Ben Shapiro Fails Hard on Ukraine
Ben Shapiro released another episode of his famous podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, earlier today, offering some questionable commentary on the ongoing war in Ukraine and the politics surrounding it.
Regarding Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech to Israel’s Knesset, he mentions that the Russian missile which hit Babi Yar was likely intended to strike a different target. OK, whatever. The Russians may have been aiming for something else, but they are still responsible for the strike.
Ben Shapiro earlier suggests that Zelenskyy was singularly hard on Israel, and probably because of the anti-Semitism of Ukraine’s population. Oh, really? I submit that he was particularly hard on Israel because Israel has taken substantially fewer measures to assist Ukraine than have other Western countries — a fact Shapiro even admits, although he convincingly argues that such half-heartedness on Israel’s part is justified because of its dependence on Russia for its national security. Note, however, the touch of hypocrisy at play as the podcast host singles Ukraine out for especially harsh criticism for its supposed “Nazi problem” as though other Eastern European countries, Russia not least among them, did not have similar “Nazi problems”.
According to the ADL’s “ADL Global 100” index, Ukraine’s most recent recorded level of anti-Semitism is only slightly higher than Hungary’s, only one point higher than Romania’s, and lower than Poland’s. The influence of far-right and fascist or neo-Nazi elements on politics in Ukraine is negligible, unlike, say, in Russia. In fact, I think Ukrainian politics suggests that the ADL’s survey has probably overestimated the actual levels of anti-Semitism in the country. As Dmitri Gordon, a Jewish Ukrainian and undoubtedly one of Ukraine’s most popular journalists, remarked shortly after President Zelenskyy’s electoral victory, 73% of voters had just elected a Jew to the presidency, the Prime Minister was a Jew, and the opposition was led by a Jewish politician as well.
Instead of mentioning facts like these, Shapiro brings up Ukrainian far-right party Svoboda. This is enraging. Here is the Wikipedia article on Ukraine’s last parliamentary elections. Had Mr. Shapiro bothered to look at it, which presumably he did not, he could have seen that in that election, Svoboda obtained a measly 2,5% of the vote and a single parliamentary seat out of 450, meaning that its number of seats actually decreased by five. During the previous parliamentary election in 2014, Svoboda had received 4,71% of the vote and six seats, which was itself down by a stunning thirty-one from the election before that. Therefore, not only is this party pitifully unsuccessful in Ukraine nowadays, its share of the vote has been spectacularly plummeting for eight years now. Why has Ben Shapiro chosen to make this deceptive argument geared towards making Ukraine look bad by bringing up something that, if represented honestly, actually makes Ukraine look good? Whatever the reason, this decision by this pundit during Ukraine’s hour of need will not be forgotten.
As if to check all the boxes on the list of stale talking points designed to convey a funhouse-mirror image of Ukraine as a bastion of neo-Nazism, Ben Shapiro then laments the existence of the so-called Azov battalion. Oh, please. Yes, the “Azov battalio” is composed of neo-Nazis. But firstly, it’s a single regiment, with an estimated membership of 900, and secondly, wouldn’t you expect people with far-right views to be ovverrepresented in military and paramilitary structures? The existence of the “Azov battalion” says nothing about the society, culture and politics of Ukraine as a whole. Zilch. If you aren’t convinced yet, consider this (Ukrainians have been saying it for years): Azov has been funded by oligarch Igor Kolomoiskiy. Igor Kolomoiskiy is Jewish. If the regiment represented a politically potent, pervasive threat to Jews in Ukraine, why would one of them fund it? The answer is that he would not, of course. Elementary, my dear Watson. Moreover, to cite the same article by Al Jazeera for a third time, the regiment has attracted fighters from multiple other countries. Therefore, it can be supposed that not all the regiment’s members are Ukrainians. Plus, according to the article, “[i]n 2015, Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment at the time said that 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s recruits were Nazis”. Shapiro mentions that the group was founded by a neo-Nazi, but he neglects to mention this statement, even though I am fairly convinced that he was reading from that very article. Note that it follows from the above that Shapiro has attempted to paint Ukraine as having a prevalent “Nazi problem” on the basis of what may be a single group of ninety neo-Nazis. His line of argument is truly absurd.
The problems with the episode do not end there. Mr. Shapiro expresses confusion regarding why people think Putin will be ousted by members of the elite surrounding him, even though respected journalist Christo Grozev has confirmed that, as far as he knows, elements within Russia’s elites are already pondering the possibility of deposing Putin. That includes oligarchs and members of Russia’s security apparatus. Shapiro talks about such a theoretical ouster of Putin as though it were something totally unprecedented, as though there were not a clear precedent for the ouster of a head of state in what happened to Nikita Khrushchev. I am not confident either that there will be a coup d’état against Putin, but Shapiro is clearly being overly dismissive of such a possibility.
Shapiro’s podcast is generally all right, but when he is wrong, he elevates being wrong to the status of an art form. Yet he is a smart man. I think he knew he was exaggerating the “Nazi problem” — to make his show more exciting, to appear fair and balanced, or to be contrarian, I do not know. Whatever the reason, again, this will be remembered.
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Update: I suppose my judgment that Dmitri Gordon is one of Ukraine’s most popular journalists (again, suggesting that anti-Semitism is not the broad national ailment in that country that people make it out to be) is a touch subjective. I am sure virtually any Ukrainian would agree with it, but outsiders may doubt it. Therefore, in confirmation, I present something which just surfaced hours ago: Dmitri Gordon is one of the individuals singled out for a threat in Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov’s bizarre poem directed at Ukrainians. How is that for an endorsement? Gordon has also become the object of legal charges in Russia for his work, it seems.