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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