JERUSALEM POST
In 1913, the Russian Empire and the world stood rapt as Mendel Beilis, a Jewish factory worker, fought for his life in a Kiev courtroom. Accused of murdering a Christian child in order to use his blood for Passover matzot, Beilis was eventually exonerated, despite the Czarist government’s efforts to ensure a conviction.
The affair, which became synonymous with politicized justice and judicial anti-Semitism, was recently invoked by another Ukrainian Jew on trial in Kiev. Accused of several politically motivated kidnappings as well as embezzlement, former Dnepropetrovsk region deputy governor Hennadiy Korban told reporters in Kiev on Tuesday he believed that there were definite parallels between the two cases.
“I can tell you one thing: history repeats itself,” he asserted, separated from the throng of reporters by the thick metal bars of his courtroom cage.
“One hundred years ago, here in Kiev in 1913, a trial of the Jew Beilis took place. This is the famous lawsuit that even then could show the absurdity of justice. Today, 100 years later, here in Kiev, we can draw a full analogy between that kind of justice and the nowadays’ one.
Then the 37-year-old father of five children was accused of all mortal sins – of eating babies, and God knows what else. Then it was a process related to anti-Semitism, and the Black Hundreds,” he said, referring to a notorious Russian anti-Jewish organization.
Korban, who runs the nationalist UKROP party and has a seat on the board of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish community, is a close political ally of former regional governor, oligarch and Jewish philanthropist Ihor Kolomoisky.
His arrest was part of a massive raid by the Security Service of Ukraine in November, which also targeted the Kolomoisky-linked Fund for the Defense of the Country and the office of Kolomoisky confidant and legislator Boris Filatov.
It is generally believed in Ukraine that the arrests came as part of an ongoing conflict between Kolomoisky and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, another oligarch. Kolomoisky, who is credited by many with stemming the side of separatism in Dnepropetrovsk following 2014’s Maidan revolution, fell out of favor with Kiev and was ousted from his position following an incident last March in which he entered the state-owned oil monopoly UkrTransNafta’s Kiev offices accompanied by several armed men after its director, his ally, was replaced.
Speaking with Politico during an interview in Geneva, however, Kolomoisky tried to distance himself from Korban, calling him “independent.”
On Wednesday, the UKROP party doubled down on Korban’s claims, issuing a press release citing “clear parallels between the cases of Beilis and Korban.”
“From comments we are seeing in social networks, it is clear that there is an organized anti-Semitic informational campaign against Korban,” party adviser Nikita Poturayev was quoted as saying. “We are seeing lots of repeated hate comments about the Jews stealing from the state and not being welcome in Ukraine. This is very dangerous and feeds into social tensions in Ukraine.”
And while the Jewish community of Dnepropetrovsk has called Korban’s prosecution “unacceptable and deeply wrong,” it has also refrained from implying in any way that the affair is motivated by racial or religious prejudices.
“There is no connection between his arrest and the Jewish community,” Eduard Dolinsky of the Kiev-based Ukrainian Jewish Committee told The Jerusalem Post immediately after Korban’s arrest.
In a statement on its website, the community said that Korban had recently undergone heart surgery and that “his health was seriously damaged during the selfless service to the Ukrainian nation,” adding that any investigation must be “legally irreproachable, transparent and flawless.”
Not everyone believes that Korban’s illness is real, however, with one Jewish media outlet’s European correspondent accusing him of “engaging in the timeless Ukrainian legal tradition of feigning illness to garner sympathy” and noting that hearings in the case have been marred by violence and thuggery.
Despite such coverage, however, Korban’s case has generated significant sympathy among Ukrainians, even if his invocation of Beilis has not, with some accusing the politician of playing the race card.
“I believe that the support of Gennady Korban from the side of the Jewish community is a natural and correct trend. However, I did not record any facts that would make it possible to interpret the criminal case and the trial as anti-Semitic ones. Moreover, as for me, the comparison with the Beilis case is an impermissible speculation,” Vyacheslav Likhachev, an anti-Semitism researcher affiliated with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and the Vaad of Ukraine, told the Post.
Rabbi Boruch Gorin, a leading figure in the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, said that while he could not bring himself to blame a prisoner for using whatever means at his disposal to defend himself, he would advise his Ukrainian co-religionist “not to make a joke of himself.”
“There are a lot of more comparable details – Beilis was also a man and he also had 2 eyes etc. But something is very different: Beilis was a victim of a cruel anti-Semitism and Korban – not. So I can wish him the best, and pray for a justice in his case, but I don’t see any anti-Semitism in it, and I do see a provoking of the anti-Semitism in these remarks comparing” the two cases, Gorin said.
Both Josef Zissels of the Vaad of Ukraine and another community leader, who declined to be identified for this article, agreed with Gorin.
Speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, the second communal official said that the entire matter was absurd and that Korban should be able to defend himself without making a “circus” out of the court.
“Beilis was a simple bookkeeper falsely accused of murdering a Christian child. Korban was in the big leagues. Leading a political party and later a political and financial war against the establishment. You can’t play in the big leagues with little league rules,” he said.
“Korban is also doing a tremendous disservice to the Jewish community by falsely ‘crying wolf’ and calling this anti-Semitic. If anything, it is financial and political. Nobody picked on him for being Jewish. They may have picked on him for acting un-Jewish.”
