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----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 2:58 PM
Subject: A Jewish Albatross: The Serbs by Julia Gorin (Front Page
Magazine)
A Jewish
Albatross: The Serbs
By Julia Gorin
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 16, 2005
Imagine that a country is fighting domestic terrorism by Muslim
militants who are carrying out attacks against police, government officials and
citizens in a bid to carve out their own state, hoping to provoke a response
from the government that will alarm the international community.
Imagine
that the world duly intervenes, and a peacekeeping force is sent in, paralyzing
the nation�s ability to defend itself, and effectively
doing the militants�
bidding even as attacks against the non-Muslim population continue. Finally,
imagine the intervening internationals
severing this nation�s Jerusalem
from it and handing it to the provocateurs.
It sounds like a worst-case scenario for the Israeli people, but
it is a fate that actually befell the Serbian people, who this year may lose
Kosovo as the deadline approaches for determining the status of the
province, where Christian churches, monasteries and homes were burned
to the
ground in pogroms in March of last year. They will lose Kosovo to Albanian
Muslims, whose fates are now entirely in the hands of the
international
Islamist factions with whom they, and we, cast their lot.
As a reprisal of last March looms on the horizon (Kosovo Prime
Minister Ramush Haradinaj stepped down when he was indicted for war crimes
last week, and the UN Mission in Kosovo was promptly bombed), the reticence
about butchered Serbian octogenarians, children and other
civilians--alternating with dismissal of these atrocities, even six years
later, as �revenge killings�--intimates that terrorized Serbs are an even
bigger yawn than terrorized Israelis. That�s why I am calling upon my fellow
Jews to break their own conspicuous silence.
In the six years since our bizarre bombing of Belgrade to
prevent a genocide that forensics turned up empty (a memo that apparently made
it
only to European and Canadian presses, leaving a gaping hole in our
national dialogue), the sense of something not being said grows
palpable.
With every explosive report coming from the Balkans--Islamic charities getting
busted as terror-funding fronts, terrorist cells being
uncovered in Bosnia
and Kosovo, explosions on Pristina�s Bill Clinton Avenue, then last year�s
coordinated Albanian riots that injured 900,
killed 19 Serbs and tried to
drive out what was left of Kosovo�s non-Albanian population--more and more
people have started to think it, but
who has the poor taste to say it?
After all, we were told that a genocide was in progress. We were
told of mass graves. A hundred thousand killed and 800,000 displaced, Bill
Clinton said.
Soon after the U.S.-led NATO invasion, the 100,000 figure turned
out to be closer to 2,000 and included armed Albanian and Serb fighters. �No
Bodies at Rumored Grave Site in Kosovo,� read a Reuters headline as early as
October �99, above an article reporting the results of an
excavation by
international war crimes investigators to check the rumors that Serbs had hidden
up to 700 Albanian bodies in a lead and zinc
mine. Other �mass graves�
turned up empty or hardly massive, and the Racak massacre, the feather that was
used to break the NATO camel�s
back, turned out to have been staged,
according to three forensics teams sent in to investigate--but only after the
first team, headed by
Finland�s Helena Ranta, initially gave a thumbs-up to
�massacre� so that the bombing campaign could commence. (Two years and thousands
of lives later, Ranta�s final report confirmed the opposite conclusion.)
Sold on a Holocaust scenario, the American people couldn�t have
known what sinister deal they�d signed on to. But my fellow Jews should
have
smelled a rat. And to my profound disappointment, in the face of a stunning
parallel to the Palestinian propaganda war that Jews
themselves struggle
with, for the most part they have been silent since.
As journalists fanned the early flames of Serb demonization in
Bosnia, starting with a widely circulated 1992 photo of a Serb-run �death camp�
for Bosnian Muslims that turned out to have been taken from the inside of a
fenced storage area, and showed refugees who had escaped the
fighting and
were free to go at any time, it should have raised some red flags among my
tribe--even if only after the fact. After all, what Jew
can forget the NY
Times photo from a 2000 riot in Jerusalem, showing an Israeli soldier standing
over a bloody young man�the caption
identifying the scene as an Israeli
policeman and a Palestinian? It subsequently came to bear that the bloody
�Palestinian� was a Chicago
Yeshiva student who had just been beaten by
Palestinians. One need only say the word �Jenin� to a Jew for him to recall the
vision of
Palestinians digging up old graves to increase the body count
there.
But just as Palestinians have been a step ahead of Israelis when
it comes to PR, so were Balkan Muslims a step ahead of Serb Christians.
