Com­ment: The nam­ing of Nazi and SS Col­lab­o­ra­tor Stephan Ban­dera as a “Hero” of the Ukraine should out­rage every­one, not just Jews, although it shouldn’t sur­prise any­one. Deeply involved with war crimes com­mit­ted by Nazi and SS units dur­ing World War II, Bandera’s OUN/B orga­ni­za­tion then jumped to West­ern intel­li­gence after the war. (The 14th Waf­fens SS “Gali­cian” Division–pictured at right– was drawn largely from the OUN/B.)

Ele­ments asso­ci­ated with Bandera’s group dis­sem­i­nated dis­in­for­ma­tion attempt­ing to link Bandera’s death with the KGB and Lee Har­vey Oswald. This helped cover up Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion by con­vinc­ing some that a Third World War would result from a proper investigation.

Evolv­ing into a key ele­ment of the Nazi wing of the GOP, the OUN/B real­ized its goal of an “inde­pen­dent” Ukraine dur­ing the Reagan/George H.W. Bush regimes. Yka­te­rina Chumachenko–the top oper­a­tional leader of the OUN/B– became the head of Pres­i­den­tial Liai­son under Ronald Rea­gan.

Even­tu­ally, she mar­ried Mr. Yuschenko, and Yka­te­rina became the first lady of the Ukraine! Her hus­band has now named Ban­dera a hero!

Jews World­wide Out­raged byYuschenko’s Prais­ing of Nationalists

Rus­sia Times; 1/30/2010.

The largest Jew­ish human rights orga­ni­za­tion in the US, the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter, joined the cho­rus of those who con­demn the dec­la­ra­tion of con­tro­ver­sial nation­al­ist leader Stepan Ban­dera as a Hero of Ukraine.

Mark Weitz­man, head of gov­ern­ment affairs at Wiesen­thal Cen­ter wrote to Ukraine’s Ambas­sador in the US, not­ing that “it is surely a trav­esty when such an honor is granted right at the period when the world pauses to remem­ber the vic­tims of the Holo­caust on Jan­u­ary 27.”

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Express­ing his “deep­est revul­sion”, Weitz­man also reminded that the late Simon Wiesen­thal, who founded their orga­ni­za­tion, was born in Ukraine himself.

Ear­lier, Russ­ian Jews sim­i­larly called Yushchenko’s move “a provo­ca­tion pro­mot­ing the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of Nazi crimes” and “a chal­lenge to the civ­i­lized world.”

Out­go­ing Pres­i­dent Yushchenko, who lost the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions on Jan­u­ary 17, signed a decree con­fer­ring Ban­dera, the head of the Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists (OUN) in 1941–1959, the sta­tus of a national hero.

Bandera’s sup­port­ers – mainly in West­ern Ukraine – claim he fought for Ukraine’s inde­pen­dence against both Soviet and Ger­man sol­diers. How­ever, many oth­ers in his coun­try and Rus­sia believe he was a war crim­i­nal who col­lab­o­rated with the Nazis dur­ing WWII and killed inno­cent people.

The Fed­er­a­tion of Russia’s Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ties, or FEOR, in a state­ment issued Mon­day, said Yushchenko’s move “insults the mem­ory of the vic­tims” of Nazi crimes.

“The decree says Ban­dera was awarded ‘for his spir­i­tual invin­ci­bil­ity, fight for national ide­ol­ogy, hero­ism and self-sacrifice in a strug­gle for the inde­pen­dence of Ukrain­ian state’,” the doc­u­ment pub­lished on the organization’s web­site (www.feor.ru) reads. “Appar­ently, this way Yushchenko equates hero­ism and self-sacrifice to the mass mur­der­ing of the Jews and Poles that Ban­dera and his asso­ciates were widely practicing.”

The doc­u­ment authors believe “such a polit­i­cal ges­ture is a chal­lenge to the civ­i­lized world, to every­one who fought against Nazism” dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. . . .