The issue of political anti-Semitism has been a source of contention between Russia and Ukraine since the fall of pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovich following a street revolution in Kiev in early 2014.
Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine’s leaders of being neo-Nazis and fascists, while Ukrainians have blamed anti-Semitic incidents on Russian provocations.
No ” Nazis and Fascists ” run the Ukraine . Anyone saying so, in Michael Collins Piper words are ; ” fools or liars “.
Any such of people are paid props like the KKK ,and second rate ” Neo Nazis ” in the West.
The Ukraine ,and its leadership is purely Jewish in creation ,operation ,and policy.
The Russian government knows this ,but plays the rhetorical game for , Fear of the Jews” at home ,and abroad .
Hmmm, mental note:…state-owned oil monopoly UkrTransNafta’s Kiev offices
If anyone knows how to contact the prosecutor, I have some helpful information I would like to send to him.
“published in early February 2007, Pasque di sangue. Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali (English translation: Blood Passover. The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder), which shows that there may well have been some truth to several “blood libels,” including the case in which Ashkenazi Jews of German descent living in the northern Italian city of Trent, near the Austrian border, were found guilty of murdering a Christian 2-year-old boy named Simone, crucifying him head down, mutilating his body and using his blood to bake matzot for Passover in 1475.
The child was canonised by the Church and became San Simonino di Trento. His entry in the Roman Martyrology was removed in 1965, after the Jewish-friendly, please-forgive-us Vatican II which gave us Nostra aetate re-examined the case and changed the verdict.
What makes this book extraordinary is that it wasn’t written by a nasty “anti-Semite,” but by Professor Ariel Toaff, who is descended from a line of rabbis, is the son of Elio Toaff, former chief rabbi of Rome and considered Italy’s highest Jewish spiritual and moral authority from the end of World War II to the early 2000s, and is a rabbi himself.”
“Blood Passover was published by the academic publishing house Il Mulino based in Bologna, a highly reputable company that prints books used in university courses, especially in humanities like philosophy and history. If you, like me, had studied philosophy at an Italian university, many — if not most — of your books would have been published by Il Mulino.”
“When Taoff examined the trial records of the murderers of St. Simon of Trent he was staggered. The confessions of the murderers contained details of the crime that only the killers could know, and material that could not have been known to the Italian clergy or public officials. The secret rites practiced by the Ashkenazi community, which could not have been known by the judges, were faithfully reproduced in the confessions.”
“It’s not an accident. It derives from Jewish sacred texts, filled with hatred for Jesus and Christianity, which say very much the same as the song and the graffiti in the video above this article.”
“Toaff’s book incontestably shows that there has been a profound, sometimes violent and even murderous, anti-Christian streak in European Jewish communities.”
My comment: The Jews claim that because the accused Jews were tortured to obtain their confessions, that means they didn’t commit the crimes they were accused of. But in the case of the “NAZIS” that were being tortured after the war ended, by smashing testicles and burning bodies with lit cigarettes, sometimes for days on end, with Jews leading the way, marauding all over Germany – this was the most upstanding trial in history, establishing the “NAZIS” guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/03/who-is-for-free-speech-the-ariel-toaff-case/
Rather than getting to the truth of the matter and being called “anti-Semitic” for doing so, the Ukrainians and Russians point their fingers at each other.
Went to Amazon today to find this book.
I found 4 used copies starting at about $800.00.
Imagine that. A used paperback costing $800.00.
I read a couple reviews. One was very distinctive and
well written.
He harboured a distaste for the ‘sephardic’ Jew isolating
blame on Ashkenazi Jews. I agreed with him.
He did also recommend “Judaism Discovered” by
Micheal Hoffman that does discuss the same topic.
This book I do have and have read. From his dicription, Hoffman’s
research comes from the same Jewish sources.
The chapter is, “Ritual Murder” starting at page 555.
I paid a rich price for Hoffman’s book.
One I still feel was worth it.
But, $800.00 for a not too old paperback written by a Sephardic Jew?
Seems like this is something they do not want to be widely read.
Pulled off the shelf and the printed copies bought up by the censors.
I would love to have that book. But I ain’t gonna pay $800.00 to
add detail to what I already know and can prove from the jew
sources in the modest collection I already have.
If there is a Jew trolling this site that has a copy of this book,
send me a link. I’ll give ya $17.50 for it.
Like I said, it is just detail to shit that most of us here already
know and can prove.
The Jews definitely don’t want the book made available:
“Blood Passover was viciously attacked even before it was published by people, to use the author’s words, who didn’t even know what colour its cover would have:
The book sparked intense controversy including calls for him to resign from or be fired from his professorship, the questioning of his research, historical method(s), and motives as they relate to his writing of the book, threats to his life, and demands that he be prosecuted. [Emphasis added]
Really? And here I was, thinking, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, “Je Suis Charlie” and free speech marches, that Jewish communities everywhere were totally in support of freedom of speech. Shocking!
Some sordid, mindless cartoons must obviously be on a much higher level, far more worthy of being defended than decades-long scholarly historical research.
Censorship in this case is a mild word. Violent polemics erupted in the Italian media, and within the Jewish community even before the book was out. Blood Passover was withdrawn from bookshops very few days after its release, deliveries were blocked and the merchandise recalled.”