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.”
Anti-Semitic talk and thought have been the most medieval tools for controlling, deflecting, and moving mobs and, at times, producing a little extra money for the feudal nobility by way of plunder accompanied by theft and murder.
The Soviet Union picked up a share of the pieces — relationships — after the Nazi defeat in WWII, and it exploited anti-Semitic sentiment to build a base for itself.
The medieval history of religion gets a little complicated. Ruling Christians in Hungary in the 12th Century formed laws to discriminate against Jews and Jewish potential and accomplishment, and then upon activation applied the same laws to Muslims.
I’ve taken the stance with anti-Semitism x feudalism and tribalism that associated conflict and cruelty are really about replacing the medieval mode and worldview with what has become politically and spiritually modern — democratically checked and distributed political power; multicultural inclusion; a great measure of compassion and secular humanism in the functional aspects of law, and where beneath such law, all are treated as equal.
The thought may at first seem spotty as President Putin handily sustains possibly the most pro-Semitic Russia in Russian history, but as one visits Moscow’s relationships with Assand and Khamenei, Hezbollah and Hamas (and PFLP) plus autocrats like Erdogan and Orban (add in Le Pen but perhaps not the now well-briefed Trump), Moscow’s medieval facets would seem unmistakable. Add to that the cruelties so well demonstrated in Syria and the cloaked “hybrid warfare” in Ukraine that would seem to amount to not much more than recognizable old infiltration accompanied by massive disinformation (for the misguiding of the masses, and much more of Russians — the 93 percent of Russians who may read and speak only in Russian — than of anyone else) and the onset of conventional war.
The inspiration for the post came by way of a Muslim convert to Christianity who had expressed enthusiasm for modern Israel, calling it a “Hebrew state” and an inspiration for the world.
Addendum
Not shortly after publishing this piece, I found a well-known figure boasting of a recently attended Christian, Jewish, and Muslim colloquy and querying the presence of a “clash of civilizations”. My response:
There is a “clash of civilizations” — but it’s not the one we have been led to believe exists, i.e., some thing between the Muslim and Christian worlds. That “clash” doesn’t exist in any meaningful reality: what does exist is the struggle of the modern world to displace several worlds — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — remaining mired in medieval outlooks, politics, and practices.
BackChannels may have hit this general topic area — i.e., the relationship between the promotion of anti-Semitism and the experience of fascistic and feudal political cultures. Nonetheless, if one may get a complex of thoughts into a very small box, well all the better in our harried Internet Age.
Discrimination has been part of Islam — and in some ways defines Islam — since Muhammad chose to divide the world in the black-and-white differentiation between believers and unbelievers with Christians and Jews made to occupy a lesser but middle space, just one up from infidels (I’m really an amateur at this, so please forgive any over-simplifications nonetheless suited for discussion. That ability to smear competition has long been part of the medieval mentality and may well define it considering the “enthusiasm” for religious warfare not so long ago.
It may interest Muslims reading this thread to know that in Christian states, well, at least Hungary, 12th Century, laws designed to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims.
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I think Edward Said published _Orientalism_ in 1972, and the same has become a staple in higher education representing politics on the Left / Far Left / Far Out Left.
I have it “on deck” today in my own library, so I’ll reserve comment on it but to convey two related URLs:
The Russian Soviet Era effort to “pick up” difficult undeveloped states and exploit them by way of a “liberation theology” — as with the Palestinians — that produced sweet promises — as with the contemplated destruction of Israel, or the elimination of whites from states like Zimbabwe (now Zuma in South Africa is using the same ploy) — that would in fact install dictatorship (absolute power) and exploit The People has been accompanied in “Active Measures” fashion by way of inserting the poison into the intellectual assets of foreign states.
I write long enough as is, but any reading may pick up on the questions that develop from my assertions.
The American Islamic Forum for Democracy’s (AIFD) mission is to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state.
