on the Defeating of Kurdish Aspirations for Independence – May 17, 2017
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Armored vehicles flying American flags, American soldiers posing for photos with Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militants and incessant reports on US-YPG relations have been the top news in Turkey in recent days, all suggesting that the United States was heading toward an alliance with the Kurds on the Syrian battlefield.
Turkish officials reacted sometimes harshly, sometimes more guardedly, to this alliance in the making. The US administration finally said the last word with statements from their officials that Washington had decided to give direct weapons assistance to the Kurds. Although American officials tried hard to explain that the weapons will be going to the Syrian Democratic Forces, everyone knows that the backbone of that force is the YPG. This radical decision by the Trump administration has naturally become a topic of international politics.
Perhaps “The Donald” at the podium was schmearing President Erdogan after all.
Yesterday, the day of initial publication for this post, BackChannels installed in the title the hedge, “Appearance of Betrayal”. With that, readers have perhaps entered a new era, not so much of “Fake News”, a term Trump’s Administration with autocratic tendencies has used to undermine faith in the mainstream media, but of high-level “Fake-Outs”.
KYIV, Ukraine—Using artillery, tanks, and rockets, combined Russian-separatist forces attacked Ukrainian forces along the front lines in eastern Ukraine on Sunday and early Monday morning, highlighting, once again, that the February 2015 cease-fire has failed.
“This is barbarism,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Monday in response to the attacks, according to a tweet from his press secretary, Svyatoslav Tsegolko.
WASHINGTON — President Trump cast doubt on whether Moscow is backing separatists engaged in the recent escalation of fighting in eastern Ukraine, appearing to side with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has long denied involvement in the conflict despite evidence to the contrary.
Mr. Trump said he did not take offense at the outbreak of a lethal bout of fighting in Ukraine that came within a day of a phone conversation he had with Mr. Putin, saying of the recent clashes, “we don’t really know exactly what that is.”
According to multiple accounts, the Trump campaign has successfully worked behind the scenes to make sure the new Republican platform would not pledge the lethal defensive weapons Ukraine has been pleading for from the United States. Trump’s forces have tabled a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, and have substituted “appropriate assistance” for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine’s military. Removing sanctions and blocking lethal military assistance to Ukraine are the two primary goals of Putin’s foreign policy. The Republican platform is handing those goals to Putin on a golden platter.
It’s been 3 years and over 10,000 people dead, 23,000 wounded and over 1.5 million displaced people in Donbas region. We all know that this bloody conflict is a covert Russian war against Ukraine, and its objective is to destabilize Ukraine and to prevent it from ever having a chance to be a part of Europe and exist independently from Russian influence.
But many Americans don’t realize that the war in Eastern Ukraine is far from being over.
This is why we will march and rally on May 20th to raise the awareness about an on going Russian aggression and to ask the US for support.
We demand that the Russian assisted militia immediately vacate the Donbas region and that Crimea be returned to Ukraine ASAP.
If these demands are not met, we insist on the American government sticking to its promise made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by all means necessary, in order to restore territorial integrity of the Ukrainian nation. American Government needs to be tough on Russia.
Above: BackChannels edited (re-paragraphed) excerpt from the San Francisco promotion for the May 20, 2017 march.
For democracy, for classical liberalism, for dignity and freedom, for rule of law (as opposed to the rule of thugs), fight back. Attend or publicize the above-listed marches.
BackChannels finds its unbelievable how so active a war as that taking place in Ukraine — and brought to Ukraine by invading Russian forces — has been so off the headlines in major media. To catch up with events, BackChannels has a portal page, “Ukraine Conflict Resources – Short List“.
Choose your Ukrainian conflict reporting or news outlet and get acquainted.
Russia has launched an unprecedented active measures / disinformation campaign across the web in association with its feudal aggression in Ukraine, and if you have been well informed, you may take measure of that yourself by having a look at the “alternative media” and “alternative news” outlets or the propaganda listings appearing to the right of the videos displayed here. You will find plenty evidence of “reflection in the mirror” or what BackChannels refers to as the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” in Moscow / Moscow-Tehran’s portion of the “information warfare space”.
The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances refers to three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary on 5 December 1994, providing security assurances by its signatories relating to Belarus’s, Kazakhstan’s and Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The Memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.[1]
The memorandum included security assurances against threats or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Russia has deployed as many as 10,000 troops in eastern Ukraine for more than a year and has actively sought to hide the deaths of its soldiers, according to a new report that provides a comprehensive assessment of the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor.
