From Jihad Watch:
Julia Gorin: A Great Piece, but Still Equivocating
On New Year's Eve, Jihad Watch ran a wonderful article by a Roland Shirk, whose piece The New Conquistadors nonetheless needs just one point of guidance. Mr. Shirk conscientiously observed that Islam's demographic conquest of Europe is "the Kosovar strategy applied to a whole continent." A key paragraph read:
Indeed, I think the real reason why NATO and the U.S. struck so hard at the Serbs in 1999 was to teach Europeans a lesson: When sharia comes, you will not be allowed to fight back. You are being displaced as the Serbs have been displaced. Attempt to resist, and this will be your fate. Of course, the real atrocities Serbs committed against Kosovar Muslims cannot be justified. Besides being evil, they were utterly futile; the battle for Kosovo had been fought decades before, and lost.
It's in the second half of that paragraph that one sees where Mr. Shirk requires some guidance: "Of course, the real atrocities Serbs committed against Kosovar Muslims cannot be justified. Besides being evil...."
Instead of repeating the propaganda that came from a press which such writers don't otherwise trust, is it too much to ask that before writing, they take a moment to see how much of that MSM propaganda (today also promoted by conservative and other alternative media) turned out to be true? It just takes peeking into some Hague transcripts -- made easy by Andy Wilcoxson -- and then one can stop feeding readers the stale misinformation.
What real Serbian atrocities does Mr. Shirk think he knows of? There were some once the NATO bombs rained chaos on the province and things got out of hand, but compared to the far uglier and more rampant atrocities by Albanians that led things to get out of hand -- and then continued after the "peace" -- Serbian atrocities were negligible in the geopolitical scheme of things. The publicity that the mostly imagined atrocities got and which came directly from Albanian propaganda organs and ordinary Albanians who spoke to reporters under the watchful eye of the KLA, resulted from the tried and true Western modus operandi of vilifying whoever is the target of the West's aggressions or surrenders, in order to counteract any potential public sympathy for the target. The same thing was done to the Czechs when the Great Powers decided they were going to give away the Sudetenland. All of a sudden, articles began appearing in international media about the mistreatment of the ethnic Germans there by the Czechs. In the Kosovo case too, the Great Powers were working backwards from a predetermined outcome, whose success required putting black hats on one side and white hats on the other. That is, facts on the ground had to be created to justify a preexisting geopolitical strategy. The policy came first, and talk of atrocities came later.
Now, we are agreed that no government can keep all its soldiers, much less its irregulars, in perfect line. What the Yugoslav National Army could and did do was distribute the Geneva Conventions pamphlet to every soldier -- while fighting an enemy that operated by no rule book -- and prosecute any wayward ones for war crimes, which it started doing even before the international courts got involved, including in cases where the perpetrators were reported by fellow Serbs, soldiers and civilians.
One war crime does come to mind. But it leads to the question: If ethnic cleansing, rape and other war crimes were a policy of the Yugoslav National Army -- as nearly 100% of the world public continues to believe -- why would this Serbian soldier be begging forgiveness from an Albanian family for what he caught a drunk Serbian irregular doing in their house, which he stopped by beating the guy up? From a July 3, 1999 Sydney Morning Herald article titled "No systematic rape of Albanian women":
As dusk fell on June 9, a drunken Serbian paramilitary soldier burst into a house full of Kosovo Albanians and announced that he wanted "fresh girls".
For more than an hour, the stocky Serb assaulted three women at gunpoint -- sisters Vesa, 25, and Nora, 29, and their neighbour Lumturije, 24. Heavily armed and half-naked, the man was trying to penetrate Lumturije when an officer from the Yugoslav Army suddenly appeared. Appalled by the tableau of screaming women and innocent blood, the officer beat the paramilitary man, threw him from the house and begged the women for forgiveness.
"Like an angel, he saved us," said Lumturije, the small, shy mother of a five-month-old girl. "He was so bad, the rapist. We were surprised the soldier was so kind."
...Western officials have accused Serb soldiers of raping ethnic Albanian women as a tool of war. But while numerous credible accounts detail sexual attacks by Serb soldiers, it now appears that rape was rarely systematic and that allegations of large-scale "rape camps" and "rape hotels" will never be proved...[R]ape in Kosovo appears to have produced keen embarrassment among military leaders, who sometimes tried to help repair the damage by taking weeping victims to hospital. [...]
