Guest Opinion/Commentary*
Played like a fiddle
By Ted Belman (01/28/07)
I promised Francisco Gil-White that I would actually read his article, What really happened in Bosnia? And so I did.
The comparisons of the destruction of Yugoslavia with the destruction of Israel are chilling and instructive.
The sub-title “Were the Serbs the criminal aggressors, as the official story claims, or were they the victims?” could equally be asked regarding Israel, “Are the Jews the criminal aggressors, as the world claims, or are they the victims?”
He conclusively proves that
“ Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of a minority Bosnian Muslim faction, the one that NATO supported, who wrote a book calling for the slaughter of infidels so that a Muslim takeover could install an Islamist theocracy in Bosnia.”
was the villain of the piece. Yet western leaders, academics, UN, and media all supported him as a moderate (Shades of Mahmoud Abbas having a long history of terrorism to his credit yet the entire world claims him as a moderate.) and accused Milosovec as the “new Hitler” and prosecuted him of war crimes which they couldn’t prove. They may even have killed him to end their embarrassment.”
(Compare to the world claiming Israel committed war crimes and its attempts to prosecute Israel’s politicians and officers for same.).
He asks
“Isn’t it more likely that the one killing innocent people in the 1990s was Izetbegovic, and not the Serbs? Yes. Consistent with this expectation, every allegation against the Serbs evaporates into nothing the minute one investigates. The overwhelming, crushing bulk of the evidence supports the view that in the Yugoslavian civil wars of the 1990s the Serbs behaved much like did in WWII, when they were the staunchest defenders of the persecuted Jews in all of Europe. The portrait that was painted of the Serbs in the 1990s as “the new Nazis” is not only false, it is absurd. For this reason, the lies we were told about the Bosnian Serbs (repeated to this day) have required spectacular hoaxes, (Jenin, al Durah, Qana to name similar lies about Israel’s actions) knowingly perpetrated by the Western mass media.”
Izetbegovic was an Islamic fundamentalist so why did he get the following support from the west? (For that matter why do the PLO and Fatah get similar support?)
First, because NATO intervened politically and militarily for Izetbegovic. For example, former US Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, admitted in congressional testimony that the U.S. gave Croatia the green light to violate international agreements by letting Iranian weapons reach Izetbegovic’s army.[9]
The US also allied with Iran in order to import foreign mujahideen terrorists into Bosnia, and this was all coordinated directly by Pentagon intelligence.[10]
And NATO repeatedly and massively bombed the Bosnian Serbs, including with bombs encased in depleted uranium. The US and NATO backed Izetbegovic with destruction and death.[11]
Second, because if we are right to say that Izetbegovic was an Islamist fanatic, and that this was no secret in Yugoslavia, then the media lied systematically. It is difficult to explain such uniform media disinformation absent coordination by the covert services of Western powers. If we are right about Izetbegovic, then this constitutes evidence that the West has a controlled media.
Third, because if Izetbegovic’s views were entirely misrepresented by politicians and the media, this is evidence that the U.S.-led Empire has a dual policy regarding Islamic fundamentalism, as we claim. The US invokes the threat of fundamentalist terror in order to excuse its military adventures, but - covertly - it also allies with and sponsors Islamic fundamentalists around the world.” (How did the ‘Palestinian movement’ emerge? The British sponsored it. Then the German Nazis, and the US.)
Francisco Gil-White writes
“Emperor’s Clothes and HIR have charged that, in Bosnia, the US and its NATO allies deliberately trained, financed, and politically supported a faction of Muslim fundamentalists whose goal was to create — through violence — a fascist-clerical state. This is what caused the Bosnian civil war.
Put bluntly, what happened is that NATO supported a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against innocent Bosnian Serb civilians, and then NATO blamed the victims, as if they had been the ones carrying out a genocide.
He makes the case so compellingly that it is impossible for an open mind not to concur. Also the more we understand the Orwellian world Israel lives in, it is easier to accept such reality.
Izetbegovic executed “a campaign of ethnic cleansing to rid Bosnia of non-Muslims, so that Muslims can be the majority, thence to establish the ‘Islamic Order.’
Yet
“That will not sound like what you heard in the Western mainstream media, because what was repeated there a million times was that the Bosnian Serbs were supposedly the ones interested in ethnic cleansing, and that Alija Izetbegovic was defending a multi-ethnic Bosnia.”
Similarly, the Arabs want to take over Israel and make it Judenrein. Yet, the UN, the EU, the US elites and the mainstream media, support them. And they do this by claiming that Israelis are Nazis who are guilty of war crimes and intent on occupying Arab lands and imposing an apartheid system.
