A new column in the Geller Report by jihad expert Robert Spencer explains that in 2019, a letter from 40 Democrats described Ukraine’s “Nazi Azov Battalion” as a terror group.
Now some of those same Democrats are sending it billions of dollars.
Explained Spencer, “One thing is certain: the full extent of the ties between Ukraine and the posturing, self-righteous, desperately corrupt, hypocritical and self-serving U.S. Democrat establishment is not publicly known, and may never be known.
“But what we do know should have brought that entire establishment crashing down years ago.”
Spencer explained that Kanekoa News, an independent journalism site, revealed that in 2019, “the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee’s counterterrorism subpanel, Rep. Max Rose, N.Y., led a letter signed by 40 Democrats asking the State Department why they had not placed Ukraine’s Azov Battalion on the U.S. list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations.'”
That report, in fact, said the letter “compared the Azov Battalion to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, and [said] how the group had radicalized Brenton Tarrent, the New Zealand mosque shooter who killed 51 people.”
The report said the letter demanded: “For Example, the Azov Battalion is a well-known ultranationalist militia organization in Ukraine that openly welcomes neo-Nazis into its ranks. The group is so well-known, in fact, that the 115th Congress of the United States stated in its 2018 omnibus spending bill that ‘none of the funds made available by this act may be used to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.’ The United Nations has chronicled human rights abuses and incidents of torture in this group’s relatively short history. Despite these facts, Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Signers of the letter included Reps. Bennie G. Thompson, Eliot L. Engel, Jamie Raskin, Stephen F. Lynch, Jim Cooper, Gregory Meeks, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ro Khanna, and Al Green, all Democrats, and others, the report said.
That report said the Azov Battalion was incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard on November 11, 2014, but has since been accused” by terrorism combating centers of “being the nexus to a global terrorist movement responsible for war crimes, mass shootings, and organizing online in ways similar to jihadist networks.”
But in 2022, “every Democrat in Congress (and the majority of Republicans) voted to send more than $31 billion in weapons to Ukraine,” the report noted.
Spencer wrote, “The irony couldn’t be richer, for now, the New York Times, that reliable organ of far-Left opinion, refers to ‘Ukraine’s celebrated Azov Battalion,’ and claims that ‘the group’s defense of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol — the southern port city decimated by Russian forces in the first months of the war — has become a powerful symbol of the suffering inflicted by Russia and the resistance mounted by Ukraine.'”
“Every last Democrat who condemned the Azov Battalion likely reads and respects the Times, and every last one of them also would likely prefer us all to forget that they once likened the Azov Battalion to the Islamic State (ISIS) and noted that it ‘openly welcomes neo-Nazis into its ranks,'” Spencer wrote.
He said it’s been in the interests of Democrats to first “play up the Nazi element” because that was when President Trump was in office. But then it later was in their interest to “pretend that element doesn’t exist.”
He wrote, “So apparently our government no longer must stand up to the Azov Battalion and other fascist groups. Instead, you and I have to pay for them.”
via wnd
