Saturday, March 15, 2014

Nick Cohen on the Left's hyprocrisy on Crimea

Three cheers for Nick Cohen, arch-exposer of hypocrisy.

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Noam Chomsky in the Crimea
The Spectator
Nick Cohen
3 March 2014

Go to London or of any other Western capital and here is what you will not see. You will not see mass demonstrations against the Russian invasion of the Ukraine swaying down the same streets in which the liberal-left marched against the invasion of Iraq. You will not hear prominent left-wing voices emphasizing that Putin is attempting more than an invasion; that the Russian Federation – and what a benign word ‘federation’ is for a revived Tsarist autocracy – is the last of the European empires, and is seeking to expand its borders, as empires always do.

In short, the activist left will not tell its followers that we are witnessing imperialism: not ‘cultural imperialism’ or ‘neo-colonialism’ or any of those other catchall, thought-forbidding phrases, but the real thing.

Ukraine has not committed crimes against humanity, so there is no duty on foreign states to intervene to protect its citizens. It does not menace its neighbours or threaten the international order by seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Moreover anyone with a sense of history knows that Putin is invading a region where the Russian empire in its Stalinist stage persecuted and deported native and Muslim Tartars.

Yet the same people who are the first to shout ‘Islamophobia’ and pledge their allegiance to endangered minorities stay silent. Just as they stay silent about the Syrian atrocities, although they would have been the first to march if the West had intervened after the Assad regime used chemical weapons.

Justifications for these hypocrisies are hard to find. more

The Jews Who Fought for Hitler

The Finno-Soviet Winter War of 1939/40 is a fascinating bit of history, with Britain supporting Finland againt the Communist aggressors, and the Finns later fighting on the Eastern Front with the Germans against Britain's then-ally. The Germans rated the Finns as the only foreign contigent fighting with them whose soldiers were the equal of their own.

I hadn't thought about the possibility that Jewish Finns were fighting alongside the Germans on that front, but it did happen, as revealed by this fascinating article. I have excerpted the final paragraph.
The Jews Who Fought for Hitler: ‘We Did Not Help the Germans. We Had a Common Enemy’
03.10.14
By Paul Kendall
They fought alongside them, healed them, and often befriended them. But how do Finland’s Jews feel today about their uneasy—and little mentioned—alliance with the Nazis?
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[T]he Finnish Jews were on an impossible mission. Whatever they did there would always be one inescapable difference between them and their Finnish compatriots: the latter were fighting for their future, but, if Hitler had won, the Jewish soldiers would have had no future. What were they supposed to do? That is the question nobody can answer.

BBC accused of censorship in row over Free Speech show from mosque

You couldn't parody this - a program called 'Free Speech', held in a mosque, bails out of discussing Islam's attitude to homosexuality.

BBC accused of censorship in row over Free Speech show from mosque
Thursday 13 March 2014
The Guardian

Host of programme interrupted question about when will it be right to be Muslim and gay due to 'deep concerns' of mosque