Mila Kunis. (Getty Images)

Sometimes there are so much information about the world, it's hard to keep it all in your head. How many municipalities does Greenland have? Who owns the Canary Islands? Do we know anything about Madagascar except for cars and that animated movie with comedian Chris Rock?

So we can forgive you for forgetting that Ukraine has been beseiged in its parliament by the All-Ukrainian Union "Svoboda" movement, a nationalist uber-right-wing Slytherin-esque party that is really interested in bloodlines and keeping up the traditions of the neo-Nazis. For the past several years, Svoboda has been gaining momentum with its anti-Russian sentiment, gaining 12 percent of the national vote in the last election cycle.

Which is all terrible, but you know, the anti-Semitic Svoboda party has been rising to power for some time. Why do we suddenly care?

We care because they started attacking on our own territory. We care, in short, because one of their leaders started going after Mila Kunis.

From the news website Algemeiner:

A Member of the Ukrainian Parliament from the far-right Svoboda Party ... sneeringly proclaimed that [Kunis] was not Ukrainian but a zhydovka. This deeply hurtful slur for a Jew was an alarming gutter effort to inject Jew-hatred into the acceptable bounds of mainstream Ukrainian discourse.

But this story gets weirder. Because it turns out that the Ukrainian lawmaker who made these comments, Igor Miroshnichenko, did so not in Parliament but on his Facebook wall. Which is shitty, but still kind of like ... come on guys. Are you just looking to fight with Ashton Kutcher?

The most disturbing aspect of the story was the reaction from the Ukrainian ministry, which claimed that there is nothing wrong with calling Kunis the female version of a "dirty Jew," because the word is in their dictionary. Which you know, maybe change your dictionary? Or not! We have tons of terrible words in our dictionary, but we don't allow politicians to bandy them about on social networking sites without consequences.

See: the question here is whether the words in question express hate and bigotry and were used in that context, not whether they are in a book of words that exist.

And the fact that the ministry is allowing this sort of rhetoric from its parliament members and justifying the hate speech is the most telling piece of information in this whole story.

Well, that and the fact that Mila Kunis is apparently Jewish. Who knew? Also, from Googling, we just found out she and Ashton might be moving to London, which we believe is nearer to the Ukraine than America is, so be careful out there, Ms. Kunis!

Psycho-sexual blue ribbon hate-spewer Andrea Peyser! In today's column "The Hate in Zuccotti," Ms. Peyser tracks the movements of a man from Georgia who came to Occupy Wall Street to announce on his sign that capitalism is "THE REASON ARABS HATE US [sic]" who explains that he is "not anti-Semitic." She cites a few fairly isolated examples of flare-ups within the Occupy Wall Street movement that has anti-Semitic overtones and notes that the movement has "a serious Jewish problem." She also notes the Anti Defamation League—ever quick to jump on even the first, most remote scents of antisemitism—putting out a "weirdly enabling statement" which noted that there's "no evidence that these incidents are widespread."

Of course, Peyser's disappointment to this result appears to weigh so heavily on her as to attempt her own way of getting attention from the ADL—in the form of a condemnation or otherwise—by comparing Occupy Wall Street to pre-World War II Nazism:

Organizers are desperate to maintain that acts of bigotry are isolated, carried out by a small cadre of hoodlums who don’t represent the movement. Some have even suggested vocal Jew-haters are “plants” sent by folks who want to take Occupy down.

Sound familiar? Germans dismissed prewar Nazis as a harmless bunch of clowns, too.

Snap! Andrea Peyser with the real talk, except prewar Germans didn't dismiss the Nazis as clowns so much as took to them like wildfire as a movement openly blaming Jews without reluctance for the economic problems plaguing their nation, already once-defeated by the world. It also wasn't a movement with any Jewish support; not having the ADL's stamp on a charge of antisemitism—about as easy to procure as an actual stamp—is like, well, sending mail without postage. Which is to say: it's likely to come back return to sender.

Furthermore, Peyser's not even well-versed enough in the Occupy Wall Street movement to detail the history of AdBusters (the anti-capitalist Canadian magazine whose poster-campaign triggered the very first supporters of OWS) which was legitimately accused of antisemitism in 2004 when they published a list of Jewish neo-conservatives, asking why these people weren't parading their Jewish hertiage around with their political views. If one were to set-up a straw man argument like Peyser's, it kind of starts there (and quickly ends at Occupy Wall Street's well-documented Kol Nidre service, held on the eve of Yom Kippur, the recipient of exactly zero anti-Semitic jeers).

Yet, it's the New York Post; could any New Yorker reasonably expect that august news organization to not have as much fun with Occupy Wall Street as a senior would with a freshman vis-a-vis locker room torture? Ergo, a new feature: The New York Post On Occupy Wall Street, where we will chronicle the daily musings of New York City's most openly misanthropic paper on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Surely, we've already missed a great deal of classics, but no doubt: there's plenty more like this to come.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Adbuster page for OccupyWallStreet.org

If one was trying to tack the label of antisemitism onto the Occupy Wall Street movement, (which apparently, everyone is) one needs to look no further than David Brooks' October 10th op-ed for The New York Times, entitled "The Milquetoast Radicals."  In it, he points to a 2004 article from Adbusters - the Canadian magazine that first put out the call to action for OWS way back in July - with the damning title of "Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish," which plays the guessing game of Republican NeoCon's religious orientation in relation to their pro-Israeli stance.