The words "Serbian paramilitary" and the crimes associated with them generally cause the inextricably propagandized to say, "Well see? Atrocities were committed." But these had nothing to do with why we went in, and on behalf of a far darker and more destabilizing paramilitary -- as the world is finding out -- called the KLA.
Another report, concerning the most notorious (non-hoax) war crime by the Serbian side in Kosovo (the likes of which, incidentally, was committed a hundred times over by Albanians before and after the "peace"):
"Serbia indicts four over 1999 Podujevo massacre in Kosovo"
BELGRADE, Serbia -- War crimes prosecutors announced indictments Monday (April 21st) against four former members of the paramilitary Scorpions unit in connection with the 1999 Podujevo massacre in Kosovo. Zeljko Dukic, Dragan Medic, Dragan Bojevic and Miodrag Solaj -- members of the unit that operated under the supervision of the interior ministry -- are accused of shooting at a group of 19 women and children from the Gashi family in the Podujevo village on March 28th 1999. Only five children survived the massacre, rescued by Serbian special police units who arrived at the scene. A fifth Scorpions member, Sasa Cvjetan, is serving a 20-year prison term for the massacre. (Beta, Tanjug, B92, AP, Jurist.com - 21/04/08)
Of course, who's serving any time for this Podujevo bus massacre in 2001, which killed a NATO soldier and 11 Serbs (including a two-year-old) trying to visit their already-killed relatives at the cemetery? Why, no one is serving any time for that:
The Albanian Police announced yesterday that, upon the request of UNMIK Police, it apprehended in Tirana three Kosovo Albanians suspected of terrorism. According to the Albanian police, one of the three, Florim Ejupi (25), is responsible for the murder of one NATO soldier and the death of 11 Serb civilians, who were killed when the 'Nis Express' bus hit a mine planted on a bridge at the village of Livadice near Podujevo in February 2001. Ejupi is also believed to be implicated in the murders of one international and one Kosovo police officer, as well as in the wounding of two police officers on the Pristina-Podujevo road in March of this year. The other two, Faik Shaqiri (22) and Xhevat Kosuni (36), for whom the German Police has released international warrants a couple of months ago, are also charged with murders and terrorist actions. The group headed by Florim Ejupi is said to have been located with the assistance of the CIA, whose agents have been intensively searching for Ejupi because he had succeeded to escape from detention in the US 'Bondsteel' military base, Blic reported. (June 9, 2004)
In 2006, a Canadian police detective working for UNMIK, Stu Kellock, told us a few things about this particular massacre, revealing how the wider game of Kosovo is played:
The all-time low in prosecuting terrorists and murderers in Kosovo dawned on February 17, 2001, when a bus carrying Serbs of all ages to visit a cemetery in Kosovo was blown up by Albanian terrorists as it passed along a road supposedly cleared by UN troops...In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, Kellock recommended that "a special task force be assigned immediately to the investigation. I expressed this desire to every senior official to attend the scene."
However, the chief detective's request was not granted, and "even more sinister was the fact that evidence from the scene was suppressed and destroyed even before the commencement of the official investigation. It was this lack of co-operation and direction that subsequently proved my intuition [regarding whitewashing KLA crimes] was correct."
Indeed, as The Washington Post reported in July of that year, "after the bus bombing, NATO paved over the crater on the Nis highway within hours, an act that several police officers said destroyed potential evidence." Furthermore, NATO did not share intelligence with the UN police, phone logs of suspects' calls were hidden in Monaco, where Kosovo's main mobile operator is based, and the main suspect miraculously escaped from the most secure location in all of Kosovo- the American Camp Bondsteel.
Referring to the dramatic jailbreak of Florim Ejupi, a [then] 23 year-old Kosovo Albanian whose DNA was traced to the crime scene, Detective Kellock said at the time that in his opinion, Ejupi "did not escape...in my opinion he was taken elsewhere for questioning or something and I still do not understand why we, the police in the investigation who held jurisdiction, were not involved." ... "There seemed to be a certain paranoia in dealing with the KPC [Kosovo Protection Corps/former KLA], and I was often delayed in making arrests or conducting operations until 'clearing' them with higher authority," he states.