Such
that when, early on, it came to winning American-Jewish empathy, the Albanian
Kosovars were victorious over the Serbs.
A 1994 article in a monthly Jewish publication called
�Midstream,� which caught on early, cites an interview between a French
journalist
named Jacques Merlino and James Harff, of the D.C.-based PR firm
Ruder & Finn, which was representing Croatia, Bosnia and the Kosovo
Liberation Army. After boasting about having set up meetings between Bosnian
officials and Al Gore, George Mitchell, Bob Dole and other
politicians,
Harff described the achievement he was most proud of: �To have managed to put
Jewish opinion on our side�At the beginning of
August 1992, �New York
Newsday� came out with the affair of [Serb] concentration camps. We jumped at
the opportunity immediately. We
outwitted three big Jewish
organizations--B'nai B'rith, Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish
Committee, and the American Jewish
Congress. We suggested to them to publish
an advertisement in the �New York Times� and to organize demonstrations outside
the United
Nations. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish
organizations entered the game on the side of the Bosnians, we could promptly
equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.�
It was a sneak PR attack, and the Serbs were out-sassed. If
anyone should have looked deeper into the story being peddled, it was the
Jewish community�who ask that people do their homework before making rash
judgments about Israeli operations in the Palestinian
territories and siding
with the visibly more pathetic side. But the magic �genocide� wand was waved,
and organized Jewry fell into its
autopilot never-again trance.
It�s all the more tragic considering the historical relationship
between Jews and Serbs, both of whom were persecuted by the Nazis� Croatian,
Bosnian and Albanian brigades during WWII. In 1999, under pressure from the
U.S. and amid protest from Israelis who knew better, Israel
joined NATO�s
war against Yugoslavia, leaving Serbs stunned and angry in an era when most of
Europe was already being engulfed by a new
wave anti-Semitism. Today,
whatever Jews remained in Kosovo before our intervention have been cleansed
right along with the Serbs.
And yet last March 18th, the second day of renewed Serb
cleansing, the House of Representatives was treated to the following resolution
on
Kosovo by Congressman Eliot Engel (D, NY), who chairs the Albanian Issues
Caucus: �When there is no resolution of the final status, the
people in a
country become restless�Right now there is rampant unemployment. Right now there
is very little hope for a
future�Self-determination and, ultimately,
independence for the people of Kosovo is the only solution�What we have seen�is
this ridiculous
plan called standards before status�We put forward
benchmarks and we tell the people of Kosovo they have to achieve these
benchmarks
before we can even look at a resolution and at
self-determination.�
The speech easily could be mistaken for one that makes the case
for immediate Palestinian statehood as a way to end �understandable�
violence against Israelis. The irony of it coming from a pro-Israel Jewish
congressman is too thick for comment, and yet it got thicker when in
his
closing thoughts Engel employed the penultimate moral-equivalence phrase
that Jews find so maddening in reference to Israel: �The
ethnic violence
which happened yesterday is a tragic undertaking, a tragic tragedy, and I must
call on both sides to stop the violence.�
Especially in light of the millions of Christians who today
stand with Israel as it fights for the right to defend itself, too few Jews have
stood
up for the Serb Christians. No, the Serbs are not the Jews. Not every
nation, when provoked, plays as tenderly as Israel, whose teen soldiers
risk
their lives going door to door to pluck the one or two actual terrorists out of
a household of complicit family members.
A 2000 documentary on England�s BBC2 showed an interview with
KLA leader Hashim Thaci, in which he admitted, "We knew full well that any
armed action we undertook would trigger a ruthless retaliation by Serbs
against our people. We knew we were endangering civilian lives, too,
a great
number of lives." There was also a sound bite from a Kosovo Albanian negotiator
named Doug Gorani: "The more civilians were killed,
the chances of
international intervention became bigger, and the KLA of course realized that."
Had we not been looking for mini Holocausts under every bed, had
we not responded like Pavlovian dogs when hearing that a modern-day
Holocaust was under way in Europe�s underbelly, we could have seen through
the hoax, as well as what it portended for Israel.
