David, do you mean the Northern Ireland idiots? Sorry I forgot about that obvious connection… (My first association was with supporters of the Dutch national football team!) I’ll refrain from using ‘Orangemen’ henceforth.

However, it’s way, way off mark to link Yushchenko with anti-semitism. While these attitudes won’t likely disappear if he’s elected, I can assure you that they won’t be encouraged or fed either.

I’d hesitate to use the word Orangeman. In my part of the world, it conjures up images of bowler-hatted fanatics who march around to show who owns the place…

…defining character of Orangemen, or even that the majority feels like that.

…the nationalist-ultraclerical tendencies that also spout virulently anti-semitic propaganda (e.g. Radio Maryja etc.)…

Simply because it has been documented on the Ukrainian Archive that inciting fear and hatred of Ukrainians is an integral part of Jewish culture. The question becomes germane then of whether this incitement is financed, at least in part, by a hidden Jewish tax upon all Canadians, and thus whether Ukrainian-Canadians are in effect subsidizing Jews to engineer such anti-Ukrainian pageants as the misnamed Desch?nes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, or such anti-Ukrainian spectacles as the current spate of half-century-old immigration-infraction prosecutions being conducted by Canada’s so-called war crimes unit.

I included this excerpt because it points to the uneasy part about Ukrainian anti-semitism (and further to a reason I dismiss Nick’s ‘authorities’ just because they were on site): its connection to the nationalist take on own history.

By many nationalists, those Ukrainians who opposed the Soviet Union during WWII are heroised despite fighting alongside the Nazis, and there is boiling conflict with Ukrainian and outside Jews on the subject. What the approach of Yushchenko and the parties behind him could be criticised of is not (necessarily) being anti-semites themselves, but of failing to confront this revisionist historicism and thus stop what it brews. [*]

While Le Sabot got no anti-semitic fliers, superficial Western observers won’t note at the Orange protests are symbols – songs or flags or slogans originating from or alluding to these nineteen-forties anti-communist times. Yes, such were reported.

On the other hand, I agree with Mrs T inasmuch that I don’t believe this is the main or even a defining character of the Orangemen.

But, if you brought up Poland, it gives further reason to caution: in my impression anti-semitism is strongest in the EU in Poland, as politics and top clergy largely failed to confront strongly the nationalist-ultraclerical tendencies (e.g. Radio Maryja etc.) that grew on the right of the Solidarnosc – and Polish nationalists don’t have Nazi collaborators to whitewash as national heroes.

[*] There was also the story of Yushchenko giving the recommendation to some historian or book on Ukrainian history who/which did some holocaust denial in the process, but I can’t recall the details.

The Solidarnosc movement, and Polish nationalism of that day in general, were deeply informed by Roman Catholicism (though of course that was not the only strain in the movement). Not all of that sentiment was sweetness and light. Are we to think Laughlandianly, then, and wish Poland back under the Soviet thumb because Radio Maryja is deeply unpleasant?

But I wonder if Aaronovitch’s Googling led him to use as a source an article entitled “Can a lobbyist for dictators work as a journalist?”, a recently posted attack on me which is almost identical to his own. The home page, Ukrainian Archive, which has links to all the western-backed “pro-democracy” groups in Ukraine itself, also carries virulently antisemitic articles about the Jewish proclivity for rape, and about how the gas chambers at Auschwitz could not have existed.

Someone should look into whether Laughland’s charges of rampant anti-semitism have any substance. It may all be nonsense, but we shouldn’t entirely dismiss the possibility that he’s right about something. The cause of democracy in Ukraine would not be served by ignoring or whitewashing incovenient facts about ‘our’ side.