Several other UN officials quoted at the time in relation to the bus bombing confirmed Kellock's suspicions. One was Christer Karphammar, a Swedish prosecutor and then Kosovo's first Western judge. He told the paper that "...U.N. and KFOR senior officials opposed or blocked prosecution of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, including some now in the KPC. 'That means some of the former [KLA] had an immunity. The investigations were stopped on a high level.'"
American covert influence was again detected with the failure to arrest another suspect, Sami Lushtaku. The newspaper fingered one Jock Covey, "...a U.S. diplomat serving as deputy head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo" as having been "...instrumental in blocking Lushtaku's arrest on at least two occasions... he told colleagues that if Lushtaku, who is popular in Kosovo, were jailed, it could destabilize the province on the eve of municipal elections and bolster hard-liners in Serbian parliamentary elections in December..."
OH NO! Not those Serbian "hard-liners" that I'm always losing sleep over! That's such a bigger threat than having Albanian terrorists running loose.
The upshot on the mastermind behind the Podujevo bus bombing? EULEX's first ruling upon taking over for the UN: EU judges free Albanian over Kosovo bus bombing, March 13, 2009
So we can see how much atrocities count for anything that our government does in the region.
What's more, if Serbian atrocities were so rampant as to warrant an international bombing campaign, why would news crews have had to toss Albanian refugee children into the mud to get tears for the camera? And why the need for the famous Rajmonda Rreci fabrication that fooled award-winning Canadian journalist Nancy Durham, who even after learning she'd been duped still couldn't manage to extricate herself from seeing the war as per official diktat.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in one case after another, what Albanians were doing to Serbs, Roma, Gorani and Albanians -- especially rivals and "collaborators" -- was inverted so that in print it turned out as Serbs doing it to Albanians. As Peter Brock documented in his book Media Cleansing -- and as happened in Croatia and Bosnia -- some of the victims of "Serbian atrocities" turned out to be Serbian victims of Albanian atrocities, but these details were either left out of news reports or discernible only in the last paragraphs of them based on the victim's name (meaning that a reader would have to be able to tell a Serbian name from an Albanian one). The effect was to pad the public's sense of rampant atrocities taking place (by implication Serbian ones), leaving otherwise fair-minded people like Mr. Shirk with a lasting, irreparable impression that during the war "Milosevic's atrocities" were the main ones and that our involvement had anything to do with them in the first place.
For decades before the conflict and for the decade since, Serbian atrocities were not large-scale (especially when compared to Albanian ones), and certainly weren't "ordered." Just the opposite:
SEIZED KLA DOCUMENTS SPEAK OF CAMPAIGN OF INTIMIDATION by Andy Wilcoxson (May 18, 2005)
Gen. Obrad Stevanovic began his third day of testimony at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Wednesday. Stevanovic was Serbia's assistant interior minister during the 1990s.
Stevanovic's testimony has been accompanied by hundreds of documents. Among his exhibits were KLA documents seized by the Serbian police during raids on KLA facilities. These particular documents were seized in 1998 during anti-terrorist operations in Leskovac.
The documents showed that the KLA had established elite squadrons for kidnapping and assassinations. The KLA had also established illegal prisons and so-called "execution squads."
The seized KLA documents spoke of the civilian population moving as the result of fighting, not as the result of any Serbian ethnic cleansing...The documents showed that the KLA was engaged in the intimidation of Albanian civilians. One of the documents was a letter written by the KLA that was intended for a particular Albanian. The letter threatened that this Albanian would be kidnapped or killed if he did not give his car, his pistol, and thousands of Deutsche-marks to the KLA.
Gen. Stevanovic gave testimony regarding the actions of the [Yugoslav] police. He said that the police only used force in special circumstances, and that they did not use excessive force...To bear this point out, Milosevic had Stevanovic read out the orders the police were given. The police were ordered to protect the civilian population regardless of their ethnicity, and to abide by the Geneva Conventions.
