The Appeasers of Ratko Mladic
General Rose, for example, effortlessly moved from coddling Mladic to demanding the impeachment of Tony Blair in the wake of the Iraq war. This paragon of the British military establishment found an unexpected ally in Noam Chomsky, whose defense of the Saddam regime was entirely consistent with his defense of the Serbs, right down to his poisonous accusation that the bloodshed in Srebrenica was mere “retaliation” for Bosnian Army attacks on nearby Serb villages.
Then there’s Tam Dalyell, a frankly sinister British parliamentarian who, like Rose, loathes Blair — in his case, for “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers.” At the height of the Bosnian war, the same Dalyell opined that the Bosnians couldn’t be the victims of ethnic cleansing, since they were Christian apostates who therefore did not qualify as an ethnic group.
And there are others: too many, sadly. For the sake of brevity, I will mention only one more member of this group: John Mearsheimer, an old-school realist who became a moralizer late in life, and only then in the context of his endless sermons on the shadowy power of the “Israel Lobby.” Consult the book Mearsheimer co-authored with Stephen Walt on that very subject, and you will find, buried in their interminably dull prose, agonized passages about how pro-Israel media moguls in the U.S. blind their audiences to the Palestinian victims of Zionist ethnic cleansing.
By contrast, in the New York Times, this is what Mearsheimer had to say during the Bosnian war:
[W]hether we like it or not, borders in the Balkans are going to change. Serbian military power has seen to that. Wouldn’t it make good practical and moral sense to organize and plan the border changes rather than to allow the chaos of war to decide them? Wouldn’t it make better sense to move populations peacefully rather than at the end of a rifle barrel?
The Bosnian war was, I contend, a dress rehearsal for the “anti-war” politics that have disfigured public debate since 9/11. The motley crew of realists, isolationists, and ultraleftists coalesced not in the rubble of the twin towers, but among the corpses of Srebrenica. That alone disqualifies their claim on the moral high ground. And when Ratko Mladic goes on trial, they will be judged alongside him.
The arrest of this murderer, Ratko Mladic, should also remind how utterly impotent the United Nations is when it comes to “protecting” people. You had Srebrenica, Rwanda, the Sudan, and lots of other places around the world where the United Nations guaranteed people’s protection and ended up failing miserably. And when you fail miserably in the world of geopolitical power politics, people tend to die. Lots of them, and the people at the United Nations seem to not see it as a problem that they’ve failed so miserably in this task. Of course, they had the “best intentions” to save those people, so I guess it was all OK in the end that they failed. At least they “tried.”
Which is why the United Nations is the most dangerous organization on this planet. They always “say” they will protect people and, inevitably, because of their crushing bureaucracy, they fail big time. And the results of this failure are a lot of dead people, as Rwanda, especially, demonstrated.
You would probably have much better results simply by having some regional alliances of countries that would assist each other in times of crisis. You may never be able to totally prevent another Rwanda from happening again, but it would be a lot cheaper than having an organization around like the UN doing nothing except making matters worse while spending a lot of money at the same time.
The UN is just as bad in providing aid (except of course, to the Palinazis, since they are the UN’s agent in exterminating the Jews, which is the UN’s primary mission now.)
After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the UN officials sat and bickered for weeks about how to set up aid to the survivors, while the US and Australian Navies were sending aid into Aceh within a day of the disaster.
Sorry, this article is nothing but lies, and it looks as though you drank the Kool-Aid that has been dished up in the western media since the 1990s.
And no wonder. If the truth ever got out that the US/NATO/EU has been, and still is, backing wrong side in the Balkans, a lot of careers would end, and some Americans would be hauled up for treason for supplying aid and comfort to our Muslim enemies who had already declared war on us at that time.
Oh, and BY THE WAY, as a Jew, Ben Cohen should be worried about the plight of his OWN people at the hands of the Muslims, not about the totally illusory plight of the Muslims in Bosnia or anywhere else, past or present. I have Jewish relatives and I know very well what the Koran commands that Muslims do to Jews. If he weren’t such an ignoramus, he’d know too.
If you want to know the truth about the Balkans conflict, please visit Julia Gorin’s blog. She does a far better job than I ever could in explaining all of this.
About the incompetence of the UN at protecting; did you know that on Friday a UNIFIL jeep was blown up in South Lebanon and an Italian soldier killed?
Sources hint Syria involved in UNIFIL Lebanon bombing
Diplomatic sources on Saturday suggested Syria was involved in the roadside bomb Friday that blew up a UN vehicle on a highway leading to the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon, Lebanese daily An Nahar reported.
Any of those UN members complaining?
The Bosnian War was one of the most confusing conflicts EVER. Apparently, the muslims were the good guys and the bad guys were the christians like Milosevic and Mladic and the Serbs were the bad guys and the Bosnians were the good guys. Or something.