Genocides don’t just happen. The people who commit them have to be incited, and this requires propaganda, which means speeches, newspaper articles, radio addresses, leaflets, books, rallies, etc. You cannot make any of that happen in a week. If you want to have a genocide by early 1992, you have to start preparing for it well before that. Adolf Hitler did not begin exterminating the Jews in 1933, when he took power, but several years later, when the preparatory propaganda work had been done, the political opposition had been destroyed, and the troops that would do the dirty work had been recruited, trained, and indoctrinated. So anybody who wants to believe that the Bosnian Serbs really were carrying out an “ethnic cleansing” campaign against their Muslim and Croat neighbors in early 1992 is practically forced to assert that in 1990 there already had to be at least some Bosnian Serb propaganda about ethnic cleansing against the Muslims and Croats, and probably a lot. And this is naturally the sort of thing that Bosnian Muslims and Croats would have heard about.
We are quite familiar with Muslim incitement and propaganda similar to that of the Nazis aimed at demonizing Israel and Jews and inciting Muslims to kill Jews and “wipe Israel off the map”. But that is not enough. You must have storm troopers to impose conformity on your own people with terror.
Izetbegovic reconstituted the Handzar Division, made up mostly of imported (i.e. non-Bosnian) Muslim fighters from Kosovo, Albania, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Africa and other places.[15] This force was modeled after the original Nazi SS Handzar Division, which had been composed of thousands of Bosnian Muslims who volunteered for the Nazis in WWII to go hunt for Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Yugoslavia, and either slaughter them in their homes or send them to the Croatian concentration camp system known as Jasenovac.
Abbas and Haniyeh similarly have their storm troopers. Iran and S. Arabia each have a special police division to impose proper conformity to Islam. All this was known to the US, NATO and the EU. Yet it doesn’t diminish their support for Palestinian plans.
Orwell’s newspeak works because
“when everybody repeats the same thing, people tend to believe it. Is it any wonder, then, that hapless Western news consumers learned to think of Izetbegovic and Co. (and the “Palestinians”) as ‘the good guys’ and of the Bosnian Serbs and Israeli Jews as ‘the (separatist) (apartheid ) bad guys’?
One of the central issues in the Israel/Arab conflict is entitlement or ownership of the land. Or who is entitled to sovereignty?
In Bosnia, the Serbs were accused of a land grab because they had 1/3 the population but claimed 2/3 of the land. The west claimed this was unfair but was it?
The press was unanimous. The Bosnian Serbs had “taken control,” “occupied,” and “staked out” a whole two-thirds of Bosnia. In other words, the media accused the Serbs of taking other people’s land away from them by force.
The only problem with this representation is that the Serbs never conquered other people’s land in Bosnia. They were not ‘claiming’ anything. It is a simple and easily verified historical fact that the Bosnian Serbs actually owned two thirds of Bosnia to begin with.
Similarly, Israel has a better claim to Judea and Samaria than the Arabs do.
The fact that the Serbs and the Jews were among the last peoples that you could claim were racists or fascist was a small obstacle.
The history of the Serbs (and the Jews) is a history of moral courage. No other people can lay claim to a more dramatic record of fighting racists and protecting minorities. In World War II, nobody in Europe defended their Jewish compatriots more bravely than the Serbs, treating them as their own flesh, and dying along with their Jewish compatriots in concentration camps by the hundreds of thousands. Why? Because, as they chanted in the streets of Belgrade, they preferred death to slavery; they would not collaborate with Hitler’s Final Solution.
If justice and facts were on the side of the Serbs (Jews) why was it not a no-brainer to make their case?
Something else that matters here is that,
as Karadzic says, “we had no PR-agency working for us … their governments did not allow them to work with and for the Serbs.” This means the battle of perceptions was not an even playing field to begin with. The NATO powers made sure that the PR-agency hired by the enemies of the Serbs, Ruder Finn, would have the greatest advantage possible, as it would not have to do battle with a competing public relations firm. This was quite important, because if any public relations firm had taken the Serbs as clients, they would have made mince-meat of Ruder Finn.
James Harff, Ruder Finn’s director, with ultimate responsibility for the demonization campaign against the Serbs, proudly explained to Jacques Merlino, associate director of French TV 2, that “Speed is vital … it is the first assertion that really counts. All denials are entirely ineffective.”
…Harff employs a file of several hundred journalists, politicians, representatives of humanitarian associations, and academics to create public opinion, and then had Harff explain the stuff above about how denials are entirely ineffective once he has chosen to demonize somebody.
So how did James Harff solve his problem, which was that he needed to make these fascists look like victims?
[Back to Merlino’s Interview with James Harff]
HARFF:
“At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations - the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, The American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. In August, we suggested that they publish an advertisement in the New York Times and organize demonstrations outside the United Nations.
“That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated.
“By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could go against it without being accused of [Holocaust] revisionism. We really batted a thousand in full.”
Ted Belman
http://Israpundit.com/
Original: http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=3854
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*Ed: Views are those of individual authors and not necessarily those of American Daily.
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