Nazism is alive and well in Ukraine
The New York Times has been forced to very, very belatedly deal with something which had long been obvious and known to many independent analysts and media outlets, but which has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for obvious reasons.
The surprising Monday Times headline said that "Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History." This acknowledgement comes after literally years of primarily indy journalists and geopolitical commentators pointing out that yes indeed... Ukraine's military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east since at least 2014, have a serious Nazi ideology problem.
This has been exhaustively documented, again, going back years. But the report, which merely tries to downplay it as a "thorny issue" of Ukraine's "unique" "History" - suggests that the real problem for Western PR is fundamentally that it's being displayed so openly. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover those Nazi symbols please!--as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.
NBC News report in 2014: "Germans were confronted with images of their country’s dark past on Monday night, when German public broadcaster ZDF showed video of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbols on their helmets in its evening newscast."
The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing frustration over the optics of Nazi symbols being displayed so proudly on many Ukrainian soldiers' uniforms. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs which have in some cases been featured in newspapers and media outlets worldwide (typically coupled with generally positive articles on Ukraine's military) are merely 'unfortunate' or misleading, the NYT report says, "In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups."
The report admits this has led to controversy wherein news rooms actually must delete some photos of Ukrainian soldiers and militants. "The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II," continues the report.
So it's merely "thorny" and "complicated" we are told. Below is a small sampling of the kinds of patches that appear on Ukrainian military uniforms with "some regularity" - in the words of The New York Times:
NATO itself has in the recent past been forced to delete images on its official social media accounts due to Nazi imagery being present among Ukrainian troops during photo shoots.
The following line from the report says everything you need to know about the so-called "paper of record" and its one-sided and ultra-simplistic coverage of what many are finally waking up to realize is a war with a deeply complex reality (to say the least), and far from the MSM's goodies vs. baddies Hollywoodesque narrative of Putler vs. the free world which is typical of networks from CNN to Fox to NBC...
From the NY Times:
"In November, during a meeting with Times reporters near the front line, a Ukrainian press officer wore a Totenkopf variation made by a company called R3ICH (pronounced “Reich”). He said he did not believe the patch was affiliated with the Nazis. A second press officer present said other journalists had asked soldiers to remove the patch before taking photographs."
Oops!
And now we might expect some significant efforts at damage control, or even perhaps we're witnessing the beginnings of evolving definitions and the moving of goalposts. More from NY Times [emphasis ZH]:
But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically.
The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.
Only very recently Ukraine's Defense Ministry and even President Zelensky's office was caught in the act:
In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II.
The patch in the photograph sets the Totenkopf atop a Ukrainian flag with a small No. 6 below. That patch is the official merchandise of Death in June, a British neo-folk band that the Southern Poverty Law Center has said produces “hate speech” that “exploits themes and images of fascism and Nazism.”
To be expected, the Times still tries to run cover while desperately seeking to 'reassure' its audience by writing that "In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be 'de-Nazified' — a position that ignores the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish."
But then still, the NYT concedes awkwardly, "More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate."
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Ted Cruz TORCHES Leftist Group for Demonizing Moms for Liberty
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed the Southern Poverty Law Center, focusing on the SPLC’s decision to place parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty on a “hate map” alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is going on offense and they’ve decided to target Moms for Liberty,” Cruz said on his podcast Wednesday. “Let me say Moms for Liberty, they are phenomenal women—they are moms who are standing up for their kids.”
The SPLC released its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” on Tuesday, plotting 523 “hate groups” and 702 “antigovernment extremist groups” on a map of the United States.
As The Daily Signal reported, the list of “hate groups” names numerous parental rights organizations, including 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education (based in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania), and many state-based chapters of Parents Involved in Education.
“And you want to know the power of Moms for Liberty?” he asked. “Let me tell you, someone who would not have the first name in his title, and that would be Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Without Moms for Liberty, Gov. Glenn Youngkin would be Glenn Youngkin. There’d be no ‘governor.’ We’d have Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Because Virginia, which Biden won by nearly 10 points, Virginia flipped red.”