The police were specifically ordered to arrest military and police personnel who committed crimes against the civilian population. Not only were the police issued those orders directly, the orders were published in the Politika newspaper so that everybody would be aware of them.
Stevanovic testified that the police mostly reacted to terrorist attacks, although there were special circumstances where anti-terrorist operations were planned. Force was only used in these planned operations when civilians would not be placed in jeopardy. Force was used in a gradual nature. The witness said that force would start out minimal and then build-up as the situation warranted. ... According to the official statistics of the Serbian Interior Ministry, between January 1, 1999 and June 20, 1999, 3,614 Albanians were reported to be the victims of violent crimes in Kosovo [whether by Serbs or Albanians]. The MUP arrested 2,788 persons, including members of the army and police, for the commission of those crimes against the Albanian population.
The statistics showed that the NATO bombing killed 617 people in Kosovo, of whom 305 were Albanians, 253 were Serbs, and 59 were others. The NATO bombing killed more people than the anti-terrorist actions of the Serbian police. The anti-terrorist actions killed 564 people in Kosovo, the vast majority of whom were Albanian terrorists.
During Stevanovic's testimony Judge Robinson acted like he had trouble understanding the nature of Milosevic's defense. ... Milosevic's defense is very simple. Milosevic claims that the joint criminal enterprise, alleged by the indictment, never existed. The primary aim of his defense is to show that there never was a conspiracy to create "Greater Serbia" or to ethnically cleanse the non-Serbian population. ... Milosevic uses his defense as a platform to defend Serbia and the Serbian people. He has conclusively shown that the Racak massacre was a hoax, and that the Serbian police never executed prisoners at the Dubrava prison. ... Milosevic does not deny that individual crimes were committed. He is showing through witnesses like Gen. Stevanovic and Gen. Gojovic that those crimes were punished, and that they were committed in violation of the orders that the army and police were given. [...]
Even the man who was supposed to be the ICTY prosecution's star witness against Milosevic -- former Serbian secret police chief Radomir Markoic -- testified in 2002 that his forces had strict orders to protect civilians.
It's also worth noting the breathtaking speed with which NATO rehabilitated the supposedly ghastly Serbian military once NATO forces began understanding what they'd unleashed. This BBC article, printed not two years after the bombing -- and while Albanians spread their conquest to neighboring areas -- should cause one to question just how true the atrocity allegations coming from the selfsame NATO were:
Yugoslav army to spread out in safety zone (March 18, 2001)
NATO IS planning to authorise the controversial return of Yugoslav troops to the entire previously demilitarised security strip around Kosovo following last week's redeployment of forces in a small sector of the buffer zone.
The move will put the Western alliance on a collision course with ethnic Albanian insurgents whose guerrilla campaign to carve out a fiefdom inside the zone, in southern Serbia's Presevo Valley, has prompted the Nato rethink.
The speed with which the West has switched sides to work with Yugoslav forces following the fall of the old Milosevic regime in Belgrade has alarmed some military analysts because there has been little overhaul of the security forces since the Kosovo war.
However, the experiences that Nato troops had with the Yugoslav army during and after the Kosovo war has left them with a grudging respect for its professionalism. In contrast, they never felt at ease with the workings of a largely renegade, poorly trained and loosely allied Albanian force.
The latest decision has heightened the danger that Albanian extremists inside Kosovo or the Presevo Valley will turn their guns on Nato peacekeepers whom they accuse of betrayal, especially at a time when rebels in neighbouring Macedonia are on the offensive.
Tensions mounted in the valley ahead of a big Albanian protest rally yesterday when suspected guerrillas broke a ceasefire and fired at Serbian police posts. In a separate incident, one Serbian officer was badly hurt and another injured when their vehicle hit a land mine.
The three-mile wide Ground Safety Zone (GSZ) along Kosovo's borders with Yugoslavia was imposed by Nato after the end of the 1999 war to keep President Milosevic's military forces away from the territory. However, guerrillas of the Albanian rebel force, the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (the UCPMB) turned the strip into a safe haven to launch a campaign in Albanian areas lying outside Kosovo.
