Michael Ignatieff on Israeli Self-Defense and Serb Ethnic Cleansing
Faith-Based Analysis
By EDWARD S. HERMAN
Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian MP and contender for a top
leadership position in the Liberal Party, was slow in responding to
the Israeli war on Lebanon. He told the Canadian media on August 1st
that "I've been following it minutely from the beginning and watching
it unfold and figuring out when was the time when a statement would be
important and relevant." (Linda Diebel, "Rae criticizes liberal rival
for delay," Toronto Star, August 2, 2006). He considered it necessary
to give Israel enough time "to send Hezbollah a very clear message"
that kidnapping soldiers and firing rockets on Israel will not be
tolerated. Of course, Israel was killing mainly civilians and
destroying civilian infrastructure while sending this message, and
there was the question of whether the world shouldn't be sending
Israel the message that aggression and the commission of war crimes
under the pretense of "self defense" is not permissible, but like
George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, for Ignatieff the Israeli message
was crucial, not any Lebanese civilian casualties or Israeli law
violations.
Michael Ignatieff is a skilled trimmer, who has adjusted his
principles and thoughts to the demands of the U.S. and Canadian power
elite, and advanced accordingly—from academia to preferred commentator
on human rights and other political issues in the U.S. mainstream
media, and on to becoming a member of the Canadian parliament. He was
for some years Carr Professor of Human Rights at Harvard University,
and for several years was a regular contributor to the New York Times
Magazine. He has always found that what the United States has been
doing in the international arena is good—well-intentioned, necessary
for international well-being, and inevitable, though occasionally
flawed in execution. He was a strong supporter of the U.S. wars in
Yugoslavia, objecting mainly to the sluggishness in the application of
force. He approved the invasion-occupation of Iraq and has supported
the use of torture in the abstract as well as specifically in the Bush
administration's so-called "war on terror," and as noted he has
recently been very understanding of Israel's need to defend itself
against the threats of Hezbollah and its other enemies.
One would have thought it might be problematical for a professor of
human rights to vigorously support two wars (Kosovo, Iraq) carried out
in violation of the UN Charter and hence "supreme crimes" in the view
of the judges at Nuremberg. These two wars of aggression also resulted
in serial war crimes, such as the regular bombing of civilian sites
and the use of illegal weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm,
phosphorus and depleted uranium, that should have been anathema to a
devotee of human rights. But these matters didn't bother Ignatieff,
who was troubled only by the lag in initiation of NATO violence in the
Balkans and the ineffectiveness and mismanagement of the occupation of
Iraq. Similarly, Israel's long-term ethnic cleansing of Palestinians
in the occupied territories, and massive human rights violations in
the process, have not troubled him in the least, although he is
bothered by the failure to bring "stability" and the absence of a
quiet occupation and dispossession process.
He gets away with this support for supreme crimes and systematic
violations of human rights because he does this only as regards crimes
and abuses carried out by the United States and its allies and
clients. He is quite passionate about the crimes or alleged crimes of
target states such as Yugoslavia and Saddam's Iraq. As this bias
parallels and therefore supports official positions, he is treated
well by the Western elite and their instruments such as Harvard
University and the New York Times. He can make egregious errors and
unverifiable and dubious claims, accept official claims as
unquestionably true, and apply double standards across the board,
without cost. Treating him well means not only giving him support and
access, it also means letting him get away with intellectual murder.