Cruz noted that Virginia “flipped red because moms stood up and they were ticked off at the left-wing takeover of their schools, they were ticked off at the woke ideology…. And what has the Southern Poverty Law Center said? Moms, they’re defending their kids, are a hate group.”
“I’m gonna say right now the SPLC is a radical left-wing hate group,” the senator declared. “I’m going to use that term. They hate you. They hate me. They hate America. They hate conservatives. They hate the Constitution. They hate the Bill of Rights. They hate families. They hate moms. They hate dads. They hate anyone who stands up for this country. And I gotta say for the SPLC to go after Moms for Liberty is disgusting.”
Virginia, which as Cruz mentioned was ground zero for the parental rights movement in 2021, includes many such groups. Parents Against Critical Race Theory in Ashburn; Parents Defending Education in Arlington; Virginia Moms for America; and Virginia Parents Involved in Education all appear on the SPLC’s new list of “antigovernment extremist groups.” The SPLC does not specifically brand them “hate groups,” although they do appear on the “hate map.”
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced many scandals. In 2019, it fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment tracing back decades. Amid that scandal, a former employee came forward as having been “part of the con.” He wrote that the SPLC’s hate accusations are a “highly profitable scam.”
The SPLC’s accusation against the Family Research Council inspired a terrorist attack in 2012. A shooter targeted the council’s Washington, D.C., office, using the “hate map.” He intended to kill everyone in the building, but a brave security guard prevented him. The shooter is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Cruz mentioned these scandals on his podcast.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center, unfortunately, is a profoundly dishonest, rabidly partisan left-wing organization,” he said. “It has a business model, where it gets very wealthy left-wing billionaires to write them big checks in order to try to tar anyone right of center and to call them hate groups.”
“Among other groups, they’ve called the Alliance Defending Freedom—which is one of the most important organizations nationally for defending religious liberty, for litigating and winning national, Supreme Court victories in front of the Supreme Court—so you literally have this organization of public interest lawyers who are winning religious liberty victories before the Supreme Court, the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group like the Nazis or the KKK,” the senator said.
Cruz also noted the attack on Family Research Council, which he called “a fantastic organization that is pro-life, is pro-traditional values, that fights for family values across this country.”
“In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s designation of the FRC as a hate group led one radical, deranged, angry leftist to show up with a gun trying to murder people at the FRC, and thankfully there was a security guard who heroically stopped this crazed attempted murderer from carrying out the hate that was inspired by the SPLC,” he said.
Cruz also noted that police arrested an SPLC lawyer, charging him with domestic terrorism following a destructive “Stop Cop City” riot in Atlanta in March.
“The SPLC is so radical, they had a lawyer just recently that worked for them who was arrested for being an Antifa terrorist in Atlanta and participating in terrorist riots against law enforcement,” the senator said. “Mind you, SPLC said when their own employee was indicted as being an Antifa terrorist, said we stand by our employee. That’s who they are.”
In March, the SPLC acknowledged that police arrested an employee, but claimed that he had been acting as a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild. The guild condemned every police arrest as an example of “ongoing state repression and violence against racial and environmental justice protesters,” and the SPLC condemned escalating “policing tactics against protesters.”
At first, neither organization explicitly stated that the observer had not engaged in violence against police. In a second statement, the SPLC insisted, “We are confident that the evidence will demonstrate he was a peaceful legal observer.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/07/ted-cruz-torches-leftist-group-demonizing-moms-for-liberty
********************************************Korean Women’s Spa Forced To Erase “Biological Women” From Policy After Human Rights Complaint From Trans-Identified Male
A Seattle court has ruled that a female-only nude spa lacks the “constitutional right” to bar males from their facilities. The decision comes after the spa sued the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC), which had forced them to change their sex-exclusive policy due to the complaint of a transgender patron.
In May of 2020, a trans-identified male submitted a complaint to the WSHRC alleging discrimination on the basis of his gender identity.