Last week, more than 1,000 Yugoslav troops returned to Sector Charlie East, a three-square-mile strip of the zone on the Serbian-Macedonian border, under a deal struck by Nato to restrict rebel activities. Within 48 hours, British and Finnish troops sent to monitor the redeployment declared it a success and Nato now plans to press ahead with the return of Yugoslav security forces throughout the GSZ.
Lt Col Richard Barrons, who headed the 15-man international monitoring team, said that he expected Yugoslav troops to be allowed back into the uncontested Sector A that stretches around northern and north-eastern Kosovo "in the short-term". That leaves Sector B, which contains the three main villages where Albanian extremists were battling Serb forces in the Presevo Valley before last week's ceasefire. ... Albanian guerrillas have made it clear that they would fight any redeployment in that sector...In the nearby rebel headquarters in Koncul, just inside Serbia, fighters were hostile to Western journalists whom they once welcomed. Shefket Musliu, the bearded, shaven-headed top UCPMB [KLA's Presevo extension] commander, aggressively ordered us out of the ethnic Albanian stronghold.
... Gen Nebojsa Pavkovic, the new chief of general staff who commanded Yugoslav forces in Kosovo during the war, oversaw Wednesday's re-deployment. Also included in the forces re-entering the zone were members of Serbia's elite Special Police Force and units of the infamous 7th Battalion, formerly based in Montenegro.
Lt Col Barrons, commanding officer of 3 Reg, Royal Horse Artillery, insisted that "one stipulation [of the deployment] is that commanders and soldiers should not be those who were prominent in Kosovo in 1999″.
A similar report from the same week:
Yugoslavia given green light to fight Albanians (March 11, 2001)
YUGOSLAVIA is preparing to use forces from the Kosovo war against ethnic Albanian radicals inside a Nato buffer zone - threatening to escalate the conflict spreading across the Balkans.
The move emerged as Albanian militants intensified raids on two fronts despite ceasefire talks sponsored by the alliance. The guerrillas snubbed the talks and launched attacks on Serbian forces in the Presevo Valley from the haven of the security zone along the Kosovan frontier.
An 11-year-old Serb boy was reportedly hurt by shrapnel. Another Albanian faction clashed with Macedonian troops on Kosovo's southern border. Against this backdrop, a specially-created Yugoslav task force will soon be sent into the buffer strip at the Serbian-Macedonian border.
A senior Yugoslav official has told The Telegraph that the force will contain units from the anti-terrorist police force, members of the old Pristina army corps and sections of the infamous seventh battalion formerly based in Montenegro. It could be deployed within days.
Nato's move to allow the Yugoslav units into the zone represents a policy shift because the alliance has consistently accused these same forces of brutality during the Kosovo war. Major Fergus Smith, the spokesman for the British sector of the Kfor peacekeepers, said he had no concerns about Yugoslav forces moving into the zone to face the Albanians.
He said: "Over the past two years, the Yugoslav Army have proven they are a disciplined organisation. They deserve Nato's confidence." The buffer zone, created two years ago to separate Yugoslav forces from Kfor peacekeepers, is the launch pad for daily attacks by Albanian extremists against Serbian troops and, more recently, Macedonians. Their aim is to annex the areas and unite them with Kosovo.
A pan-Slavic coalition force involving Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Bulgaria - possibly backed by Greece - may also be formed to combat a co-ordinated Albanian guerrilla campaign...
Intensified attacks by the Albanians have brought the region to the brink of another Balkan war. Last week, the conflict spilt into neighbouring Macedonia with armed Albanians killing three Macedonian soldiers on the Kosovo border and attacking an army-escorted aid convoy. Three Yugoslav soldiers died when their vehicle rolled onto a mine in southern Serbia. Nato commanders and senior Yugoslav leaders met on a roadside in northern Kosovo to put together a ceasefire plan to halt violence in the alley. ... International officials in Kosovo fear that Nato's efforts to clamp down on the Albanians might lead to the West's worst-case scenario in the province: Albanian weapons trained on Kfor, their former saviours. A Nato official said: "If one American soldier was killed or wounded by Albanian rebels, then the whole nature of the game would change."
As the valley, now filled with barren trees, turns green, the Albanian fighters will find it easier to launch their attacks. With deaths rising, Yugoslavia's policy of restraint - which has won President Kostunica praise from Western governments - looks increasingly untenable. A Serb police commander said last week: "No one can stop us from defending ourselves and our country."