What occurs in war is that both sides present the truth (aka propaganda). In 1974, I met and spoke with a christian from Yugoslavia. He had emigrated to the USA because he was afraid the muslims were going to start killing all the christians. So were the muslims the bad guys? Or was he lying and simply left his homeland for a better life in America?
Ben Cohen’s article sheds no light on the subject. Apparently, a British General named Rose was the bad guy, in concert with Milosevic and Mladic. But, don’t the muslims want to kill all the jews? If that’s bad, then killing muslims is good, right? No, apparently “ultraleftists”, who are generally anti-jew, are just as bad as the christian Milosevic/Mladic who wanted to kill muslims who want to kill jews and christians.
Toss in the claim that “entire villages were wiped out” through “ethnic cleansing” (although there have been no graves uncovered that contained the bodies of “entire villages”). A Newsweek cover from that time showed an emaciated man sans shirt which (in Newsweek speak) “proved” that Milosevic had concentration camps set up just like the Nazis. The photo, however, also showed well-fed fat guys with big smiles on their faces. I doubt that the jews in Hitler’s camps were smiling.
We will never know the real story, although I’m sure it’s out there. Any historian would be well-advised not to talk to Slick Willie Clinton about it, though.
While Mr. Cohen’s assessment of Mladic is correct the rest of his article is pure BS. The Serbs are not anti-Semites, the Bosniacs and the Croatians are. The UN’s failures in Srebenica have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. The Bosnians and Kosovar Muslims propaganda campaign serves as model for the those who would destroy Israel.
I know LTG Sir Michael Rose’s communications officeer and I have an autographed copy of LTG Rose’s book “Fighting for Peace.” The reason the Mr. Cohen doesn’t like Rose is that he didn’t play favorites and had a clear eye about the crimes of all parties in the war. The Bosniacs were every bit as brutal as the Serbs. The Croats were worst of all.
“The Serbs are not anti-Semites, the Bosniacs and the Croatians are.”
The Serbs, before and during WW 2, did have a history of anti-Semitism, and Nazis declared Belgrade the first “Judenrein” city in Europe in June, 1941. The Serbs were motivated by the traditional Orthodox Christian anti-Semitism, and their view that the Jews sided with the Turks who controlled Serbia for centuries. They were not the organized Nazi Jewkillers that the Croat Ustashe was, or the Bosniak Muslims with their SS Division, but they hardly had clean hands, either.
Don’t confuse the puppets in Belgrade with the Serb population in general. I know several Balkan Jews who can testify to both the pro-Jewish sentiments of the average Serb and their willingness to help save them.
I know some Serbs here in the States, and they are also pro-Israel, and yes, Israel has good relations with Serbia, including military cooperation. Israel has similarly good relations with Poland, which is also pro-Israel. But that does not erase the ugly history of how Jews were treated in both countries.
How many cultures abutted against muslims have taken on idiotic beliefs due to cultural osmosis?
too damn many..
Mr. R., what is the source of your information? Or are you this site’s version of Amanpour or Mitchell or Maddow or even the pathetic Joey BeeWhore, who just fling crap against the wall and hope it sticks?
My mother and father were both royalists during WW2, and neither uttered an anti-Jewish sentiment in the 40 plus years I had with them. Not only that, I grew up among Serbs, and never heard them say a cross word about Jews.
Ugly Maddy Albright’s fat “Oh, I just learned I’m Jewish at age 55″ ass was saved by Serbs. She’s living, gelatinous proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
I think you need to study some history. It was the Croats who were allied with Nazi Germany.
BY the way read what the Croats did to the Serbs of Krajina.
And don’t forget that it was the Palestinian Mohammad Amin al-Husayni who started his anti-Jewish pogroms in the early part of the 20th Century around the First World War and went on to become a recruiter of Muslims in Europe for the Wafen-SS creating a division for Hitler’s use.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Al-Husayni was involved in the organization and recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th “Handschar” division of 21,065 men, which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944,[152] committing numerous atrocities against their traditional ethnic rivals the local Christian Serbs.[140]
In 1942, al-Husayni helped organize Arab students and North African emigres in Germany into the “Arabisches Freiheitkorps,” an Arab Legion in the German Army that hunted down Allied parachutists in the Balkans and fought on the Russian front.[140]
In WWII Bosnian Muslims along with Croatians, were Nazi allies and willingly participated in killing of Jews. They did it right on the spot sparing the Nazis the trouble of transporting them to camps.
Despite this history the Bosnians recieved huge support from the Jewish community during the war with Serbia. I remember hearing Eli Wiesel talk about the subject. He was very influential in getting the US involved. Israel was supportive and took in Bosnian Muslim refugees.