Haven Wilvich had sought a membership at the Olympus Spa in January of 2020, but had been denied on the basis that he had not undergone “gender reassignment” surgeries and his penis was fully intact.
In the complaint, Wilvich alleged his application to use the facilities at the spa had been rejected after staff told him that “transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it could make other customers and staff uncomfortable.”
The Olympus Spa, which has locations in Lynnwood and Tacoma, is a Korean-style health and wellness facility. The spa requires nudity in some of the areas, and, as such, has been reserved for female clientele.
The owner of the spa, Myoon Woon Lee, and the spa’s president, Sun Lee, are of Korean heritage and modeled the spa after the tradition of jjimjilbang. They are also Christian, and cited their faith as a reason why they did not wish to accommodate males in the facility.
In March of 2021, the WSHRC served the spa with a Notice of Complaint of Discrimination and asked the owners to respond to the claim they had acted in a discriminatory manner. Sun Lee drafted a statement standing by their women-only rule.
Sun Lee explained that Olympus was a “family-owned women’s Korean traditional health spa” and noted that that nudity was required for certain procedures.
“We firmly believe it is essential for the safety, legal protection, and well-being of our customers and employees that we maintain adherence to this adaptation of a females-only rule,” Sun Lee wrote, also providing education on the cultural traditions of the jjimjilbang.
He concluded the response by indicating that Olympus Spa was “willing to consider a review of [its] current biological females only policy,” but that “we are unwilling to remake the ‘jjimjilbang’ haven we have worked so hard over many years to build and preserve, simply for the sake of promoting gender neutrality.”
Two weeks later, the WSHRC ruled that the spa had violated Washington anti-discrimination law, stating that the female-only policy “denies services to transgender women who have not had surgery … because their physical appearance is not ‘consistent’ with the traditional understanding of biological women.”
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Australia: Senior child psychiatrist stood down after questioning gender medicine
The suspension of a senior staff psychiatrist over her approach to transgender patients has thrown the Queensland Children’s Hospital into turmoil, casting a spotlight on widespread concerns among doctors at the treatment of children with gender dysphoria.
The case of Jillian Spencer – stood down from clinical duties apparently accused of transphobia – has exposed a culture in which clinicians are unable to employ medical discretion or a neutral therapeutic stance and are bound by their employment to affirm children’s gender transition.
Dr Spencer, a senior staff specialist in the QCH’s consultation liaison psychiatry team, was removed from clinical duties in mid-April following a patient complaint in an unusual response from a public hospital that followed months of conflict over affirmative gender medicine and trans identity politics within the hospital.
The case has prompted other doctors to raise concerns about the operation of the hospital’s gender clinic and the lack of co-ordination with its adolescent mental health service, the young age at which vulnerable patients with complex presentations are being prescribed cross-sex hormones, and the advocacy role of the gender clinic’s nurses who are running education sessions for public school nurses on chest binding.
Some staff members employed at the QCH have spoken of their concern at the way Dr Spencer’s case was being handled after the hospital drew upon its powers to compel staff under employment law to use children’s preferred pronouns, even though doing so was regarded by the Cass review as an active treatment measure as part of a social transition process that could lead to a cascade of medical interventions.
The hospital has also banned any discouragement of referrals to the gender clinic.
Some doctors at the hospital hold concerns that children are being prescribed hormone treatments after only two consultations at the Queensland Children’s Gender Service, with teenagers being approved for cross-sex hormones, which carry side-effects of sterility and loss of sexual function, sometimes at just 14 years old. This is despite the UK and several European countries adopting a more cautious approach to the prescription of such drugs amid concerns – also expressed by NSW’s Westmead gender clinic doctors – the evidence base was lacking.
The QCGS has 922 patients on its books and, according to FOI documents, prescribed cross-sex hormones to 102 adolescents in 2022 – more than twice as many as the Melbourne Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic. However, the true number of patients on hormones may be significantly greater as many are referred to private clinicians who prescribe to children under the care of QCGS.