What I've presented in this one blog is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to exculpatory evidence for the Serbian side in its war against the infinitely more terrifying and less morality-bound Albanian side. In addition to me, the late Daniel Pearl debunked the level and scope of atrocities that almost 100% of the world clings to as truth; British journalist Neil Clark has debunked them; writers Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz debunked them in The Washington Post. And all that is just a microscopic fraction of the myth-busting that has taken place over the past 12 years but which few trouble themselves with, especially after Milosevic did the liars and their believers the favor of dying.
In the face of the myth-busting or atrocity-comparing, people will often wave a dismissive hand at the whole thing, trying to exit the conversation with the cliche that's applied to both Serbs and Israelis vis-à-vis their respective enemies: "Oh, well, both sides were committing all kinds of crimes, blah blah blah." This is, as one reader called it, "a load of horsecrap used by the sponsors of savagery to slander the victims of that savagery."
In case the uninterested still haven't heard -- and we know they haven't -- the infamous Operation Horseshoe turned out to be a myth. Such that, quite entertainingly, the Prosecution at the Hague -- after it was shown repeatedly that Albanians weren't fleeing Serbian forces but NATO bombs along with everyone else -- tried to change the story. Get this:
Milosevic calculated that his crackdown would result in a NATO bombing that would cause the population to flee from Kosovo, thereby indirectly achieving his desired result of ethnic cleansing. (Following this stuff is addicting, I tell you!) Never mind that proportionally more Serbs than Albanians fled Kosovo during the NATO bombing (that is, during Milosevic's secret plan all along!)
The only American politician who was remotely skeptical about the reality of Operation Horseshoe was Alan Keyes. Excerpt from a 2000 Republican primary debate in Arizona (Dec. 6, 1999):
Moderator Judy Woodruff, of CNN: Mr. Keyes, another Kosovo question. You have said that you thought the scale of Serb atrocities there was grossly overstated and that what the U.S. did through NATO in intervening was more dangerous than what happened inside the province itself. My question is that there is a new report just out that [comes from] a neutral organization that confirms an overwhelming, brutal Serb campaign to drive out a million Albanians from Kosovo. Do you still stand by your view that the U.S. through NATO should have stood by and done nothing?
Alan Keyes responds: I understand the report, it confirms an intention, Ma'am. It's not entirely clear to me we react in foreign policy to intentions. We've got to react to facts. And the facts as they have been established on the ground do not support all the reports that came out in the course of that war, and you and I know it. The Pentagon has said so, others have said so. We have got to be very careful to not lower the threshold of intervention. It was the pretext of the abuse of minorities in Poland and elsewhere that Hitler used for his aggression, that other countries have used for their aggression. If we are to maintain the principle of non-aggression that has been the bedrock principle for which Americans have died, then we have got to be very careful not to set an example ourselves that allows an easy pretext to be out there in the world for would-be aggression. It's gonna cause far more trouble than the trouble we resolve, as we are discovering, I believe, right now in Kosovo.
In closing, I ask again: Which atrocities is it that Mr. Shirk thinks he's talking about? And why is it always necessary to bring up these nebulous atrocities even in articles that hope to get a reevaluation of that conflict going -- thereby perpetuating the public's moral and historical confusion about a conflict that we had no business in unless we intended to bomb the other side? Indeed, the mass of the Serbian atrocities that did take place happened once NATO unleashed chaos, a chaos that continues to the present day. The time for de-programming on that war is long past due. It was past due on September 12, 2001. But the public remains so indoctrinated and easily fooled that it inspires hopelessness about the prospects for humanity's future.
There is a reason that a right-leaning college student who in 1999 knew nothing about the Balkans except that Bill Clinton couldn't be trusted -- has named his website after a socialist apparatchik in Yugoslavia whom he would have otherwise never noticed, respected, or been sympathetic to: Andy Wilcoxson's Slobodan-Milosevic.org.
