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Putin did not ‘kill Holocaust victims for a second time,’ hysterical responses unnecessary – opinion

Putin is no saint, to say the least, but equating accidental damage to a memorial with the intentional, systematic murder of tens of thousands of Jews is absurd, fallacious and unjustifiable.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

After international media reported that the Babyn Yar memorial, which commemorates the site where some 33,000 Jews were slaughtered during World War II, was damaged in a Russian air strike on Tuesday night, international condemnation came swiftly.

But the Stop Antisemitism organization chose to up the ante, releasing a tweet which read, “BREAKING – Putin’s Russian military missiles just hit the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial site. 33,371 Jews were horrifically murdered at Babi Yar.

“Putin has just killed them for a second time.”

Come again?

In contrast to to the Marvel movie-like narrative being widely promoted in Western media, which seems to suggest that Putin is an evil supervillain comparable to Hitler, accidents and collateral damage happen during wars.

It’s clear that the damage to the memorial, which is located next to a television tower targeted by the Russian military, is an example of this phenomenon, which has occurred during armed conflicts since time immemorial.

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Putin is no saint, to say the least, but equivocating accidental damage to a memorial with the intentional, systematic murder of tens of thousands of Jews is fallacious, absurd, and completely unjustifiable.

It’s also critical to note that the tweet specifically refers to Putin as being responsible for killing the Jews a second time, but curiously, there’s no acknowledgement of who killed them the first time.

That would be the Ukrainians.

It seems that this unpleasant reality was omitted because it runs counter to current stories being pushed by legacy media, which focus primarily on the Ukrainians’ heroic efforts to defend their homeland.

Today’s Ukrainians, of course, should not be held responsible for the atrocities committed by their forefathers.

But the fact remains that casting Putin as a murderer of Jews, while failing to acknowledge Ukrainians as the perpetrators of this horrific act of brutality due to political inconvenience, displays an intellectual dishonesty and cowardice that seriously hurts Stop Antisemitism’s credibility.

A hysterical response to the damaged memorial does not help anyone.

Denying the history of the very memorial that was damaged is inexcusable and only serves to strengthen Holocaust deniers and those who accuse Jewish organizations of wielding the genocide as a political weapon.

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Jewish organizations must express their dismay with the damage to the site without making hyperbolic, irresponsible statements that distort the memory of one of the darkest chapters in Jewish history.