Despite the outbreak of Western media use of the one-liner, “Zelenskyy is Jewish,” so as to brush aside any investigation of the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is on record in saying that Judaism plays almost no role in his life, and many other factors are much more important. So, in his new role thrust upon him as defender of the Jewish faith, he went flight-forward, treating the horrendous genocide at Babyn Yar as a fit subject for the cheapest of lying.
Zelenskyy’s tweet: “To the world, what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? At least 5 killed. History repeating...” How could this be understood as anything but, “the Russians bombed the site of the Nazi mass murder of Jews, five people were killed there, and the Russians are about to escalate the genocide.” His tweet did what it was calculated to do, setting off a wave of horrific images, triggering a visceral gut reaction, not to be erased.
However, there simply was no bombing of Babyn Yar.
As the chairman of the Babyn Yar Memorial Center’s advisory board, Natan Sharansky, explained: A missile targeted a broadcast tower and hit it. There was damage from the flying debris to the nearby sports complex. (He didn’t say it, but there was probably also damage to two other nearby establishments, a hamburger restaurant and a motorcycle repair shop.) However, the Babyn Yar “site,” different from the Babyn Yar Memorial, encompasses hundreds of acres. And there are also three cemeteries—including a Jewish cemetery—closer to the broadcast tower than the Memorial. Sharansky: “The bomb was of course targeting the radio tower.” Nothing of the Memorial was damaged, and a close-by synagogue was “not damaged…. The building that was damaged [the former sports facility] was not … part of the museum.”
In fact, hours before the single missile was fired, the Russian Defense Ministry had publicly warned the neighborhood that “the technological infrastructure of the SBU [Ukraine’s Security Service] and the 72nd main PSO [Psychological Operations Unit] center in Kyiv will be hit with high-precision weapons. We call on … Kyiv residents” not to get close to the 370-foot-high broadcast tower. No one did, and no civilians died or were wounded. There’s no argument that when any military site, or artillery emplacement, within Ukraine’s cities, is targeted only with high-precision weapons, the debris flying off the target is indeed dangerous and both can and will cause damage. Very little is claimed here, and none to the Memorial.
