David Matas
The Globe and Mail, Mar. 23, 2022
“Vladimir Putin’s Russia, despite its general repression, tolerates the Russian Imperial Movement, a neo-Nazi, antisemitic, armed white supremacist organization, designated by the U.S. as a terrorist entity. In their current invasion, the Russians have bombed, in Kyiv, Babi Yar, a site memorializing the mass killing of Jews there.”
Russia justifies the invasion of Ukraine as an effort in denazification. The justification is so obviously unreal that there may be a tendency to disregard it. Yet, internet blockage within Russia means that there the unreal can hold sway. As well, we must be concerned with the delusions of the invaders, no matter how unreal they are, because of the very real results that flow from these delusions.
The Holocaust was a tragedy in which the whole world shared, either by killing the victims or denying them refuge or giving haven to those complicit in mass murder. Before, during and after the Holocaust, antisemitism was pervasive. Today all too few have come fully to grips with the legacy of hatred and murder that their ancestors inflicted.
Ukraine, to be sure, is not innocent. Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 1.5 million were Ukrainian. Those killings were done mostly by German roving killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen. But, to know who to kill, the Germans relied on local collaborators to identify the Jews.
David Matas is a human rights advocate and senior counsel to B’nai Brith Canada.
To view the original article, click here
