September 26, 2009

Jews decry hotel plan for Nazi massacre site

The nazis in action at Babi Yar
Jewish groups have condemned a plan to build a hotel at Babi Yar, the site of the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews, on Kiev's edge.

Lawmakers said Kiev's city council approved a plan last week to build dozens of hotels in the next decade - including a three-star hotel to house visiting football fans for Euro 2012 - on what a Babi Yar scholar said was a killing field.

Babi Yar is one of the most sensitive sites for Ukrainian Jews. More than 33,700 Jews were rounded up and shot at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine over two days in late September 1941. In the ensuing months, the sprawling ravine was filled with an estimated 100,000 bodies, among them those of non-Jewish Kiev residents and Red Army prisoners of the Nazis.

The hotel proposal, discussed at a closed council meeting last week, has been described to Ukrainian and Israeli media by a member of Kiev's council, Serhy Melnik, a political opponent of the city's mayor, Leonid Chernovetsky. Mr Melnik told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that 67 of Kiev's city councillors had approved the hotel plan without knowing what they were voting for.

According to Mr Melnik, the Babi Yar site has been included in a list of dozens of the city's parks and other open spaces earmarked for possible construction of hotels to house the hundreds of thousands of football supporters expected for the competition, to be co-hosted with Poland. The decision has attracted controversy in the Israeli media and angered some members of Kiev's council - not least Mr Melnik, who is using the issue to attack the council leadership.

Jewish women await their turn to be slaughtered at Babi Yar
While the council has admitted that a development plan exists for Euro 2012, it has so far refused to discuss details. The controversy has been clouded by the fact the area already has an underground station and some other buildings - structures that some leaders of the city's Jewish community believe should not have been built.

They said there were two issues at stake. First, the proposed new hotel would probably be built in an area that many have been campaigning for years to have designated as a national memorial to the massacre. The second issue is of consistency. Kiev's chief rabbi, Yakov Bleich, said when Jewish community members proposed building a museum and religious complex in that area in 2006, their plans ran into city opposition.

''What we know,'' Rabbi Bleich said, ''is that a resolution was passed by the city council for a hotel in Babi Yar. There is an underground [station] already there and no one screamed. But perhaps people should have screamed.''

The Soviet Union discouraged any remembrance that singled out the Jewish character of a large part of the atrocity, a fact that inspired Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 dissident poem Babi Yar, and Dmitri Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony No. 13, based on the poem. Only in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a memorial unveiled for the Jewish victims, most of whom perished in two days and nights of killing on September 29 and 30, 1941.

Although Babi Yar is most remembered for that massacre, the Nazis used the ravine for mass murder until they retreated from the Soviet Union. In all, it is estimated that 70,000 to 120,000 people were killed there.

The Age

16 comments:

Towards a Higher Man said...

Good riddance. Jew child killers wont be missed.

Anonymous said...

More Nazi scum

http://scotland.bnp.org.uk/2009/09/first-meeting-for-lothians/

Antifascist said...

'Good riddance. Jew child killers wont be missed.'

All I see is a Nazi murdering a Jewish woman and her child.

Note: 'Towards a higher man' is of course, Nick Griffin's former henchman and bodyguard, Joe Owens.

Brummie said...

Note: 'Towards a higher man' is of course, Nick Griffin's former henchman and bodyguard, Joe Owens.

I should also mention Owens' criminal conviction for sending razor blades to prominent Liverpudlian Jews.

West Midlands Unity said...

@ Towards A Higher Man

Follow your leader, you cruel bastard.

Anonymous said...

The picture of the woman and child about to be shot is horrible but apt. For Owens to respond in the way he has, just shows what vermin he is and, by association, what vermin Nick Griffin is.

Anonymous said...

Thats one of the most powerful pictures I've seen. It should be used on all anti-Nazi propoganda.

Anonymous said...

has anyone else noted how utterly mental Joe Owens has become recently?

he pops up everywhere at the minute with his daft predictions on who is a 'spy' or 'state'. And now on here with this extremely unfashionable slating of 'the jews'. hmmmmmmmm....

Does he live inside a computer or a mental hospital - or a computer in a mental hospital... (?)

I've yet to decide.

Dave T said...

What a mine of information this site is. I'd never heard of Babi Yar before or Joe Owens.

West Midlands Unity said...

That is a very powerful pic, just as powerful as the "Hiroshima running girl" picture. Hope the people of Kiev protest at Babi Yar and take action against the building developers there.

Babi Yar must forever remain a resting place for all those that died there by those monstrous Nazi bastards

Anonymous said...

"What a mine of information this site is. I'd never heard of Babi Yar before or Joe Owens."

I've hear of that racist thug Owens but not Babi Yar before. Thank you for bringing it to everyones attention.

Was it the SS that had 'Blood and Honour' inscribed on its flags or knives or something like that? Some honour in killing defenseless women and children. And the nazis can't understand why we loathe them....

Brummie said...

Anybody who has seen Owens' posts on here, or has seen his antisemitism-filled blog will know that he is not only a perverted degenerate but a dangerous perverted degenerate.

Anonymous said...

Joe Owens is nothing, and he's getting old and slowing down.

Pretty soon he'll be just another bitter washed up frail old nobody ranting to himself and wallowing in self-loathing in a nursing home pissing into a bag without any visitors.

Stephen said...

Joe Owens is a violent drugdealer as well as a racist, and as a Liverpool gangster who murdered someone and got away with it, he knows all about shooting people with guns!

It was the Nazis who killed children in cool blood, you evil racist cunt!

I'm so glad Mr Owens posted on here with his own login, so everybody knows once and for all, behind their electoral spin, the BNP are unemorseful, unreconstituted nazis.

I hope Mr Owens vile an depraved contribution to this article, wallowing in genocide, is used on Liverpool Searchlight materials come the general election, so disgusted people can run this washed-up racist gangster from the streets of Merseyside.

Holocaust denial is bad enough. To say the Jewish victims of Hitler deserved being murdered, and acusing these victims of being "child killers" (obviously to do with the "poisoning the wells" lies), is so downright evil, it's beyond belief.

I wander if any of Mr Owens fellow gangster enemies in Liverpool would like to know of his love of racial genocide???

Then we will see how hard this fucking evil coward is, the disgusting piece of shit!

AndyMinion said...

Horrible photo. Babi Yar happened relatively early during the Holocaust, and the murderers weren't yet organised enough to try keeping these things under their hat.

Consequently, there are many such images from those two days - seemingly taken as souvenirs by the killers themselves.

That Owens is a repellent little turd, isn't he?

Anonymous said...

There's lots of stuff about Owens being some sort of gangster god-father who dominated Liverpool in the 80's and 90's. I don't know about that and suspect that it is vastly overblown.

However, I do know a few ex-Militant lads who were active on Merseyside around then and they used to give him a slapping and chase his little BNP group away fairly regularly.