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30th May 2014 12:39
Link to Post #1
Anti-Semitic political candidates in Ukraine doomed at the ballot box
The following article is very informative because it illuminates things as they really are in Ukraine.
President Putin Has Called Ukraine a Hotbed of Anti-Semites. It's Not.
Openly anti-Semitic political candidates in today’s Ukraine are doomed at the ballot box.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...ors_picks=true
Here are some highlights from this article.
That the 2 far right candidates in that country's most recent election each only received 1% of the vote"flew in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin's claims that Jews in Ukraine—who number between 100,000 and 300,000—are under threat and that the country is a hotbed of "fascists and anti-Semites." This was one argument Putin used to justify Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's southern region of Crimea and the pressure he continued to exert on the country."
But here are the facts:
Political Poison
"Anti-Semitism is something Ukrainians on either side of the political divide accuse their enemies of, but it's a label they themselves assiduously avoid. Jew baiting is political poison—openly anti-Semitic candidates are repeatedly punished at the ballot box."

"Jewish men in Zhytomyr, 80 miles east of Kiev, read from the Torah. The men wear prayer shawls, or tallit, and on their heads, tefillin, or phylacteries, boxes containing a holy prayer."
At any rate, when it comes to anti-antisemitism, the country of Ukraine offers us an excellent model wrt it being a country which was once rampant with that cancer but has, over the course of many years now, transformed into a place where Jews and Non-Jews live together, side by side in peace and harmony.
"Above all, what seems to characterize Jewish life in Ukraine at this moment is a sense of hope.
The Maidan movement, in which a number of Jews were passionate participants, was not just about eradicating corruption and building democratic institutions. For many Ukrainians, it was about creating a new sense of national identity, one based on citizenship, not ethnicity.
While I was in Lviv, I met some young Jewish residents of the city—over pizza and Cokes—who said there'd been a noticeable transformation in Ukrainian society in recent years.
"People are starting to talk about the Holocaust, take an interest in Jewish things," said Olexander Nazar, the head of Lviv's Sholem Aleichem Society for Jewish Culture, who had just taken part in a Days of Yiddish and Jewish Culture festival. "It's just the beginning, but things are changing, like when molecules start to bump up against each other."
"We're patriots of our country," Nazar said."
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The Following User Says Thank You to Roisin For This Post:
Rocky_Shorz (2nd June 2014)
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1st June 2014 04:12
Link to Post #2