Milosevic was the left-leaning multi-culti "we're-all-family" Brotherhood & Unity type that Mr. Shirk describes in his article as facilitating the conquest of Western civilization -- for which the Balkans have served as a historical bulwark. He was not a "fascist" or a "nationalist" as accused. You are either a nationalist, or you are a socialist-communist sort, and Milosevic was the latter. Interestingly, in the wake of the organ-trafficking story, this obvious but suppressed fact is finally seeping into articles. To wit, Stephen Glover in the UK Daily Mail: "[M]any on the Left had branded Milosevic a 'fascist' (actually, he was a barely reconstructed former communist)."
The point of the paragraph above -- that Milosevic was a multi-culti type who left his country vulnerable for takeover even without our help -- can't be overstated. That's why some of us recognized the bombing of Belgrade as a self-killing: we were bombing the same hapless suckers of Islam that we've become, and doing so on behalf of Islam. I saw us bombing us.
On that point, another name that has recently been speaking out occasionally on the West's evil in the Balkans is Daniel Greenfield, and he saw the intervention for what it was -- "Terrorizing Our Own":
In 1999, we dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Yugoslavia, bombing trains, fuel depots, homes, bridges and people. We did that in order to give the Muslim drug dealing terrorists of the KLA their own state. Today that state is a gateway for drug trafficking and sex slaves into Europe, and a training ground for terrorists.
I guess my bottom line on Mr. Shirk's terrific piece and other welcome works like it: If you're going to associate the word "atrocities" with the Serbian side, do the same with the far more culpable Albanian, Bosniak and Croatian sides.
Posted by Robert on January 23, 2011 11:59 AM
Julia Gorin: A Great Piece, but Still Equivocating
On New Year's Eve, Jihad Watch ran a wonderful article by a Roland Shirk, whose piece The New Conquistadors nonetheless needs just one point of guidance. Mr. Shirk conscientiously observed that Islam's demographic conquest of Europe is "the Kosovar strategy applied to a whole continent." A key paragraph read:
Indeed, I think the real reason why NATO and the U.S. struck so hard at the Serbs in 1999 was to teach Europeans a lesson: When sharia comes, you will not be allowed to fight back. You are being displaced as the Serbs have been displaced. Attempt to resist, and this will be your fate. Of course, the real atrocities Serbs committed against Kosovar Muslims cannot be justified. Besides being evil, they were utterly futile; the battle for Kosovo had been fought decades before, and lost.
It's in the second half of that paragraph that one sees where Mr. Shirk requires some guidance: "Of course, the real atrocities Serbs committed against Kosovar Muslims cannot be justified. Besides being evil...."
Instead of repeating the propaganda that came from a press which such writers don't otherwise trust, is it too much to ask that before writing, they take a moment to see how much of that MSM propaganda (today also promoted by conservative and other alternative media) turned out to be true? It just takes peeking into some Hague transcripts -- made easy by Andy Wilcoxson -- and then one can stop feeding readers the stale misinformation.
What real Serbian atrocities does Mr. Shirk think he knows of? There were some once the NATO bombs rained chaos on the province and things got out of hand, but compared to the far uglier and more rampant atrocities by Albanians that led things to get out of hand -- and then continued after the "peace" -- Serbian atrocities were negligible in the geopolitical scheme of things. The publicity that the mostly imagined atrocities got and which came directly from Albanian propaganda organs and ordinary Albanians who spoke to reporters under the watchful eye of the KLA, resulted from the tried and true Western modus operandi of vilifying whoever is the target of the West's aggressions or surrenders, in order to counteract any potential public sympathy for the target. The same thing was done to the Czechs when the Great Powers decided they were going to give away the Sudetenland. All of a sudden, articles began appearing in international media about the mistreatment of the ethnic Germans there by the Czechs. In the Kosovo case too, the Great Powers were working backwards from a predetermined outcome, whose success required putting black hats on one side and white hats on the other. That is, facts on the ground had to be created to justify a preexisting geopolitical strategy. The policy came first, and talk of atrocities came later.
Now, we are agreed that no government can keep all its soldiers, much less its irregulars, in perfect line. What the Yugoslav National Army could and did do was distribute the Geneva Conventions pamphlet to every soldier -- while fighting an enemy that operated by no rule book -- and prosecute any wayward ones for war crimes, which it started doing even before the international courts got involved, including in cases where the perpetrators were reported by fellow Serbs, soldiers and civilians.