AIFD is the most prominent American Muslim organization directly confronting the ideology of political Islam and openly countering the common belief that the Muslim faith is inextricably rooted to the concept of the Islamic State (Islamism). We stand firmly for universal human rights – including gender equality, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech and expression. Founded by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, AIFD envisions a future wherein Muslims never feel a conflict between their personal faith and their commitment to individual liberty and freedom. Rather, we work to empower Muslims to be primary advocates for liberty and freedom.
We are being called to tolerate, accommodate, and include people who believe it is compassionate to murder gay people; from Imams trained in moderate Saudi Arabia to moderate Iran. We see gays from these countries murdered before our eyes: gays hanging from cranes in the city squares or thrown off tall buildings. Think about that. Close your eyes and picture someone blindfolded, hands tied behind their back and flung over a building. Imagine the horror of that death. Yet we say nothing and invite Islam into our western countries-to preach and proselytize in the name of freedom of religion and freedom of speech-yet without question against our laws.
We tend to forget that Islam is far more than a religion. It, like democracy, is an ideology, but at odds with democracy.
Islam is inherently, innately, systemically, and endemically homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic and virulently anti-Jewish. Islam opposes the ethic that the Jewish people brought into the world 3500 years ago and brought to these shores by Christians. We know this because we hear their calls “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” “Death to the Jews.”
Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations.
KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the authoritarian nationalism certain to weaken EU / NATO cohesion and favor the development of political environments subject to the control by the wealthiest and most powerful of personalities.
Western Response Most Adverse to Democratic Modernity: in former Moscow-aligned organizations or personalities, adoption of “active measures” and forms of perceptual control, including the “false flag” painting of events, to channel popular perception in service to greater political power.
Western Response Most Favorable to Democratic Modernity: strongest possible emphasis on empiricism, integrity in investigation, and the promotion and retention of American and associated constitutional methods, principles, and values.
In the feudal mode, “the masses” — BackChannels finds the term itself degrading — may be controlled by disinformation, disingenuous information, framing, innuendo, rumor, and suspicion.
In the modern mode, the curious and the reasoning of the public may sift and evaluate for strong information — valid, reliable, significant, and straight.
North Americans and Europeans accustomed to political decency may wish to evaluate whether they really want to have the Feudal Mode installed in the future experience of their own presently democratic and modern rule-of-law states.
I would question the authenticity of each posture or pretense presented, and I should think a good detective would start with the accuser. Again, we have been made to enter an era marked by the potential for KGB-style “false flag” and other manipulation. Where some people dare the improbable — do the unthinkable — the numbers (what are the odds?) may not help them.
I find the Linda Sarsour side of the story deeply suspect given her relationship with Hamas.
What if Jews and Muslims accomplished the vandalism together, and then made a show of amity in the wake of tragedy?
In the feudal mode — where power is concentrated by a force in personality that generates immense wealth and patronage without regard for common law — and in the mind supporting the feudal worldview (blessed with imagination but cursed by limited access to applicable data, critical research and reasoning skill, and relevant knowledge), what, however improbable, is not possible?
In this imbroglio, to accuse either Jews or Muslims — or representatives of either — of engaging in a “false flag” operations draws immediate condemnation as either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic — and therein lies the beauty of medieval manipulation and political theater and the greater horror of it as well.
What happens when power play magus?
Syria — and the incubating of ISIL as useful tool for Moscow and the depopulating of the state to present the west with a major headache.
What will happen to the western public IF subjected to continued “reflexive control” and artifice in the presentation of political event?
Whatever the answer may be, it’s unknown to BackChannels.
However, BackChannels would attempt to armor the “American Mind” against so many feudal methods of perceptual control even though an obscure foreign policy / political science / political psychology blog cannot begin to do what perhaps the American Intelligence Community (IC) needs must do in defense of the Constitution and the related cohesion and integrity of the state itself: set the record straight.
