American Jews and the Serbs
FrontPageMagazine - 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’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.