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In reply to the discussion: Ukraine's former President &Prime Minister to formalize and strengthen alliance with Neo-Nazi groups [View all]sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)government from the beginning. Worse, our own government represented by two US Senators, one Republican and one Democrat were meeting with the leader of that party last December, posing for photos with them.
My question at the time was 'do they KNOW who these guys are'?? I still can't tell if they knew but nothing that has happened since then that shows they had any problem with these far Right thugs.
It makes a lot of people sick to their stomachs, but here shamefully, on DU of all places, the alliance with the Neo Nazis has actually been defended.
Here's a little info on who we are apparently associated with:
U.S. Republican Senator John McCain, Democratic senator, Chris Murphy, second left, and the leader of the Sbvoda Party, Oleh Tyahnybok,
John McCain Went To Ukraine And Stood On Stage With A Man Accused Of Being An Anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi
Tyahnybok himself was expelled from the Our Ukraine parliamentary faction in 2004 after giving a speech demanding that Ukrainians fight against a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia" (he later clarified this by saying that he actually had Jewish friends and was only against to "a group of Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine and against Jewish-Bolsheviks [in the past]" . In 2005 he wrote open letters demanding Ukraine do more to halt "criminal activities" of "organized Jewry," and, even now, Svoboda openly calls for Ukrainian citizens to have their ethnicity printed onto their passports.
Tyahnybok is a prominent leader in the Ukrainian protests, so perhaps it was only right that McCain met with him as he did with the others (we reached out to McCain's office to find out how much he interacted with Tyahnybok, but have not heard back at the time of writing). You can defintely understand, however, why Jewish leaders in Ukraine and abroad are concerned about him.
In the past, McCain has sometimes revealed a simplistic, Cold War viewpoint of Russia. You have to wonder if, by going to Ukraine and standing on stage with a man accused of being an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi, he may have shown that trait again.
http://www.businessinsider.com/john-mccain-meets-oleh-tyahnybok-in-ukraine-2013-12#ixzz3DXZ5a47z
Disturbing is putting it mildly.