Sadly it does not look as if there has been any reciprocal good will. Weisel has had to resign from at least one Bosnian organization due to presence of Israel hating Jihadists.
I do not know what the average Bosnian thinks about Jews or Israel. Probably not much. There are only a handful left and Israel is probably not a big priority.
Once again the need for Israel as a Jewish refuge is confirmed. At the outbreak of the war the majority of Bosnias small remaining Jewish community was airlifted to refuge in Israel. Given the state of things in the Netherlands and other European communities I do not think it will be the last time either.
At least we can be thankful that the Jews of the Middle east, Yemen and North Africa are virtually all in Israel now, although it was not their choice at the time. I shudder to think what their fate might have been otherwise.
The Serbs want to join the EU.
One of the EU conditions is that they arrest Ratko Mladic.
That is what this is all about.
Mr. Cohen seems to have his own bizarre agenda and axes to grind in this very poorly written article.
Um, if being a Christian means lining up 8000 men & boys who haven’t done anything, then count me out. I don’t care what side a country was on in WWII, that’s old history and we in the US do not believe in corruption of the blood (check out the Constitution.) yeah, and we shouldn’t play favorites between mass murderers and innocents. Very poor comments here.
rbj:
Your observations show more than a little a bit of ignorance. Croatian, Bosniac and Kosovar anti-Semitism is as real today as it was under Nazi occupation. When the Bundeswehr entered Croatia as peacekeepers in the mid ’90s the Croatians lined the streets to render honors to the German Army with the raised right hand of the Nazi salute. The small Kosovar Jewish community left the country in fear of the new political leadership. The Roma had no such ability and suffered at the hands of the KLA “freedom fighters”
So because some people are anti-Semitic, it’s ok to line them up and shoot them? When they haven’t actually killed anyone? Japan is still as racist as it was in the 1940s (and I like the Japanese, just do admit their faults) yet now we are allies. I don’t give a rat’s ass who was allied with whom 50 years ago. Holding grudges over the centuries is part of the Balkan peninsula’s problem.
“So because some people are anti-Semitic, it’s ok to line them up and shoot them?”
If they’re intention is to kill Jews, then yes, it is OK.
Sport, it’s not a few who are anti-Semitic it’s most. You also have shortfall in knowledge of the FRY. What happened in WWII had everything to do with how and why the Balkan Civil war was fought. Each faction was settling scores that laid dormant until the early ’90s
“Sport, it’s not a few who are anti-Semitic it’s most. ”
You are correct. And if Israel goes down, she can take most of those most down with her.
Tell it to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oh, wait. You can’t do that. Americans are the last people on the planet that should criticize what happens to civilians in a Civil War.
How many innocent Serbs were killed before the alleged massacre at Srebrenica? How many were actually killed in Srebrenica? The Spanish forensic team that was sent there said they found no more than a 100 or so bodies. When the enemy kills YOUR civilians, and you find that enemy hiding amongst its civilians, do you stop when you kill an equal number? How many civilians has the US killed when there were at war?
Hypocrites.
What about the appeasement of the Muslims?! The Muslims of the former Yugoslavia were far from being angels. Americans and western Europeans need to face the facts that Muslims committed many atrocities against Christians in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere after Tito left the scene. There has also been a sweeping under the rug of how Jihadism also played a role in the civil wars.
The Serbs and Croats were of course not blameless either, but its quite shocking how for the most part, the western media during the Yugoslav civil wars were willing dupes of the Muslims. Muslim leaders like Izetbegovich manipulated the media like a fiddle. There is good evidence that some–not all but some–civilian deaths blamed on the Serbs in places like Sarajevo were carried out as provocations by Muslims against their own people, in order to influence western opinion. And there are clear cases of other atrocities by Muslims such as Nasr Oric and others. Oric got away with barely a slap on the wrist.
Our fricki….oops, sorry, what is the good word? oh, our dear intellectuals tirelessly keep singing the same stink…sorry, charming song about so-called “Muslim victims”.
Did I fabricate something completely fictional?
“Bosnian Muslim victims” – who wrote these words, I or the author of this column, Ben Cohen?
I definitely didn’t. So, you count: 2-1=1.
And one importunate thought is gnawing at my skull: the entire so-called “World progressive community” did not recognize sovereignty of separatist Abkhazia and South Ossetia, rejects returning NM, AZ, CA and TX to Latinos despite their demands, but yet sooo tenderly recognizes the separatist movement of bloody Ustashe, oh, sorry, poor Bosnian Muslim victims…
Why such inconsistency?
Why “poor Muslim victims” can blow away thousands of Christians, but some definitely non-Christians like Mr. Cohen (this name is used in the Torah to refer to priests, if I am not mistaken) call Orthodox Christians “bloody murderers”?