Ignatieff came into prominence during the Balkan wars, where he joined
forces with a number of other liberal intellectuals and journalists
who took on the cause of Alija Izetbegovic--author of the Islamic
Declaration and close ally of Osama bin Laden--and the Bosnian
Muslims, and pressed strongly for military intervention on their
behalf.1 Ignatieff's position also aligned him with the Clinton
administration, and he established "close relations" with Richard
Holbrooke, General Wesley Clark and former Yugoslav Tribunal chief
prosecutor Louise Arbour.2 These close links with officials with an
axe to grind might be thought to compromise a journalist and human
rights activist, but it doesn't work that way in the United States—as
with "embedded" journalists, such links enhance a reporter's
authority. It is only in enemy states that official connections and
embedding compromise journalistic integrity, as by assumption our
officials don't lie and manipulate, and/or the linkages do not cause
journalists to lose their critical capacity, whereas elsewhere
governments lie and embedded journalists become propaganda agents of
the state.3
One revealing illustration of Ignatieff's integration into the
propaganda apparatus of the war-making establishment was his November
2, 1999 op-ed column in the New York Times on "Counting Bodies in
Kosovo." By the time Ignatieff wrote this piece, the wilder claims of
the State Department that 100,000 or even 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had
been killed by the Serbs had collapsed in the wake of the very modest
results of the intense forensic searches that followed the NATO
takeover of Kosovo after June 10, 1999. The new claim made by Carla
Del Ponte, the Yugoslav Tribunal's prosecutor (who had succeeded
Louise Arbour), was that 11,334 Kosovo Albanians had been killed.
According to Ignatieff, whether all the 11,334 bodies will be found
"depends on whether the Serb military and police removed them."
Possible error or inflation by the Tribunal and its sources was ruled
out for no reason but deep bias.
Del Ponte had been vetted by Madeleine Albright before taking her
position, the Tribunal had been organized and largely staffed and
funded by the NATO powers, and it consistently served as a PR-judicial
arm of NATO.4 The Tribunal's investigator, who recommended dismissing
any charges of war crimes against NATO without a formal investigation,
stated that he had been satisfied with NATO press releases as an
information source on the motivations and results of NATO actions.5
Del Ponte followed his recommendation, implicitly accepting this use
of evidence, and expressing satisfation that there was "no deliberate
targeting of civilians or unlawful military targets by NATO"
(presumably the targeting of the Chinese Embassy and the Serb
broadcasting facility, among hundreds of other non-military targets,
was lawful). Only an unscholarly partisan would take her number as
definitive (and only a partisan newspaper would invite Ignatieff to
write on the subject and subsequently bring him on board as a
regular). Eventually only some 4,000 bodies were recovered in Kosovo
after the NATO takeover, by no means all or even a majority Bosnian
Muslim civilians, and 2,398 remain listed by the Red Cross as missing,
yielding a total—6,398—substantially below the 11,334, a difference
never commented on by Ignatieff or the New York Times.6
During the Kosovo conflict Ignatieff offered a stream of claims and
interpretations that make an enlightening contrast with his
apologetics for Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and structured
racism. Commenting on an incident in which the Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA) murdered six Serb teenagers, Ignatieff wrote that this was
"doubtless a KLA provocation, intended to goad the Serbs into
overreaction and then to trigger international intervention. Yet it is
worth asking why the KLA strategists could be absolutely certain the
Serbs would react as they did [he is referring to the "Racak massacre"
of January 15, 1999]. The reason is simple…only in Serbia is racial
contempt an official ideology."7
We may note first that for Ignatieff the KLA killings were only a
"provocation," not a murderous act to be severely condemned. Note also
that although there is compelling evidence that the Racak incident was
arranged into a "massacre" following a furious battle, and is
therefore of extremely dubious authenticity, Ignatieff takes it as
unquestionably valid.8 On the certainty of the Serb reaction, killings
such as those carried out by the KLA produce similar responses in
civil conflicts everywhere, so that Ignatieff's blaming it on Serb
racism is nonsensical for that reason alone. But it also flies in the
face of Serb tolerance of Albanians in Belgrade, along with Roma--in
contrast with Kosovo Albanian intolerance of both in NATO-occupied
Kosovo.