Instead, cover articles ran in Jewish newspapers across America,
such as the one in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles that began,
"With echoes of the Holocaust and pogroms haunting a collective conscience,
the Jewish community in Los Angeles has mobilized forces to
come to the aid
of Kosovar refugees left homeless and hungry by Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic." A full-page ad read: "OUR HELPING
HAND EXTENDS ALL THE WAY TO
KOSOVO," and the small print informed readers that the Jewish Federation of Los
Angeles had made a
donation of $50,000 to the Kosovo Refugee Relief Fund of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Only when turning to the letters page did one encounter a
dissenting voice. It belonged to self-described researcher and writer Paul
Stonehill,
who compared the one-sided press coverage to that directed
against Israel: �I am sad that because of our misguided policy yet another
radical Moslem state will appear in Europe. I am sad that the Serbs, who
stood up to the Nazis like very few other people did during the war
are
bombed by the grandchildren of the Allies. And I am ashamed that some Jews have
such selective memory."
In 1999 this selective memory afflicted both the ADL�s Abe
Foxman (�We�re glad that we�re doing now what we weren�t doing then [WWII]�),
and Elie Wiesel, who approved of bombing Yugoslavia when instead the 1941
words of Adolf Hitler should have been echoing through his
head: "As soon as
sufficient forces are available and the weather allows, the ground installations
of the Yugoslav Air Force and the City of
Belgrade will be destroyed from
the air by continual day and night bombardment. When that is completed we will
subdue Yugoslavia."
Sure enough, within weeks of our offensive, Prince Khaled Bin
Sultan, commander of the allied Saudi troops during the first Gulf War, called
on NATO and the U.S. to extend its �honorable actions� in Kosovo to
Palestine. A few years later, when Kofi Annan sent Helena Ranta to look
for
evidence of massacre in Jenin, karma came calling. Israel's external adviser on
the Jenin inquiry, Cambridge University international legal
expert Daniel
Bethlehem, warned then, "If the committee's findings uphold the allegations
against Israel--even on poor reasoning--this�may
make it impossible for
Israel to resist calls for an international force, the immediate establishment
of a Palestinian state and the prosecution
of individuals said to have
committed the alleged acts."
When, during Wesley Clark�s clumsy yet merciless 78-day
bombardment of the Orthodox Christian Serbs, which didn�t break even for Easter
(the way our other bombardments have for Ramadan), the possibility of a
precedent for Israel was made clear to then Foreign Minister Ariel
Sharon by
an Italian ambassador, he asked American Jewish leaders to call for an end to
the bombardment against Yugoslavia, citing that the
KLA was backed by
Iran-backed terror outfits and that an independent Kosovo would be a gateway for
the spread of terror throughout Europe.
Whether such an organized Jewish voice emerged is unclear; if it
did, it was done quietly, to save face. What has begun to take form since is
a humanitarian concern for the remaining Serbs of Kosovo. But its language
has been meticulously woven, so as not to backpedal too
obviously on our
overzealous enforcement of a cheap morality.
But we Jews at least should be trying to set the record
straight. Though they were late in coming, entire organizations are devoted to
debunking the Muslim-spun mythology against Israel that so many in the media
dutifully report. The Serbs have no such face to the outside
world, and so
they do not get their slice of human sympathy. Nor did the Serbs think to buy
clout in the halls of power via lobbyists in the
U.S. Congress, where the
Albanians, Croatians and Bosnians have been buying influence for decades, from
the likes of Bob Dole, John McCain,
Joe Lieberman, Tom Lantos, Joe Biden,
Jesse Helms and Benjamin Gillman, to name just a few. Like the Israelis had for
a long time, the
Serbs--busy fighting radicals--assumed the ability of the
world to see right from wrong, up from down, truth from lie, and didn�t realize
they
were supposed to be fighting a simultaneous image war. Today, amid a
sustained media blackout on the subject of our little 1999 war that
has been
quietly backfiring and still offers no hint of an exit strategy,
Serbian-Americans and others who understand our miscalculation are
left
feverishly writing letters to editors in response to the many articles that get
the Balkans wrong, in a futile attempt to inform the public.
Today, Serbia is the only remaining pocket of multi-ethnicity in
the Balkans--where Serbs, gypsies, Jews, Albanian and other Muslims, along
with 22 other nationalities still coexist. In fact, when trouble started,
many Albanians fled to Belgrade--just as Bosnian Muslims had before
them.
It�s not unlike the situation of that �racist� state of the Middle East, Israel,
with its one million Arab citizens standing in contrast to the
surrounding
Jew-cleansed Arab lands.
The trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague, meanwhile, was
billed as no less than Nuremberg 2. Yet we hear virtually nothing about it.
Where are the day-to-day reports of this momentous historical event,
dispatches from which should have Americans lining up at the
newsstands and
scouring their papers for the latest developments? And wouldn�t the biggest
trial since Nuremberg at least warrant some
punditry?
