Zelensky Before Bundestag Invokes Holocaust

He’s offensive. He’a manipulative. Playing the Holocaust card in modern Germany is beyond the pale. Reuters:

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy addressed the German Bundestag by video link, pulling no punches in a speech that invoked the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall, and seemed intended to shame pro-Russian politicians in Moscow's main energy buyer.

That’s right, it’s intended to “shame.”

"Every year politicians repeat 'never again'," said Zelenskiy, who is of Jewish heritage, citing a slogan used to mark the Holocaust. "And now we see that these words are simply worthless. In Europe a people is being destroyed, they are trying to destroy everything that is dear to us, what we live for."

A non-Jew analogizing to the Holocaust brings a storm of condemnation from Jews. Here a Jew does it—in Germany. Zelensky got his customary standing ovation from the Bundestag at the end. He is going to keep shaming and guilting other countries as long as he can get away with it, but I warn Zelensky to be careful: You have overreached repeatedly with your rhetoric. There is more at stake here than Ukraine. What is happening in Ukraine is not the Holocaust. How dare you! Your rhetoric is insulting.   You are playing into a standard anti-Semitic trope, that of the charming Jew cunningly manipulating others emotionally to  get them to do his dirty work for him. You are appealing emotionally to others to put at risk everything that is dear to them, everything that they live for before the same menace that is "trying to destroy" you. Politicians are going to come to resent the messenger and ignore the message, but maybe not before they are destroyed in a nuclear fireball. 

…Zelenskiy appealed to Scholz to restore freedom to Ukraine, tapping Germany's collective memory with reference to the historic 1948-1949 Berlin Airlift and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

What obligation does Germany have to restore freedom in Ukraine?

Zelenskiy described a new wall "in the middle of Europe between freedom and unfreedom", which he said Germany had helped build, [!] isolating Ukraine with its business ties to Russia and its previous support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

There’s the shaming and guilting again.

Recalling former U.S. president Ronald Reagan's appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, to tear down the Berlin Wall, Zelenskiy told German lawmakers: "That's what I say to you dear Chancellor Scholz: destroy this wall."