Does anybody have an answer?
An astonishing piece of Muslim propaganda. For a second there I thought the late unlamented Richard Holbrooke had come back to life.
The Bosnian war was, I contend, a dress rehearsal for the “anti-war” politics that have disfigured public debate since 9/11
Obviously this Cohen guy doesn’t realise most of the Left supported Clinton’s “humanitarian” aggression against the Serbs, a people who were merely defended their homeland.
If the international community decides Israel is a human rights abuser, as it did with Serbia, will Cohen support a “humanitarian war” against Israel?
I always have had doubts about the massacre at Srebrenica. Firstly the story was exposed by Seymour Hersch who I don’t give any credence to. Next I’ve heard accounts ranging from a few hundred to 50000 dead. Which is it? There was a tear jerking Canadian documentary about a Muslim woman whose family was slaughtered by the Serbs and she joined the supposed freedom fighters against the Serbs. It was revealed after the war the story was a fraud. Her family was alive but it made good propaganda. The media as always pandered to the Muslims. The truth I doubt will ever be known.
Interesting how ordinary people with ties to the ex-Ygoslavia seem to think the Muslims there were a bit more cruel than the Christians that Mr. Cohen condemns.
Of course, we need to factor in his association with the Western Power Elite to understand where he is coming from.
The UN ignored the election fraud in the Ivory Coast and installed a Muslim over a Christian, and then after the war was “won,” they stood idly by as 1000 Christians were murdered. Iraq’s Assyrian Christians were safe under Saddam, but after Bush fought for “democracy” there, the Assyrian Christians were decimated. The survivors mostly live in a Swedish town now.
Mubarak was toppled under pressure from the West, and the day after he fell, the Egyptian military fired on priests and workers in a Coptic Christian church.
Meanwhile, the Power Elites in the EU send about a million Muslims into Europe every year, where they are given jobs and social assistance so that they can demonstrate regularly against Europeans and slander Christians.
Libyan rebels, with the blessings of the UN and most Western powers, are slaughtering black African Christians in some of the remote villages and are extolled as paragons of “democratic activism.”
Yes, we certainly do support democracy in the world — if by that you mean anti-Christian butchers.
A rather confused article.
The British and French via the UN got badly entangled on the ground in Bosnia for one simple reason – the Clinton Administration’s sustained refusal to put troops on the ground to help achieve a political settlement.
President Clinton even refused to act to order NATO troops to arrest Mladic/Karadzic after Dayton, lest it put at risk his re-election chances (all described in Holbrooke’s book).
When US/UK governments finally agreed in 1996/97 to arrest war crimes suspects, they nervously went for the ‘low-hanging fruit’ (ie lesser known suspects) first. That’s the main reason why Mladic was able to sneak away and then hide for years. (Note: I was British Ambassador in Sarajevo from 1996-98 – plenty about all this on my website if anyone’s interested.)
The attempts by different parts of the US establishment to blame the Bosnian mess on anyone but themselves (as echoed above) is pretty unedifying.
Care to comment on why the Dutch UN forces in Srebrenica were put on the ground with one APC, a few machine guns, no air support, and Rules of Engangement which did not permit them to fire their weapons to even try and accomplish their mission of protecting the civilian population Ambassador?
Or is that the fault of the US too?
The whole point about the UNPROFOR rules of engagement was that the UK/French forces who were risking their lives on the ground and saved tens of thousands of lives would not be able to do so if they had a more aggressive mandate.
The core UK/France position was honourable as far as it went. The policy problem for all of us was that the USA would not share responsibility for putting soldiers on the ground with them, but also would not accept responsibility for the likely collapse of Sarajevo were the UN forces to quit to allow US bombing to proceed.
Once it became clear at long last that only a US military presence on the ground would end the mayhem, we got the bombing of the Serb forces and then Dayton and a peace deal fairly quickly. It could have happened much earlier.
As long as an objective case can be made for the Serbs, especially given the animosity that exists between Serbs and Muslims dwarfs the animosity directed towards the Tea Party – ground rules applicable to all have to be established.
For, why don’t we see what overlap there is between Srebrenica and Jenin?
Because the amount of credibility coming from the Muslims is about the same as the credibility of Bernie Madoff.
The combatants in this conflict did not think of themselves as “Christians” or “Muslims.” They identified as Serbs, Croats, or Bosniaks. Religious backgrounds mark the boundaries of these communities, but a huge number were and are post-communist atheists. The former Yugoslavia is not the Middle East. It is no more religious than Western Europe these days.
And Mladic shot at anything that moved in Sarajevo, not only Bosniaks, but also Croats and Serbs who lived there in vast numbers.
Goodness me.