When one considers also that, more than a year into the trial,
the court finally relented from its own one-sidedness and decided it would start
trying non-Serbs for war crimes against Serbs as well, the Nuremberg analogy
falls apart like a bad joke. How many Jews do we recall being
prosecuted at
the Nuremberg Trials? And as the Chicago Tribune pointed out on the first
anniversary of Milosevic�s trial, Nuremberg took only
11 months �to try,
convict, sentence and hang 10 of Adolf Hitler�s top lieutenants.� The Milosevic
trial is now in its fourth year.
If, as we were told, there was systematic rape by Serbs, where
are the resulting children? Or evidence of mass abortions? Jewish women had
Nazi babies, and at Nuremberg there was plenty of testimony and plenty of
evidence. So far at the Hague, there has been only testimony
(much of which
falls apart under cross-examination), and virtually no evidence. Such that the
court has had to redefine the very word
�genocide�--to at least make it fit
what happened in Bosnia after it was unable to make it fit Kosovo. (�War crimes
case widens �genocide,��
BBC.com, April 19, 2004). Hence we arrive at a
state of affairs wherein the UN declares 70,000 dead men, women and children in
Darfur to not
be genocide, but 7,000 dead Bosnian males in the UN �safe
haven� Srebrenica--used as a staging ground for attacks on Serbs--is.
While Byzantine art exhibits at New York museums were humming
last year, 900-year-old Serb churches, cathedrals and monasteries in
Kosovo
were being systematically bombed, burned, looted, and urinated on in a single
week. The pogroms had been set off by a rumor, later
confirmed false by
NATO, that Serbs had drowned some Albanian youths. By the end of March, 366
homes and 41 churches were destroyed,
according to an AP report, which
quoted 23 year-old Ruzhdi Krasniqi, who �smoked a cigarette as he assessed the
damage and said he felt
�OK� about [it]. �I don't want the Serbs to return
here,� he said. �They've got no place here.��
In response to the violence, Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova
told an Italian newspaper, "Everyone realizes by now that it is clear that
independence from Serbia is vital for Kosovo and its inhabitants."
Though he is a moderate and has had at least two attempts on his
life because of it, Rugova seems to have followed the Arafat model:
Accept
the infidel�s (the West�s) help for as long as it moves you closer to your goal.
When you hit the inevitable brick wall with the infidel
and he ceases to
further your agenda, revert to traditional methods and allow violence to engulf
the region, turning your guns against the
helpful infidel if necessary. Then
propose independence as the only possible solution.
Independence, of course, would mean withdrawing UN peacekeepers.
As Balkan-based journalist Chris Deliso wrote last year for
BalkanAnalysis.com, �Even though they are inept�the UN contingents cannot be
replaced by local enforcers without serious repercussions for
Europe and
America. With no foreign eyes and ears on the ground, pretty much anything can
happen�.terrorists abroad look for safe havens in
states with little or no
central control�Kosovo--with its porous borders, fundamentalist minority,
criminal underbelly and proximity to the rest
of Europe--is a perfect hiding
place.� He concludes, �With successes like that, who needs failures?�
But Americans don�t see how Kosovo relates to them. Until 1999,
who had ever even heard of a Serb? It was neither an enemy nor a
significant
international player. So this people and what happened to their country do not
occupy any coherent place in the American psyche.
Without being innocent, a people can still be scapegoated and a
falsified history go down in the books. Serbs have apologized repeatedly for
the heavy hand that Belgrade wielded in responding to the ethnic cleansing
of Serbs in Kosovo and Bosnia. They have admitted they are not
innocent,
while the instigators themselves admit nothing, continue crying out against past
Serb crimes, and kill with abandon.
That the Serbs haven�t been innocent cannot continue to be used
to mischaracterize the Balkan conflicts and our actions there. Starting with a
mistaken premise and working backwards to prove it, then devolving into
moral equivalence when it doesn�t work must stop. A reevaluation
must begin.
Whether it does or not, history�s reckoning will come, such that after an air
war against a fictitious enemy, we may have to fight
a ground war against
the real one.
The world stood by while one-third of its Jews were exterminated
last century. This century, the Jews stand by idly with the world as a
people�s history is erased. Serbia is reviled, for like Israel, it had the
poor taste to not wait for 9/11 to start the resistance against a common
enemy.
That�s why, in sounding the call for Serb rehabilitation, I
apply a double standard to my fellow Jews. They should be used to it. The Serbs
are.
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