How is it possible that an act of vandalism on the scale reported — in Philadelphia’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, some “75 to 100 headstones were topped” according to CNN — produced no claims (by person or organization), no witnesses — none that have been in any way publicized, at least — and to date no suspects.
What has been produced: innuendo, rumor, suspicion, each a part of the shifting — and at times easily manipulated — perceptions well known to feudal lords and their loyal subjects.
Context: the talk was of Meir Kahane and involved a friend who knew him.
One may respect your living it — and I would recommend Giulio Meotti’s (compassionate, complete, factual, pro-Israel) account of the Baruch Goldstein attack for how that really worked — but that the politicians chose to trim the tendency toward incitement may speak volumes about the image Kahane produced in his own day. Not only should Jews not explain away terrorism, the entire community should note Russia’s long relationship with political terror as an appropriate tool in its realpolitik for upwards of 100 years, and then denounce it and distance themselves from it.
I used this excerpt from Walter Laqueur’s scholarship with the hope that Jews of Russian descent and memory and others involved in the scholarship will deflect a little bit of attention from the Arab anti-Semitism and follow the modern narrative back to Imperial Russian anti-Semitism and its dissemination and amplification in other cultures, starting with the “informing” of the Nazi’s worldview and moving on to what the Soviet managed to do to the middle east — and what is sustained today in Moscow’s relationship with Tehran and Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.
So how long do you want to keep around one of the world most deceitful and ugly of sustained conflicts?
Hamas and the PLO will continue exploiting and suppressing their subjugated populations — these guys are not Freedom Watch and Human Rights Watch winners by a long stretch — and Israelis and the west will continue building and buying upgraded defense systems to handle the next generations of terrorist drones, rockets, and tunnels.
I’ll apologize for the coming cynicism right here, but it sometimes seems everyone making money on the conflict goes home happy compared to those made to believe that the Jews or the Arabs must be the cause of all their woes, and they must continue suffering until Hamas obliterates the Jews or the IDF “takes down” Hamas.
Left alone, the Middle East Conflict may be a politician’s best and most reliable evil system, efficient for generating income in some parts, pretty good for speechifying and promising the world to one constituency or another.
Context: in light of dozens of bomb threats and two acts of vandalism against Jewish targets, the chatter turned to the JDL, which in the United States remains an FBI designated terrorist organization (the same has been left to operate in Canada and Great Britain). The matter of reevaluating the too obvious public appearance of anti-Semitic acts in America came up between Jews and here fits with the notion that a part of the nation seems now driven toward the revival of feudalism.
The commission of political violence before the Larger Force of the State renders the same very small and degrades and tarnishes the nobility of the actor. Now we reached a super-generational changing of the political guards. Angela Davis is 73 years old; Noam Chomsky is 88 years old. The Baby Boomers are counting on their retirement funding or the state to east them into death, and the New Guards of the Culture are climbing into their positions and making their marks.
In the framework of time, that is where these attacks on Jewish targets are taking place.
I have on Back-Channels noted an increasingly stark choice for modern bodies politic: do ye wish to remain “Modern” — cooperating, multicultural, mutually respectful beneath the benevolent and firm umbrella of secular-humanist / Greco-Roman / Judeo-Christian law developed atop much bloody argument about political power, or may ye wish to slide back into the feudal slime hoping to come out on top with the authoritarian who says he really likes you?
Conflict — equipment, manpower, research — is a money-maker for a lot of people employed and invested in related fields. Give it a thought: to really be kind to our neighbors, perhaps we should all just thin ourselves out. God only knows Americans have the firearms to do it to themselves.
Maybe Black Lives Matter would like to weigh in on this business about an America / EU / NATO that trends toward feudalism and the potential for the conflicts of all-against-all. The same would make the Arab, “I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin . . . .” sound awfully quaint.
BackChannels reach on Facebook has been broad and not terribly shy; however, hateful events — bomb threats, the desecration of cemeteries — promote suspicions, and one may now wonder at the purposes of those who commit such acts, which appear to no longer involve one city or community center and at least one mysterious miscreant.