@David W. Lincoln – the difference between Srebrenica and Jenin is plainly visible to anyone not predisposed to conspiracy theories. One was a documented massacre committed by Bosnian Serb forces, under Mladic’s command, in which 8,000 were slaughtered. The other was a firefight with Palestinian terrorists in which the Israelis took extraordinary risks to minimize civilian casualties, resulting in 23 IDF soldiers losing their lives.
@Charles Crawford – perhaps you’re feeling a bit confused yourself. How come no mention of the arms embargo which your former employer, the FCO, helped to impose on the Bosnian government AFTER recognizing Bosnia’s independence?
“One was a documented massacre committed by Bosnian Serb forces, under Mladic’s command, in which 8,000 were slaughtered”
Hmm.. something doesn’t add up in the real world. Why weren’t muslims using their women as shields? I have not encountered so much reverence for women and girls by muslims in my whole time learning about islam..
I could explain how only males could be the only gender targeted.. If the muslims wasted the men, they could take their women as property.. best of all, the Serbs would get the blame because at that time nobody knew that MUSLIMS are manifestly evil people by indoctrination.
Ben,
Was Vlad Tepes a good guy or a bad guy?
btw.. there was no massacre..
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/05/julia-gorin-roasting-mladic.html
Provide proof, not speculation, propoganda, or fifth hand hearsay that 8000 were slaughtered.
You know, something like this:
“Belgrade was bombed by Anglo-American air forces on April 16 and 17, 1944, which was Orthodox Easter Day. The most important unit that took part was American 15th Air Force, based in Foggia in the south of Italy. This carpet bombing raid was executed by 600 bombers flying at high altitude. Civilian casualties were as many as 1,160, while German military losses were 18.”
I’m sure you’ll claim it’s a lie. Guess the pictures were faked, too.
http://artcoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/bombing-of-belgrade-1944.html
Then again, I’m sure you believe Obama’s “certificate of live birth” is authentic, too. And that it wasn’t a plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11, but a missile fired from the front trunk of a 1972 Volkswagen.
Once the USA had decide not to commit ground forces to help keep the peace in BH, it obviously was intolerable to those countries who DID commit ground forces to allow more weapons to pour into the country.
As I myself said to Izetbegovic after the war ended, it always had been open to the Bosniac-led leadership in Sarajevo to ask UNPROFOR to leave and then take their chances, with arms pouring in to help them. Of course they did not not do so, as they would have been crushed.
Basically, Izetbegovic refused to confront the Clinton Administration with the full consequences of the USA refusing to commit ground forces, and so then blamed the UK/France for ‘not helping the Bosniacs’ as his next best option. Maybe the best he could have done in the dismal circumstances, but still a wretched cynical policy. UK/French involvment on the ground saved the Bosniac community from being shattered.
The UN is a bad joke, it is nothing but a group of thieves and liars. If you want to see an army run away with its tail between its legs. Then just watch the UN forces without America to hold there hand.Now that obama is bankrupting America and gutting our military including in giving our enemies our secrets, so they will be our friends, what a joke. Europe you are on your own when the muslims rape and pillage your countries, America is broke and our military depleted of weapons to fight. Believe me the muslims are coming to Europe to destroy you. The only way to stop the muslims is help defend Israel, once they over run Israel. The muslims will be knocking down your doors, who is going to stop them? The muslims have been taught to hate and kill us from the time of their birth. That means anyone who will not submit to their pagan religion. They tell you this everyday but we run to and fro saying it can not happen here. It can happen here and will!
The UN should be thrown out of America without our money that we had to barrow to give them. Obama is a big spender with other peoples money!
‘And when Ratko Mladic goes on trial, they will be judged alongside him.’
No they won’t. Nobody on the left ever admits they are wrong and nobody ever holds them to account.
Incredible! This article is heavy with agitprop and disinformation. If you know anything about General Rose then you know that this article characterizes him in the opposite of the truth. If you actually study what happened you will know that the claim that the Serb killed 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica is untrue, a fabrication quoted endlessly by those that know little of what actually happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990′s. It is tragic that this is what passes for thinking in the West.
In 1999 US/NATO took the side of the KLA Muslim terrorist organization and waged ruthless war on Christian Serb innocents.
Alija Izetbegovic stated in the ISLAMIC DECLARATION that:
- “there can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions”;
http://www.balkanpeace.org/cib/bos/bosi/bosi01.html
NATO BOMBING — RETURN TO BARBARISM
For National Post, May 31, 1999.
For 69 days the democratic countries of the West have been systematically smashing to pieces a modern European state… The air strikes have degenerated into a war of annihilation against the Serbian people.
Even before the bombing, its economy had collapsed as a result of economic sanctions. …
It was a country that presented no threat either to its neighbors or to European security. Prior to the NATO air attack it was balancing on the edge of survival.
