burn in hell

People ask me what I think about what's going on in my homeland - and are typically surprised to hear my indifference. yuschenko, yanukovich, street protests and the romantic saga of a proud people (whom no one gave a shit about as recently as a month ago) seeking to throw off their despotic rulers and drown themselves in a pool of joyous freedom. poisonings, the evil hand of that comfortingly familiar enemy, and a microcosm of the west vs. east divide. Well, I didn't become ukrainian (or russian to my more ignant acquaintances) until my arrival to these great states of ours. I used to be jewish, and any good ukrainian knows what to do with the jews.

From Ha'aretz (not precisely an impartial source):
"...Ukraine has a long history of bloody pogroms and persecution of Jews. In 1648, the nationalist forces of Bogdan Chmielnicki [national hero to this day] slaughtered some 100,000 Jews and destroyed around 300 communities. The pogroms recurred in every political and social crisis of the 18th century, in 1734, 1750 and 1768; at the end of 1919-1920 Civil War some 100,000 Jews were murdered; and during World War II the Nazis killed some 600,000 Jews, approximately half of Ukrainian Jewry, with active collaboration on the part of the locals. Survivors returning from Russia after the war were given a hostile welcome by their Ukrainian neighbors, and Kiev remained even after the war a hotbed for anti-Semitic publications..."

and

"...This past September, a series of incidents in Ukraine started: in Lviv, swastikas were drawn on a monument marking the place where a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis had stood, and slogans appeared on city walls calling for the killing of Russians and Jews; the trial of a drunken security agent who broke into a Jewish soup kitchen and attacked workers there has already been postponed three times, and there are some who see this as an indication of the government's anti-Semitic tendencies; in addition, the trial of the editor of the anti-Semitic journal Idealist has been twice postponed; in December, the windows of Kiev's Brodsky Street Synagogue were shattered, the same synagogue where hot meals are distributed and which provided refuge from the severe cold to dozens of Yushchenko supporters protesting against the results of the first round of elections."