Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-year-old veteran who fought with Nazis
The Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation on Friday to a 98-year-old immigrant from Ukraine who fought in a Third Reich military formation accused of war crimes.
The elderly veteran, Yaroslav Hunka was honored during a session in which President Volodomyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine addressed the lawmakers to thank them for their support since Russia invaded his country, saying Canada has always been on “the bright side of history.” The Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota — who had compared Zelenskyy to Winston Churchill — recognized a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”
The assembly then rose to applaud a man in a khaki uniform standing on the balcony, who saluted, according to this screenshot from Canadian television. […]
The AP caption described Hunka as having “fought with the First Ukrainian Division in World War II before later immigrating to Canada.” The First Ukrainian Division is another name for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party; the unit was also called SS Galichina. […]
Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: What’s truly insane to me is that Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian Jew himself, and his great-grandfather and several of his grandfather’s brothers were killed during the Holocaust. I’m just really truly shocked.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @vague-humanoid
You haven’t been paying attention. There have always been right-wing and even far-right-wing Jews, of course, but the current (and repeated) Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu, has being trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler for years, and has said that the only thing wrong with the Nazis is that they included Jews in the list of groups they threw in concentration camps. (That is: concentration camps are fine as long as the people who go into them are not Jewish.) And he has his party’s backing, and that party reliably gets a majority in Israeli elections — a surprisingly large proportion of modern Jewish people no longer care. The idea that Jewish people and Nazis are some kind of Manichaean opposites was never true — there were even a few high-level Jewish Nazis for a while, before they got offed — but modern Jewish right-wingers have basically become Mad Libs Nazis, where the only difference is whose names are written in which blanks, so of course they forgive the original German ones for doing what they themselves want to do to (specifically, but probably not exclusively) Palestinians. It’s not at all surprising that Zelenskyy is okay with this, and I strongly suspect that as time passes more and more “normal” Jews will reveal that they don’t care either, because fascism has become part of the mainstream Jewish political landscape just like it has become part of the mainstream political landscape among nearly everyone else. It’s appalling, but the dominant word in “Jewish people” is “people”, and there has never been a time when people haven’t been stupid.