{"id":142120,"date":"2014-11-19T19:15:59","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T19:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=142120"},"modified":"2014-11-19T22:05:22","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T22:05:22","slug":"israel-lobby-protected-ukrainian-neo-nazis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/israel-lobby-protected-ukrainian-neo-nazis\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Israel Lobby Protected Ukrainian Neo-Nazis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Max Blumenthal<\/i><\/p>\n<p>AlterNet has learned that an amendment to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have forbidden US assistance, training and weapons to neo-Nazis and other extremists in Ukraine was kept out of the final bill by the Republican-led House Rules Committee. Introduced by Democratic Representative John Conyers, the amendment was intended to help tamp down on violent confrontations between Ukrainian forces and Russian separatists.<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/politics\/2014\/04\/28\/usa-today-pew-poll-americans-wary-of-sending-arms-to-ukraine\/8406393\/\">USA Today\/Pew poll<\/a> conducted in April while the NDAA was being debated found that Americans opposed by more than 2 to 1 providing the Ukrainian government with arms or other forms of military assistance.<\/p>\n<p>If passed, Conyers&#8217; amendment would have explicitly barred those found to have offered &#8220;praise or glorification of Nazism or its collaborators, including through the use of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or other similar symbols&#8221; from receiving any form of support from the US Department of Defense.<\/p>\n<p>The amendment was presented by congressional staffers to lobbyists from Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, two of the country&#8217;s largest established Jewish pressure groups. Despite their stated mission to combat anti-Semitism and violent extremism, the ADL and Wiesenthal Center refused to support Jeffries and Conyers&#8217; proposal.<\/p>\n<p>According to Democratic sources in Congress, staffers from the ADL&#8217;s Washington office and the Simon Wiesenthal Center rejected the amendment on the grounds that right-wing Ukrainian parties like Svoboda with documented records of racist extremism had &#8220;moderated their rhetoric.&#8221; An ADL lobbyist insisted that &#8220;the focus should be on Russia,&#8221; while the Wiesenthal Center pointed to meetings between far-right political leaders in Ukraine and the Israeli embassy as evidence that groups like Svoboda and Right Sector had shed their extremism.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.alternet.org\/world\/how-israel-lobby-protected-ukrainian-neo-nazis\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Max Blumenthal AlterNet has learned that an amendment to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have forbidden US assistance, training and weapons to neo-Nazis and other extremists in Ukraine was kept out of the final bill by the Republican-led House Rules Committee. Introduced by Democratic Representative John Conyers, the amendment was intended [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104780,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-142120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}