The contrast with Ignatieff's treatment of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon
is also dramatic and revealing. With the June 25 capture of an Israeli
soldier in Gaza and at least two other Israeli soldiers in
still-disputed circumstances around the Israel-Lebanon border on July
12, minimal consistency with his treatment of the Serbs should cause
him to regard these as "provocations" that induced an Israeli
"overreaction," and he should condemn this overreaction, which in Gaza
and Lebanon has been far more deadly and murderous than the Serbs'
alleged overreaction at Racak. He might explain this overreaction and
this willingness to kill large numbers of Palestinian and Lebanese
civilians on the "simple" ground that "only in Israel is racial
contempt an official ideology." Of course he does not do this,
although the case that can be made for racial contempt as an official
ideology in Israel is vastly greater than the evidence for Serbian
racism.9
For Ignatieff, Israel's legitimate "security needs" justify the
Lebanon response (and he evades discussing the reinvasion and attack
on civilians and humanitarian crisis in Gaza). Didn't Yugoslavia's
legitimate security needs justify Racak and other actions of the
Serbs, with NATO threatening an attack--that soon materialized--and
working in coordination with the KLA? There is of course no hint at
this in Ignatieff—his frame of reference is always that of his side
(NATO), and the enemy is always wrong and has no right of self
defense.
Ignatieff was enraged at the Serb expulsions in Kosovo during the
bombing war, claiming that "Milosevic decided to solve an 'internal
problem' by exporting an entire nation to his impoverished neighbors,"
and he also described it as a "most meticulous deportation of a
civilian population" and "a final solution of the Kosovo problem."10
One would hardly realize from these effusions that Yugoslavia was
under military attack by NATO, forced to defend itself in a situation
where the KLA and NATO were working in close coordination; that
proportionately more [ethnic] Serbs fled the bombing war in Kosovo
than [ethnic] Albanians; that there was nothing "meticulous" about the
flight, induced by the KLA and bombing as well as Serb actions, and
that there is no reason whatever to think that Milosevic viewed this
as a "final solution," another dishonest piece of rhetoric that
conflates Nazi industrial murder with a war-induced flight of
civilians.
Again, the contrast with Ignatieff's treatment of the forced exit of a
million Lebanese by the Israelis is dramatic. Here Israel is justified
in "sending a message" to Hezbollah reflecting Israel's right to
defend itself. Yugoslavia had no right to send a message to the KLA
and NATO powers in the process of defending itself, although NATO's
war threatened its survival, whereas Israel had only suffered minor
losses in a border skirmish with a force that did not threaten its
existence. Ignatieff has not even expressed sympathy with the million
Lebanese displaced to "send a message" to Hezbollah; and he will
clearly not speak of this as a "meticulous" ethnic cleansing and
"final solution" via an "export" of Lebanese civilians. Human Rights
Watch and the Red Cross (among others) have repeatedly declared the
Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure to be war
crimes,11 but Ignatieff has not said a word about anything wrong with
Israel's attacks on civilians or the use of illegal and anti-civilian
weaponry like cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and he has never
hinted that these frequent and ruthless attacks on Arab civilians
could be because of Israel's racist ideology, although the evidence
for such attitudes in Israel is massive (which it is not in Belgrade).
In short, we are dealing here with gross political bias and gross
apologetics for aggression, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Add to
this the fact that Ignatieff has swallowed Bush's claim to be striving
to "bring freedom everywhere," an ideological premise that allows him
to rationalize anything the Bush administration does externally
because it is in a noble cause—based solely on the fact that Bush says
that that is his aim (see his "Who Are Americans To Think That Freedom
Is Theirs To Spread?," New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005; and my
analysis of this apologetics landmark: Herman, "Michael Ignatieff's
Pseudo-Hegelian Apologetics for Imperialism," October, 2005).
Facts no longer matter for Ignatieff; they are trumped by proclaimed
aims and values, but only for the side he favors and that produce
benefits—to Ignatieff and some of the elites that underwrite his work.
Clearly this is a man worthy of a human rights chair at Harvard, a
special place in the Paper of Record, and a bright political future in
our close and reliable ally Canada.
Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton
School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on
economics, political economy and the media. Among his books are The
Real Terror Network, Triumph of the Market, and Manufacturing Consent
(with Noam Chomsky).