Nurses employed by the gender service have been running “chest binder fitting sessions” for patients, as well as providing training to public school-based health nurses on chest binding.
The hospital not only actively pushes pronouns compliance by staff but also enters patients in the medical records as the gender they identify as, rather than their sex-based gender. Some doctors are opposed to this as it renders sex-based measures such as growth charts inaccurate among other medical implications.
QCH management did not respond to specific questions concerning all of these issues. A spokesperson for Children’s Health Queensland said: “The safety and wellbeing of children and young people in our care is always our highest priority.”
“All treatment and care provided by the Queensland Children’s Gender Service is guided by the Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People (8th edition),” the spokesperson said. “In line with Children’s Health Queensland’s universal person-centred care approach, we respect the individual needs and preferences of every child … and their right to feel safe and supported while receiving clinical care through our services.”
The hospital operates on the basis that gender dysphoria results in serious mental health problems if not treated early and in accordance with internationally recognised practice.
Dr Spencer is prevented from speaking about her employment, but a number of Queensland medics aware of the circumstances of the psychiatrist’s case have spoken to The Weekend Australian.
The matter that led to Dr Spencer’s removal from clinical duties is understood to relate to an assessment she carried out in the hospital’s paediatrics ward of a mentally troubled 14-year-old who was under the care of the hospital’s gender clinic and had been taking puberty blockers.
Following the consultation, an apparent complaint of transphobia was levelled by the patient, and it was deemed by the hospital executive that Dr Spencer represented a risk to the safety of trans and gender-diverse children. Sources familiar with the matter said the psychiatrist has not been provided details of the complaint by the hospital.
“This is completely unusual,” said Dylan Wilson, a Queensland paediatrician informed of the situation. “This is not standard in terms of managing complaints.”
Dr Spencer is a signatory to the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists’ guide to managing gender dysphoria and incongruence in young people, which advocates a cautious approach and comprehensive mental health assessment. Her concerns about the lack of an evidence base underpinning gender-affirmative medicine and the prescription of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children were well-known within the hospital.
“Doctors in no way should be punished for expressing any concerns about a treatment pathway in any speciality in any form,” said NAPP’s president, psychiatrist Philip Morris.
“It would be completely outrageous if expressing concerns which are echoed by international organisations resulted in any form of disciplinary action.”
Children’s Health Queensland said it was, by law, unable to comment on employment matters but noted all employees were bound by public sector codes of conduct.
Dr Spencer has become so concerned at what she believes are the harms to children of the affirmative medicine model – which came under heavy scrutiny during a review in the UK by paediatrician Hilary Cass, who concluded there is a lack of evidence underpinning it – that she has appeared at women’s rights rallies and detailed her concerns at the “massive health risks” from hormone drugs and surgeries.
She told a recent rally in Canberra she was deeply concerned at the current culture in which “anyone’s child will be encouraged at school, online, during extra-curricular activities, by their friends and by health professionals to contemplate their gender”.
“Even little kids are being encouraged to contemplate their gender,” Dr Spencer said. “For some children this turns into an enduring preoccupation and they start to believe that the solution to any difficulties that they are facing lies in changing their bodies. From this point on the nightmare for families begins.
“Because they slowly come to realise that there is collusion going on between teachers, health professionals, child protection services and even the courts to ensure that all children are affirmed even if their parents disagree with that approach.
“Suddenly you’ll see what you never had cause to notice before: rainbow lanyards around the necks of health professionals and teachers, trans pride flags … in the waiting room at the health clinic, adults asking your child their preferred pronouns and using them … Wherever you try to move there is a professional there ready to trans your child.
“It will suddenly dawn on you (you) are not in with a chance to protect your child. These people you are relying on for help in the village it takes to raise a child are not actually interested in the long-term welfare of your child. They don’t suffer if your child becomes infertile or never experiences sexual pleasure or lives with debilitating side-effects from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
“But they feel like really good people because they’re being inclusive.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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