Despite this, our NATO leaders — without consulting their parliaments or their people — have chosen to bomb Yugoslavia into submission.
NATO has judged Serbian people to be collectively guilty of daring to defy an ultimatum, which no sovereign nation could have accepted.
The civilized world is now standing by witnessing the destruction of a country and annihilation of its people.
NATO is using the most dreadful weapons of modern warfare: cluster bombs and cruise missiles. Many of the weapons being used contain depleted uranium, which will spread deadly radioactive dust throughout the region, contaminating for generations water, soil and crops.
NATO’s unprovoked attack is a blatant violation of every precept of international law.
To their everlasting shame, our NATO leaders have chosen war over peace in Kosovo. They have abandoned diplomacy in favor of bloodshed. .. They have smashed the framework of world security. They have guaranteed that we will start the new century as we did this one, with killing and carnage. They have left us with a terrible legacy. With six months to go before the millennium, they have taken us back to barbarism.
http://www.deltax.net/bissett/a-bombing.htm
Cruel global jihad is waged against the world’s non-Muslim innocents – Western ruling elites help and empower Muslim jihadist supremacists in their goal of world conquest.
On the side of KLA Muslim terrorist organization, US/NATO waged merciless war on Serb Christians based on a PHONY massacre US/NATO knew never took place. That American and other Western leaders are rabidly anti-Christian and anti-Jew and highly favor and vigorously support the most radical elements of Islam is painfully obvious.
NATO War Crimes and links to Al Qaeda confirmed former UN Commander in the Balkans
We bombed the wrong side?
by Lewis MacKenzie
National Post, 6 April 2004
http://www.globalresearch.ca
Five years ago our television screens were dominated by pictures of Kosovo-Albanian refugees escaping across Kosovo’s borders to the sanctuaries of Macedonia and Albania. Shrill reports indicated that Slobodan Milosevic’s security forces were conducting a campaign of genocide and that at least 100,000 Kosovo-Albanians had been exterminated and buried in mass graves throughout the Serbian province.
NATO sprung into action and, in spite of the fact no member nation of the alliance was threatened, commenced bombing not only Kosovo, but the infrastructure and population of Serbia itself…
Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers.
The fact that the lead organization spearheading the fight for independence, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored.
…Those Serbs forced to leave joined the 200,000 who had been cleansed from the province since NATO’s “humanitarian” bombing in 1999…
Since the NATO/UN intervention in 1999, Kosovo has become the crime capital of Europe. The sex slave trade is flourishing. The province has become an invaluable transit point for drugs…
The objective of the Albanians is to purge all non-Albanians…from Kosovo The campaign started with their attacks on Serbian security forces in the early 1990s…
There was no genocide as claimed by the West — the 100,000 allegedly buried in mass graves turned out to be around 2,000, of all ethnic origins, including those killed in combat during the war itself.
The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo…
When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MAC404A.html
Maj-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, now retired, commanded UN troops during the Bosnian civil war of 1992.
US/NATO showed the world that you have reason to fear if you are not Muslim-but it is not always the Muslims who are to be feared.
Pay no mind to the trolls here, Ben. Ratko Mladic is quite plainly a war criminal and a fascist.
Arguing with Serbian nationalists and their apologists, in my experience, is a lot like arguing with Arab and Palestinian nationalists. The conspiracy theories, the hysterical lies (Srebenica is fabricated? Really?), the axe-grinding resentment, and the persecution complex is very nearly identical.
Let me ask you something Mr. Totten. I am Jewish, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight, and you can see earlier in the thread that I can be critical of the Serbs. But don’t you think the world media glossed over Muslim atrocities in that war, just like they do when the Palinazis blow up Jews in Israel?
You won’t get anywhere with M. Totten, no matter that the facts do not support the ‘accepted wisdom’ that the Serbs are bad and the Muslims and Croats are innocents.
Michael J. Totten is a personal travel writer–give him a break
He does not claim to have any expertise in US Foreign Policy, nor has he ever claimed to served in the US Military.
Some people like his personal travel writing–it is a niche market, but some people like it.
Well said, Eric R. and Arius. I am neither Serb, Croat, Orthodox nor Catholic, as Mr. Totten might assume. Mr. Totten stoops to ad hominem rather than an effective argument. He strikes me as yet another blinded member of the “Ruling Class,” no matter how many trips he makes to hotspots. Can’t seem to see the forest for the trees, like many other pundits of today.
For those of us who were reasonably sentient during the ’90s, it was obvious that much of the western media were severely duped by the Muslims/Bosniaks in Bosnia and the Albanians in Kosovo. There was a palpable desperation on the part of so many media figures to portray the Bosniaks and, maybe to a less extent, the Kosovo Albanians as victims worthy of almost unlimited sympathy and support. This would fit in with the templates of so many in the media. Well, the truth was a lot more messy and complicated. Yet there are still many with axes to grind on all sides, to promote their torn and tattered agendas. And this includes Mr. Totten and Mr. Cohen.