The bomb threats number in the dozens; the attacks on two Jewish cemeteries now involve two cities.
Has someone been going down a call list?
Has someone been driving from one place to the next?
Many who follow politics at many levels — diplomacy, foreign affairs, international relations, warfare and terrorism — have picked on some far ahead or far out concepts, e.g., that Obama made the United States “post-Constitutional” or that we are living in a modern “post-fact” world — or a world comfortably supporting “alt-facts”. How is one to reject the arrival of so ambiguous and ambivalent a political philosophy?
For the time being, the United States of America remains a “constitutional democracy”, and perhaps one with a security community that has its own backbone when it comes to the defense of the nation against “all enemies foreign and domestic”.
BackChannels suggestion to those vulnerable to being goaded into violence against pet targets on the basis of assumptions based on the constructs of swirling conspiracies or shadow and uncertain empirical evidence: cool it. Let’s not drag ourselves backward several hundred years in the way of the ill-educated, ill-informed, and paranoid.
Vinberg was a most loyal and devoted subject of his Tsar and his writings are full of invective against all Russian politicians, particularly of the centre and the right, who had been deficient in this respect. Shortly before the October revolution, Vinberg took part in a conspiracy to overthrow the provisional government, was arrested and sent to the Peter and Paul fortress. There he had ample time to write his diaries and to bring some order into his ideas; like Hitler in Landsberg prison, he then and there prepared himself for his future political and publicist career. Vinberg was released, or escaped, in 1918, and went first to the Ukraine and later to Germany, where he systematically developed his ideas in the short-lived Berlin newspaper, Prizyv, the yearbook Luch Sveta (A Ray of Light), published first in Berlin and subsequently in Yugoslavia, his book Krestny Put (Via Dolorosa), and a number of other writings. Vinberg’s ideas can be summarized as follows:
The Jews are the source of all evil. They must be exterminated.
The liberals and the constitutional monarchists are responsible for Russia’s ruin. Any form of democracy and republican regime is bad. A strong dictatorship is needed, for the people are stupid and bad and can never be trusted.
Russia and Germany must unite in order to crush the revolution.
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches must unite against the combined power of the Judeo-masonic sects now operating as a new International.
. . . In his ‘Berlin letters’ published in Luch Sveta, we learn that nature loves the strong, the brave, the agile, those who act and do not talk; she loathes weakness and democratic half measures. Vinberg has only contempt for the masses, and his only criticism of Nicholas II is that the late Tsar unduly idealized the muzhik, and the Russian people in general, who are really a good for nothing lot and deserve to be punished for having betrayed their Tsar. The people will always remain a blind, ignorant, senseless mass which has never and nowhere understood anything apart from the crudest material needs.
Starting well before Vinberg and moving far past him, Laqueur connects the dots between the Tsar’s White Russian loyalists and emigres who had carried from the experience of the royals the anti-Semitic cant and nurtured racial contempt and supremacism of that medieval world. The transfer of thought from Vinberg to Germany’s Rosenberg ensues.
What Rosenberg says of Jews and Jewish history can be traced, chapter and verse, to Vinberg’s ‘Berlin letters’ of 1919: the Jewish religion is highly aristocratic; the Jews have been engaged for many hundreds of years in a struggle against the gentile aristocracies; they use in this fight democratic, liberal, and socialist doctrines which act as a poison in the non-Jewish body politic. Thus they destroyed the Roman empire through the deadly injection of democratic-Jewish Christianity . . . . (op. cit. p 116)
And on goes Walter Laqueur’s documentation of the intellectual history involving the transfer of such thought from the Russian experience and invention into a German culture soon to embrace Nazism.
Vinberg died in February 1927, and did not witness his ideas coming to fruition. His views are of historical interest because they constitute something in the nature of a half-way house between the old Black Hundred and National Socialism (op. cit. p. 117).
The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]
According to Michael Kellogg,[2] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[3] Recent research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.[4]