Endnotes:
1. For a general account, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson,
"Morality's Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders," in David
Chandler, Ed., Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to
International Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 196-216 (as
posted to ZNet, August 30, 2005). The New Humanitarians have been
members of a network of like-minded people, often friends, who have
worked in coordination with government officials and government-linked
thinktanks, bonding and hobnobbing among themselves in Sarajevo or at
international conferences and being fed information by U.S. and, in
the 1990s, Bosnian Muslim officials. Sometimes, they worked together
in establishment operations such as the Independent International
Commission on Kosovo (Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone, Michael
Ignatieff, Mary Kaldor, Martha Minow), the International Crisis Group
(William Shawcross), the American Academy in Berlin (Paul Hockenos),
George Soros' Open Society Institute (Aryeh Neier), and offshoots of
these and similar institutions. The first three groups have been
heavily funded by NATO governments, and have had on their boards
numerous NATO government officials, past and present.
In a nice illustration of what C. Wright Mills might have called the
"social composition of the higher circles" of New Humanitarianism,
Timothy Garton Ash wrote back in 1999: "When I arrive in the late
evening…[at Hotel Tuzla,]…I step into the lift, press the button for
the second floor, and at once subside, powerless, into the cellar. The
reception committee in the bar consists of Christopher Hitchens, Susan
Sontag, and David Rieff. When I join them, Sontag is just saying to
Michael Ignatieff, 'I can't believe that this is your first time
here." And he adds that on the very next day, after arriving at an
event hosted by the Bosnian Muslim leadership of Tuzla, Mary Kaldor
welcomed the group, and the British actress Julie Christie read a poem
in homage to Sarajevo, "glowing white…as a translucent china cup."
Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from
Europe in the 1990s (New York: Random House, 1999), p.147.
2. The quoted words were used by David Rieff to describe and laud his
ally Ignatieff's connections with the West's political and military
leadership, in "Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond," Los Angeles Times,
Sept. 3, 2000.
3. Back at the time of the controversy that followed the May 1981
shooting of Pope Paul II by a Turkish fascist, the mainstream U.S.
media relied heavily on the expert Paul Henze, rarely pointing
out--and never suggesting any problem based on--lhis 30-year
employment as a CIA propaganda specialist and his having been head of
the CIA station in Turkey.
4. For a compelling analysis, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets
Away With Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 132-46.
5. Ibid., pp. 188-191.
6. "Statement to the Press by Carla del Ponte" (FH/P.I.S./550-e),
Carla del Ponte, ICTY, December 20, 2000, par. 16; "Kosovo: ICRC
deplores slow progress of working group on missing persons," ICRC
News, March 9, 2006.
7. Michael Ignatieff, "Only in truth can Serbia find peace: There is
racism everywhere in Europe, but only in Serbia is racial contempt an
official ideology," Calgary Herald, June 26, 1999.
8. On questions about Racak, see Mandel, pp. 72-80, 170-73; see also
the devastating testimonies of Judge Danica Marenkovic, forensic
expert Professor Slavisa Dobricain, Col. Bogoljub Janicevic, and Col.
Milan Kotur, during the Milosevic defense period, March 23-24, April
8, 13, and 26, and January 27, 2006. None of this testimony was
reported on in the New York Times.
9. Under the subheading "Root Causes," Israeli analyst Reuven Kaminer
says "It is impossible to oppress an entire people for 40 years and
not to succumb to the ultimate rationalization for such action.
Anti-Arab racism is endemic to Israeli society. This racism is so
pervasive that it covers the political landscape like a cloud and
infects all the thinking and the attitudes of the overwhelming
majority of Israelis." ("Who Won and Who Lost and Why," Portside,
August 17, 2006). See also Edward S. Herman, "Ethnic Cleansing:
Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious," ZNet, August 9, 2006.
10. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 86-87, 78-79, 84.
11. See, e.g., Peter Bouckaert and Nadim Houry, Fatal Strikes:
Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon (Human
Rights Watch, August 3, 2006; and Peter Bouckaert, "For Israel,
innocent civilians are fair game," International Herald Tribune,
August 4, 2006.
http://www.counterpunch.org/herman08222006.html
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