But isn't using Adbusters to discredit what is now an independent, international movement sort of, well, besides the point?

It's true that there is some really inflammatory rhetoric in the Adbusters' listicle of the Jewish neocons they produced, and even more in the response to criticism that editor-in-chief Kalle Lasn eventually gave. (Note: original spelling left intact):

The list of Jewish neocons we came up with is a provocation, I'll admit. And if it were a list of dentists or firefighters  or stockbrokers, then that would indeed be very offensive. However, the neocons are no ordinary group - they are the most influencial political/intellectual force in the world right now. They have the power to start wars and to stop them. They are the prime architects of America's foreign policy since 9/11 - a policy that is heavily weighed in favor of Israel and a key-source of anti-Americanism in the world. So I think it is not only appropriate, but necessary to put them under a microscope. And if we see maleness, Zionism, or intellectual thuggery there, then let us not look the other way.

On the ethnic question: Is it not just as valid to comment on the Jewishness of neocons as it is to point out that the majority of them are male or  white or wealthy or from the Western world or have studied at a particular university? If half the neocons were Palestinians, would the US have invaded Iraq?

Well, that certainly lends credence to the argument that this protest was founded by an anti-establishment, anti-American, antisemitic, (and worst of all) Canadian publication. Just like it would be easy to point a finger at Anonymous - another early supporter of the OWS movement -  and say that all of the people in Zuccotti Park (and across the country),  are all anarchist hacktivists. It's easy to say these things precisely because it's lazy journalism at best, fear-mongering at worst.

The Occupation of Wall Street may have originated from an Adbusters' call-to-arms, but the magazine does not speak for the protesters or their many differing beliefs. They aren't the "organizers" or "leaders" of the group, either.

If you are going to argue that OWS can not present a cohesive message because there are too many people with too many different grievances, you can not then turn around and dismiss the movement by saying its whole ideology is based on one inflammatory article criticizing America's pro-Israel stance from seven years ago. (As Fox News has done.) An article, we might add, that was given far more attention by the press itself than Occupy Wall Street, which has made its clear on its official website that it is "not affiliated with Adbusters, anonymous or any other organization."

Calling Wall Street "Hitler's Bankers" is not anti-Jewish.

Despite what you might have heard from the many conservative outlets looking to discredit the movement through a couple of crazy people with "Jews = Bank Bailout" signs, the majority of Occupy Wall Street is not anti-Semitic. Because that's what we were all worried about, right?

From Jonathan Chait's piece on NYMag.com today:

When writing about the Occupy Wall Street protests, Washington Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin complains, "virtually nothing has been said about its anti-Semitic elements." And yes, virtually nothing has been said! Unless you count David Brooks. Or Fox News. Or The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Or Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, the Daily Caller, Commentary, Karl Rove, National Review Online, Newsmax, Reason, and toomanyblogs to name.

Not to mention this video that has been circulating:

Yikes! That's a lot of media scrutiny for hate rhetoric towards a group that held Yom Kippur services, as well as Shabbas. Someone should probably alert Jewsish Week and tell them to stop sending "their people" to Zuccotti Park...unless they want trouble.

The wisecracks weren't very funny ("Oh my God, this is terrible," Kirsten Dunst whispered to herself as she sat next to the increasingly uncomfortable von Trier). Yet they were just offensive enough to force a public apology from the prankster director as well as an eleventh-hour cancellation of the private dinner and after-party for his new film Melancholia. But to earn Cannes' first-ever exile over anti-Semitic remarks? That seems a bit hypocritical, especially when the festival let Mel Gibson walk the red carpet to promote "The Beaver" two days ago.

Then again, in a carnival atmosphere where attendees guzzle carafes of rosé wine like tap water and hammer out distribution deals on only a few hours of sleep, where oglers can choose between obscure Romanian starlets filing into premieres or local gamines at topless beaches, no gesture seems too extreme.

This is the place, after all, where a pair of horny cinephiles groped each other and tongue kissed all the way through Markus Schleinzer's Michael, an Austrian competition entry about a pedophile who repeatedly rapes a little boy locked in his basement. (Chacun à son goût, I suppose.)

And this is where the hottest ticket in town is for Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, a slight, silly but sweet homage to silent film that took the Croisette by storm precisely because no one in it is being raped, beaten, tortured or forced into a sex-change operation.

Cannes has always embraced alarming images, but this year had some seriously cringe-worthy moments: one movie, Bertrand Bonello's L'Apollonide: House of Tolerance, ends with a close-up shot of a fin-de-siécle prostitute literally shedding tears of semen. Maybe Cannes is actually getting more sensitive to its own historical predilection for offending its viewers. The Dutch drama Code Blue, featuring a euthanizing nurse with a taste for sexual deviancy, prompted the programmer to post a badly-translated warning: "Some scenes of the film Code Blue may hurt the audience's feelings." If only von Trier had done the same.