A nationalistic party in Ukraine issued a press release calling for the boycott of Israeli and kosher goods since "buying them helps the Jews and Israelis conquer and destroy Ukraine's economy". The party's official website reads, "When you buy kosher products made in Israel you are helping destroy your people.Well, my grandmother always said to never trust a Ukrainian and here I thought she was just letting her inner bigot show.
"Naïve Ukrainians don’t pay attention and buy products under the Z'hids' 'kosher' slogan, which are spreading through the Ukrainian market more and more. Ukrainians buy them without knowing that they are actually helping Israel conquer the Ukranian market and destroy Ukraine's national economy."
The party's website also stated that 13% of the profits from sales of kosher products went to religious Jewish communities in Ukraine and were used against the Ukrainian people.
A detailed explanation of how to identify Israeli products according to the barcode can be found in the website. The party calls on Ukrainians not to purchase any products marked kosher, since they are affiliated with the "Zionists".
Friday, August 24, 2007
Everything old is new again
Talk about your old school Elder Complex. Taken from Ynet News:
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6 comments:
Kate, I don't know if you knew this, but Ukrainians were prominent among concentration camp guards, and SS extermination units.
John Demjanjuk, a former camp guard about to be deported from the States (for lying about his wartime actions, and for extreme brutality as a guard) is Ukrainian.
This sort of thing does not surprise me.
Actually not really surprised. One of my friend's father was one of the Minsk's partisans who fought the Germans in the forests. As much as he hated the Nazis he hated the Ukrainians more.
As a part-Ukrainian, I've rubbed up against a lingering, culturally-ingrained anti-Semitism before:
I always remember my dad telling me about the 1930s in the Ukraine, how Stalin did more than just shut down the churches in rural villages. Because shutting down the churches would have been too easy, you see…and it would have focused the rage and emnity of the Christian populace in the wrong direction (i.e. toward Moscow). So ol’ Papa Joe came up with the idea to allow the churches to be opened for worship on Sundays…but he confiscated the keys to the churches from the rural priests and turned them over to Jewish shopkeepers, thus making Christians throughout the Ukraine beholden to Jews if and when they wanted to worship in the normal way. This served Stalin’s purposes well enough (it still, after all, interdicted the faith practice of the populace, which Stalin rightly saw as a threat to his explicitly atheist regime)…but it also had the added benefit of channeling the hostility of the populace away from Moscow and toward the Jews.
Typing it out now, I can’t really tell where the line between historical fact and folky fiction should be drawn. Certainly, I can believe that Stalin — monster that he was — was capable of setting up just such a system. I can also see it working more or less the way it is described above. Why risk the ire of the populace being directed against the dictator, when one can direct it against another group that, historically, has tended to be the favourite punching bag of many Western regimes and governments?
I don’t harbour any deep-seated antipathy toward the Jews myself (in plain point of fact, I have a deep-seated respect for the Jewish people and the religion called Judaism), but I do know many Ukrainians who do, including (at times) my father.
kenneth:
Interesting story. Thanks.
Kenneth, I concur with Michael, its an interesting story, though my grandmother's family left the old country prior to revolution so she came by her bias in a decidely old fashion pre-Stalin way.
Granted -- it wouldn't have been nearly so useful to play up a bias that never existed in the first place.
My (half-)people are stubborn, set in their ways, intransigent, and utterly resistant to change of opinion. Once you're on a Ukrainian's bad side, I've discovered, you can only be thought of as worse...never better.
You should see the fireworks when some crotchety old fogey at the parish hall discovers that my dad was a Ukrainian Catholic and my mom a Roman Catholic. Funtimes.
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