Yeah, it’s all just fantasy, right?
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/numbers.htm
Shame on those who accuse courageous and ethical Christian Serbs of anti-Semitism!
America’s Veterans The Serbian People Are Heroes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0vUQNqB6jw&feature=player_embedded
http://de-construct.net/?p=8114
The reason for our tribute to General Mihailovich is first and foremost our gratitude to him for saving the lives of over 500 American airmen whom he rescued. Despite communist disinformation both during World War II and after, preserved historical documents and facts conclusively demonstrate the General Mihailovich was an heroic anti-Nazi, but also an anti-Communist. It was the latter that led to his murder.
State Department Bureaucrats Suppress the Truth About Serbs
Why are the lifestyles of the red and famous untouchable? Why is there so little challenge to the reliability of Communist-produced evidence?
http://de-construct.net/?p=8114
I am forever grateful to the brave Christian Serbs who rescued American military and other allies. An entire village of Christian Serbs were barbarically put to death because they refused to tell where the Americans and allies were hid. The light that was their lives, lives on.
Pull back a thousand years or so and see where this all started, and that was when, for many hundreds of years, Muslim raiding parties (razzias) and armies marauded—looted, burned, raped, and took slaves–throughout and invaded Eastern Europe, and among other things, took so many Slavs from the area as slaves that some say we got the word “slave” from the term “Slav.”
Various bands of Muslim warriors/rulers proceeded to settle down and colonize many parts of Eastern Europe and to squeeze the unbelievers—Christians and Jews—they had conquered for loot, protection money i.e. “Jizya,” and labor, and to grind down their new subjects–dhimmis and slaves–under the comprehensive Muslim system of discrimination outlined in Shari’a law; one example being the Devshirme system, in which some of the heavy taxes on unbelievers were collected in the form of young male Christian children, who we forcibly taken from their families by Turkish Muslim conquerors and transported far away to be made into their soldiers i.e. the Janissaries (see, for instance, http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/10/ottoman_dhimmitude.html). Thus, the situation on the ground today, these mixtures of bitter enemies, of Muslim and Christian regions and nations in Eastern Europe, are the result of Muslim conquest and occupation of this originally Christian region over many hundreds of years, ending with the Ottoman Empire.
Flash forward to today, in which the same commands of Allah, the same Qur’an, Hadiths and Sira, and the same example of Muhammad that motivated the initial Muslim conquests of Eastern Europe are still as they were 1,400 years ago.
I don’t think we should have gotten involved in this rabid dog fight but, if we did have to get involved, I would rather have seen us backing fellow “unbelievers” rather than Muslims whose Qur’an, in the ultimate and controlling “Verse of the Sword,” commands Muslims to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them…waylay and ambush them…and…use every stratagem of war against them.”
Allah has commanded and Islam and Muslims are striving, in every way they can, in all parts of the world, to intimidate, subvert, confuse and, ultimately, to conquer or, if we resist, to kill us unbelievers, and it is the same whether we are talking about here in the U.S. or in Eastern Europe.
You are correct, but unfortunately few in the West know anything about Islam except to recite to themselves that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’.
P.S.–The various Muslim empires that were imposed on the conquered unbelievers were not productive but extractive in nature, and only survived as long as they were supported by an “income stream” from a few key sources; from the “intellectual capitol” of those highly educated, cultured, and technically proficient unbeliever slaves they captured–literate slaves, administrators, and craftsmen who provided the administrative support for those empires (and no doubt, produced most of the cultural and intellectual artifacts that are supposedly the hallmarks of Islamic culture, like ceramics, metalwork, architecture, and some mathematical and scientific advances), on profits from loot, on profits from the sale of slaves, on labor inputs from slave labor, and on the income from Jizya, the “protection money,” the percentage of their total assets that each of the the conquered unbelievers had to pay annually to their Muslim conquers to buy each year’s immunity from attack, spoliation, and slaughter by Muslims (and reportedly the living relatives of those unbelievers who died in any particular year had the deceased’s unpaid Jizya added to what they had to pay.
The immense Muslim slave trade (about which we hear practically nothing today) that grew up over more than a thousand years to “process” what has been estimated were some 17,000,000 slaves–mostly from Africa and India, but an estimated 1,500,000 of them from Europe (a far larger total number of slaves than were processed by the much more familiar and smaller Atlantic slave trade which lasted only 300 years) established holding and processing procedures and areas, transportation routes, and slave markets that were the template for our much smaller Atlantic slave trade. A whole gigantic extractive Muslim “industry” of looting and slave taking, processing, and sale that is justified and detailed at great length in the Qur’an, Hadiths, and Sira, and particularly in the Shari’a law that grew out of them.
