May 7, 2007
AN OPEN LETTER Published in The American Srbobran Mr. Adam Kendall, Curator Grand Lodge F.& A.M. of California 1111 California Street San Francisco, CA 94108 Dear Mr. Kendall: My attention was recently directed to your exhibit entitled Confronting the Critics: Examining Anti-Masonry Through Art and Artifacts and the current article on your web site by Alan Casalou. As a first generation American of Serbian heritage I know I speak for the tens of thousands of Serbs in this country who are outraged by your promotion of this immoral propaganda related to the postage stamp issue. If Free Masons are entitled to the truth, certainly the Serbs whom you have condemned in this exhibit are entitled to a full apology for the lies, distortions and pure propaganda that your organization is using in this exhibit. As one of many leading spokespersons in the Serbian community I know full well that not a single Serb or Serbian scholar was contacted for this exhibit. It is my guess that you cannot read a single word of Serbian and must have relied on enemies of the Serbs in utilizing these stamps. Justice nor truth are served at the trough of hate speech and bigotry. Yet, people attending this exhibit are supposed to take pity on FreeMasonry for being abused while you freely use the identical tactics to abuse Serbs. Was Philip Cohen your advisor for this exhibit as so much of your propaganda seems to flow from his pen? During the Civil War in Croatia in 1991, Dr. Philip Cohen, a dentist, not a historian, published his book entitled Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History. On the cover he used an "anti-Jewish" stamp and makes the same claim as your organization that "The Serbs issued these stamps in conjunction with an official "Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition that featured hundreds of thousands of brochures, posters, flyers and film clips focused on a Jewish/Masonic plot to dominate the world" Shame on you Mr. Kendall that you would stoop to such discredited propaganda. Serbia's alleged "anti-Semitic" stamp is apparently so rare that Philip Cohen was unable to find a single one with a Serbian cancellation mark for his cover, and for good reason-this is a ruse-these stamps were created in Belgrade 7 months after the German occupation and after the Nazis took over the entire Serbian government and all of the printing presses in Yugoslavia, including those of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Nazis took Patriarch Gavrilo of the Serbian Church and imprisoned him at Mathausen. "Propaganda and the Deceit of History," was Cohen's subtitle to his book. Deception is therefore exactly what your organization is wallowing in. Cohen's book has already been exposed as a racist piece of trash with large parts written by a Croatian hand. Many of the documents in his book were written in the Cyrillic alphabet and Cohen does not read or understand the Serbian language. Nor do you Mr. Kendall, so, who pushed the Masons in San Francisco to put on such a distortion of history? Just think about it Mr. Kendall. The Serbs were the only people in the Balkans to declare war on Nazi Germany. Belgrade, a declared 'open city' was bombed into submission by the Germans on April 6, 1941 (Palm Sunday) and 17,000 Serbs were killed in one day! The Yugoslav army was defeated in less than 10 days and the Serbian population imprisoned and occupied by Nazi forces, who magnanimously allowed these imprisoned Serbs the privilege of creating "anti-Semitic" and "anti-Masonic" stamps. And, as though this was not benevolent enough, these same Nazis 'allowed' the imprisoned Serbs to hold an "anti-Masonic" and "anti-Jewish" exhibit in Belgrade 7 months after Serbs were occupied. Was there no end to German generosity? Your claim that "Serbian newspapers urged Serbs not to wait for the Nazis to exterminate the Jews," is a disgusting piece of propaganda. Those newspapers were taken over by Germans months before this exhibit. Do the Freemasons really believe this nonsense or are you now a better Serbophobe than Philip Cohen? What you omit from your ugly diatribe is any mention that one of the greatest guerilla movements in history took place in Serbia when forces under General Mihailovic fought the Nazi and in the process saved the lives of 513 American airmen downed over occupied Yugoslavia, the single largest rescue of American troops from behind enemy lines in this nation's history. Your omission that General Mihailovic was awarded the Legion of Merit Award by an Act of Congress in 1942 and by President Harry S. Truman reveals the depth of this exhibit's deceptions. In whose interest do you work so diligently? It certainly is not the truth. These same generous Nazis liquidated over 1.4 million Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 80,000 Gypsies according to Holocaust documentation. They were aided and abetted by Croatian collaborators, and Bosnian Muslims, 22,000 of whom formed the SS Hanjar Division whose miserable task was not only to kill Serbs but to guard the railway links between the Balkans and Auschwitz. We now know that 740 Roman Catholic priests participated in the Ustashe and personally put to death tens of thousands of Serbs with their own hands-then fled through the "Vatican Ratline" for Argentina where they escaped justice. The crimes of these Catholic priests make current pedophile cases pale in comparison. In Cohen's book he uses the stamp entitled Borba Llgrozene Europe is Istoka (4+2KN) a stamp from the same period as the one on the cover of his book jacket-the stamp was created in Leipzig, Germany months before the war. Cohen makes no reference in his book to the Nazi stamp with its obvious Fascist image, the Croatian checkerboard symbol, which was used during the Holocaust and is now utilized on the current Croatian flag. Croats will insist that "The checkerboard symbol dates from the 15th century." I remind you Mr. Kendall, the Swastika originates from the Bronze Age, but do we really care when these symbols originated? Are we not more outraged in the way such symbols were used and now reused in Croatia? The other stamp used by Philip Cohen was Hrvatska Legija Stalingrad (Kuna 350). The stamp also clearly shows the 'before-the-war' Croatian collaboration with the Nazis. Germans knew they could count on the Croatians-even before they invaded Yugoslavia. THERE IS NOW NO DOUBT how it was possible for the Croatians to have hundreds of thousands of Swastika flags in their possession to greet Hitler's arrival in Zagreb as it is more than obvious now that these flags were manufactured secretly in Croatia in the lead up to the war. As a double victim of Genocide, in 1942 Croatian Nazis and their Nazi Catholic priests locked 97 Serbs inside their church in the village of Vojnic and burned it to the ground. Seventeen members of my family were killed in that massacre. In 1995, President Franjo Tudjman had the ruins of that church bulldozed to erase from history the hideous crime committed there just as he bulldozed the Jasenovac Concentration Camp and its adjoining Museum that attest to the liquidation of 1.2 million Serbs, 100,000 of whom were Serbian children, put to death by Roman Catholic nuns who used toxic soda to murder these children to save bullets. Tudjman would claim in 1992 that he, "Was a doubly lucky man that his wife was neither a Serb or a Jew." During Operation Storm in August, 1995 when 200,000 Serbs were cleansed from Croatia the last 5 relatives of my name were too old and too sick to flee. I was notified a month later they were found with their throats slit. Today, the FreeMasonery of San Francisco reveals an ugly betrayal of facts and history. You willingly resort to distortions and racism to serve you own purpose at the expense of the Serbs. Is there no depth to which you will not stoop? I remind you that after the Spanish Civil War it was Serbia that gave a home to fleeing Jews who prospered in Serbia for generations. Serbs who hid thousands of Jews during the Holocaust now share common graves. The oldest Jewish Choir in the modern world is not in Israel, it is in Belgrade! How dare you infer that Serbs are Nazis or anti-Semitic, especially by the use of fictitiously prepared stamps Mr. Kendall? May God have mercy on your rotten soul. A pox on all of your houses and FreeMasonry if this is what you stand for! William Dorich Los Angeles The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history including his 1992 book, "Kosovo." His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, The Arizona Republic and numerous Serbian publications to mention a few. He has appeared on more than 300 radio programs. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
