Move over, Israelophobia, there’s a new bigotry in town. A different nation now finds itself on the receiving end of fevered bile from time-rich tweeters.
Spend five minutes online, especially among the cranky right, and you’ll see this country being defamed with abandon. It’s not the Jewish state – it’s the Ukrainian state. Ukraineophobia is the prejudice du jour of right-wing hotheads on the internet. Zelensky-bashing is all the rage among a certain kind of sun-starved internet user who fancies himself a brave critic of “the globalist elites”.
The curious animus for Ukraine’s wartime leader has been brewing for some time.
In 2022 American columnist David French wrote of “the oddly intense anger against Zelensky” among the very online right. Dip a toe into right-wing social media, said French, and you’ll see Volodymyr Zelensky being damned as greedy, corrupt, even a “piece of s..t”. And it has worsened since that Oval Office blow-up between Zelensky and President Donald Trump and his Vice-President, JD Vance.
The right-wing crankosphere has overflown with anti-Zelensky invective.
They’re calling him a war criminal, a man with such a horrible record in office that the best he can hope for is “some kind of amnesty in a neutral country”, according to Elon Musk. You’d think he was a modern-day Idi Amin rather than a leader whose only crime is that he faced down Russia’s invasion of his lands.
Perusing all this Zelensky derangement syndrome, it struck me: Ukraine is to the batty right what Israel is to the mad left.
The bitter right’s swirling contempt for Zelensky mirrors the loathing for Israel that has infected leftists for years. In both cases a frothing moralism masquerades as anti-war critique. And in both cases one nation is made the scapegoat of world affairs, held responsible for virtually every ill facing mankind.
Ukraineophobia and Israelophobia are two cheeks of the same arse of moral nihilism. The similarities between rightist Ukraineophobia and the leftist hate for Israel are striking.
Both nations are libelled as looters of America’s coffers. Members of the online right love to call Zelensky a “welfare queen”, no doubt chuckling with self-satisfaction as they do so.
After the Trump-Zelensky shouting match, right-wing commentator Matt Walsh gloated that Trump had put this “international welfare queen” in his place.
Even Donald Trump Jr has called Zelensky an “ungrateful international welfare queen”.
It’s alarming that such juvenile playground taunts have become the stuff of semi-official chatter. It echoes, of course, what the left says about Israel: that it raids the American treasury to fund its infernal wars.
Neither the Ukraineophobes nor the Israelophobes demonstrate even the barest understanding of geopolitics, the fact it is in America’s interests to provide assistance to allies under assault.
Trump himself seems to have lost sight of this truth of world affairs. His tantrum-like pausing of military aid to Ukraine suggests he, too, is so blinded by the virtual caricature of Zelensky that he can no longer see the real Ukraine and how important its resistance to Russia is.
Both sides also view the nation they hate as a source of world instability. The Zelensky-bashing oddballs have convinced themselves that Ukraine threatens to drag all of humanity to hell, just as the Israel-haters say about Israel.
Witness Trump’s rant about Zelensky “gambling with World War III … gambling with the lives of millions of people”.
I felt like I was going insane when I heard that. Mr President, Ukraine did not ask to be invaded by its brutish neighbour.
But it sounded familiar, too, for isn’t that what the lunatic left has said about Israel for years? That its wars may one day engulf all of us in the fires of conflict?
The Ukraineophobes love calling Zelensky a war criminal. “ZelesnkyWarCriminal” trended on X following the Oval Office spat.
Again, they sound just like Israelophobes who are forever making accusations of criminality against Israel.
You feel like grabbing both sides by the scruff of the neck and reminding them that it was Israel and Ukraine that were criminally violated, Israel by the neo-fascists of Hamas and Ukraine by the imperial forces of dangerous, delusional Vladimir Putin. To call the victims of crime criminals is pure victim-blaming.
It is a testament to the moral infantilism of both Zelensky derangement syndrome and Israelophobia that such shrill and false allegations can be bandied around so cavalierly.
Most unforgivably, both wings of this geopolitical idiocy accuse the nation they loathe of bringing on its own invasion.
“You should never have started (this war), you should have made a deal,” Trump said to Ukraine in February. Across Zelensky-hating social media, the cry goes up: if Ukraine hadn’t tried to join NATO, this war would never have happened.
This is morally indistinguishable from what the left says about Israel: that it is to blame for the horrors visited on it by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Who can forget when those student societies at Harvard University said, on October 7 itself, that Israel was “the only one to blame” for those barbarous events? It was the political equivalent of saying: “She was asking for it”. And now the cranky right says the same of Ukraine. For shame.
The end result? Russia is absolved of its responsibility for the hellish calamity of the Ukraine war, just as Hamas was absolved of responsibility for its own horrific pogrom that started the war in the Middle East.
Both the right’s Zelensky bashers and the left’s loathers of Israel are engaged in a lethal form of scapegoating. Both have turned a nation into a symbol of moral rot, into a sinful entity deserving of our contempt. It smacks far more of xenophobia than true anti-war activism.
It is nihilism dolled up as pacifism. They use the language of peace to disguise their true belief that nothing is really worth fighting for and that it would be better for everyone if Israel surrendered to Hamas and Ukraine surrendered to Russia.
No way. Those of us who still have our moral bearings know that such capitulation only would embolden radical Islamists and Russian tyrants. If Ukraine and Israel win, so does humanity.
More Coverage
Pollies hungry for housing vote show prudence the door
Forget political parties doing the economically and fiscally responsible thing with housing in Australia. That went out the window long ago.
Why Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek are ghosting each other
Plibersek and the PM share a long history of conflicting leadership ambitions and fortunes. Her now celebrated blow away kiss at Labor’s campaign launch betrays deeper feelings and risks political damage.