The report was published Thursday by the Interpreter, a daily online journal that translates Russian media and reports on Russian affairs, also detailed the Kremlin’s provision of increasingly sophisticated weaponry and vehicles to separatists in Ukraine. Nearly 8,000 people have been killed in the Ukrainian conflict since April 2014.
As Ukraine marked Armed Forces Day today, Poroshenko said that more than 2,500 Ukrainian servicemen and 7,500 civilians had been killed since the outbreak of the war in the spring of 2014.
In an interview with Holos Ukrainy, the official journal of the Ukrainian parliament, the defense minister, Viktor Muzhenko, specified today that 3,064 members of the security forces had been killed in the east since the start of what the Ukrainian government calls the “anti-terrorism operation” (ATO) in April, 2014.
Of this number, Muzhenko said, 2,636 were soldiers in the Ukrainian armed forces (VSU), the others presumably being volunteer fighters or servicemen in the National Guard, police or State Border Service. 2,148 of the VSU casualties were combat losses.
8 December 2016 – A new United Nations report out today has confirmed that Ukrainians living close to the “contact line” – the area between Government-controlled and armed group-controlled territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – not only suffer due to fighting near their homes but also face the threat of landmines and unexploded ordinance as well as have to contend with severe restrictions on movement.
According to the Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine launched today by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), between mid-August and mid-November, at least 32 civilians were killed in conflict-related incidents and another 132 injured. Between mid-April 2014 and 1 December this year, more than 2,000 civilians are estimated to have dined while an additional 298 were killed in the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17.
Conflict-related civilian injures are estimated between 6,000 and 7,000.
“It is of deep concern that Government forces and armed groups operating in civilian areas do not take all feasible precautions against the effects of fighting, resulting in damage to schools, kindergartens, and medical facilities,” noted the report.
It added that it was worrying that Ukrainian military forces and armed groups continued to be positioned in civilian homes and buildings in villages and towns adjacent to the contact line.
The report also raised concern that armed groups in the self-proclaimed “Donetsk people’s republic” and “Luhansk people’s republic” continue to deprive people of their fundamental rights as well as of effective mechanism for redress.
The total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Crimea and eastern Ukraine is 1,590,056 as of 3 April 2017, according to the Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine.
IOM assisted over 137,000 vulnerable IDPs and conflict affected people in 24 regions of Ukraine.
Lack of funds made 40% of vulnerable IDPs IOM assisted with cash in Ukraine refuse medical treatment, according to the post-distribution monitoring of IOM’s project in 13 regions of Ukraine.
The march – with a full police escort – is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. at the Washington Monument and conclude at the Holodomor Memorial, near Union Station, where a vigil is to be held, concluding at approximately 5:30 p.m.
Among the invited guest speakers are analyst Paul Goble, Peter Borisow, president of the Hollywood Trident Foundation; other noted Ukraine advocates are expected and, at the time of writing, were still being confirmed, among them Ukraine’s Ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly. Clergy from the Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches, as well as leaders of the Jewish and Muslim faiths in Ukraine have been invited to properly represent the people of Ukraine.
As stated by Mr. Skibicki: “We demand that the Russian-backed terrorists immediately vacate the Donbas region and that Crimea be returned to Ukraine. If these demands are not met, we insist on the American government to stick to its promise made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which is to provide the full and immediate defense of Ukraine by providing modern defensive weapons in order to help the Ukrainian people restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine. We are NOT calling for American troops to be deployed to Ukraine.”
AMUDA, Syria — At long last, those of us struggling to maintain a fledgling democracy in Northern Syria have been buoyed by the announcement from the Trump administration that the American military will begin to directly arm the Kurdish men and women who make up the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Those forces have been America’s most valued and effective allies in the war against the Islamic State.
This is something we’ve asked for repeatedly during the nearly three years our militias have been fighting the Islamic State and winning, victories achieved despite tough odds and a lack of heavy weapons. We’ve steadily driven the jihadists back hundreds of miles to the brink of defeat at Raqqa. The Islamic State won’t give up its self-styled capital easily. This military aid will be crucial in finishing the job.
But as President Trump prepares to meet next week with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — no friend to the Kurds in Syria or in his own country — we ask the American president and people to be mindful of the enormous sacrifice the Kurdish people have made in this fight, and the importance of the unique democratic system we have worked hard to build in the area of Northern Syria known as Rojava.
BackChannels 