In addition to taking Christian male children out of Eastern Europe to become Janissaries, Muslim slave takers were also focused on capturing the women of Eastern Europe, whose lighter skin and exotic looks Muslims favored for their Harems.
I would imagine that the cultural memory of hundreds of such years of Muslim imposed terror, oppression, looting, slavery, and systematic and crushing discrimination might make the recipients of such quite hostile to Muslims.
Seth — I like your term, “extractive.” Indeed the Muslims were so extractive they manage to impoverish everything they touched. In Roman time, north Africa (and specifically the coast of Libya and Tunis, and all of Egypt) were some of the richest parts of the Empire. Today, those areas are some of the most backward places in the world. But for its oil, Libya would be a backwater no one would care about.
What was General Rose’s name before he changed it.
The Bosnians are the descendants of Christian heretics not of Turks. Like many non-orthodox Christians in the middle east they went over to the Muslims because prior to their arrival they had been persecuted for holding strange views about the nature of the Trinity. When Islam tries to take over America which heretical Christians will join them?
mormons for sure… and any bahai influenced progressive christians
It is easy to see why many unbelievers, living under the all-encompassing and oppressive discriminatory regime set up by Shari’a law, would, under this daily, constant pressure, gradually—over the years and centuries-abandon their religions and convert to Islam.
An unbeliever, a “dhimmi” i.e. was someone under Muslim rule who agreed to a “dhimmi,” a contract of payment of annual Jizya and obeying the rules set by Muslims in exchange for physical safety; they thus became second class citizens or sometimes little more than slaves.
Under these Muslim rules, the testimony of a dhimmi was not accepted by Muslim courts—and one of the chief accusations by Muslims that voided the dhimmi contract and opened up dhimmis to attack, plunder, rape, and death was the accusation, that could be made by any Muslim, that a dhimmi had slandered Muhammad—an accusation dhimmis could never rebut because their testimony was not accepted by Muslims courts, dhimmis often had to kneel and be slapped around when they presented their annual Jizya payments to demonstrate their “submission” to Muslims, dhimmis could not own weapons, could not ride horses or have fine saddles, and had to leave the road to allow Muslims to ride on the good surface, dhimmis residences were often confined to a particular part of town i.e. a ghetto, dhimmis had to provide shelter and several days food to any Muslim who demanded it, dhimmis were not allowed to show any of the symbols of Christian or Jewish worship in public—wine, Bibles the Torah, crosses, or to ring bells– and could not speak of Muhammad, nor could dhimmis build new or repair old churches or temples, dhimmis were not allowed to build houses that were taller than those of Muslims, and dhimmis were often required to wear special identifying colors, clothes, or insignia, so that they could be instantly identified (supposedly the origin of the Nazis practice of forcing Jews to wear a Star of David to identify them as Jews). The dhimmi contract was a collective one, and any infraction by any dhimmi in a community voided the dhimmi contract for the whole community, opening all members to attack, looting, rape, and slaughter.
However, if a dhimmi converted, he was now a Muslim and paid no Jizya, nor was he subject to any of the former discriminatory provisions.
Since Jizya payments were one of the key sources of income for Muslim regimes, these Muslim regimes tried to limit the number of unbelievers who converted, thus reducing the regime’s Jizya income.
The ignorance about the balkan war is overwhelming. FIRST THING ONE MUST CONSIDER Serbs have the overwhelming amount of arms. They attacked Slovenia-they attacked and destroyed Vucovar(massacred-children as well)in Croatia- they attacked Bosnia(massacred the population)- they attacked Kosovo. They had a plan they had the weapons they have no morals. The comments that I see here are full of bigotry, ignorance, racism and hate. We can thank people like Noam Chomski, Michael Parenti, Jeremy Scahill, ETC. who are not at all motivated by human rights but by opportunistic political ideology. Those of you who criticize one group of people and give passes to others are making matters worse.-Please go to – BALKAN WITNESS by Peter Lipmann. Mr Lipman has been an advocate for peace and justice since the vietnam war and has been to the Balkans many times and has liven in Bosnia. He is also against US and Israeli policy in the M.E.He cannot be accused of being an ideologue -lap dog- like most of you here. Lets not dismiss reports from the Dutch Soldiers, Human rights watch (Fred Abrahams), Doctors without borders, UN high comm for refugees-people like Adam Shapiro, Noam Malcolm, and of course Peter Lipmann.AND PLEASE LETS STOP THIS INSANE DIALOGUE OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGY- HATE AND BIGOTRY AND STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE VICTIMS.