One war crime does come to mind. But it leads to the question: If ethnic cleansing, rape and other war crimes were a policy of the Yugoslav National Army -- as nearly 100% of the world public continues to believe -- why would this Serbian soldier be begging forgiveness from an Albanian family for what he caught a drunk Serbian irregular doing in their house, which he stopped by beating the guy up? From a July 3, 1999 Sydney Morning Herald article titled "No systematic rape of Albanian women":
As dusk fell on June 9, a drunken Serbian paramilitary soldier burst into a house full of Kosovo Albanians and announced that he wanted "fresh girls".
For more than an hour, the stocky Serb assaulted three women at gunpoint -- sisters Vesa, 25, and Nora, 29, and their neighbour Lumturije, 24. Heavily armed and half-naked, the man was trying to penetrate Lumturije when an officer from the Yugoslav Army suddenly appeared. Appalled by the tableau of screaming women and innocent blood, the officer beat the paramilitary man, threw him from the house and begged the women for forgiveness.
"Like an angel, he saved us," said Lumturije, the small, shy mother of a five-month-old girl. "He was so bad, the rapist. We were surprised the soldier was so kind."
...Western officials have accused Serb soldiers of raping ethnic Albanian women as a tool of war. But while numerous credible accounts detail sexual attacks by Serb soldiers, it now appears that rape was rarely systematic and that allegations of large-scale "rape camps" and "rape hotels" will never be proved...[R]ape in Kosovo appears to have produced keen embarrassment among military leaders, who sometimes tried to help repair the damage by taking weeping victims to hospital. [...]
The words "Serbian paramilitary" and the crimes associated with them generally cause the inextricably propagandized to say, "Well see? Atrocities were committed." But these had nothing to do with why we went in, and on behalf of a far darker and more destabilizing paramilitary -- as the world is finding out -- called the KLA.
Another report, concerning the most notorious (non-hoax) war crime by the Serbian side in Kosovo (the likes of which, incidentally, was committed a hundred times over by Albanians before and after the "peace"):
"Serbia indicts four over 1999 Podujevo massacre in Kosovo"
BELGRADE, Serbia -- War crimes prosecutors announced indictments Monday (April 21st) against four former members of the paramilitary Scorpions unit in connection with the 1999 Podujevo massacre in Kosovo. Zeljko Dukic, Dragan Medic, Dragan Bojevic and Miodrag Solaj -- members of the unit that operated under the supervision of the interior ministry -- are accused of shooting at a group of 19 women and children from the Gashi family in the Podujevo village on March 28th 1999. Only five children survived the massacre, rescued by Serbian special police units who arrived at the scene. A fifth Scorpions member, Sasa Cvjetan, is serving a 20-year prison term for the massacre. (Beta, Tanjug, B92, AP, Jurist.com - 21/04/08)
Of course, who's serving any time for this Podujevo bus massacre in 2001, which killed a NATO soldier and 11 Serbs (including a two-year-old) trying to visit their already-killed relatives at the cemetery? Why, no one is serving any time for that:
The Albanian Police announced yesterday that, upon the request of UNMIK Police, it apprehended in Tirana three Kosovo Albanians suspected of terrorism. According to the Albanian police, one of the three, Florim Ejupi (25), is responsible for the murder of one NATO soldier and the death of 11 Serb civilians, who were killed when the 'Nis Express' bus hit a mine planted on a bridge at the village of Livadice near Podujevo in February 2001. Ejupi is also believed to be implicated in the murders of one international and one Kosovo police officer, as well as in the wounding of two police officers on the Pristina-Podujevo road in March of this year. The other two, Faik Shaqiri (22) and Xhevat Kosuni (36), for whom the German Police has released international warrants a couple of months ago, are also charged with murders and terrorist actions. The group headed by Florim Ejupi is said to have been located with the assistance of the CIA, whose agents have been intensively searching for Ejupi because he had succeeded to escape from detention in the US 'Bondsteel' military base, Blic reported. (June 9, 2004)
In 2006, a Canadian police detective working for UNMIK, Stu Kellock, told us a few things about this particular massacre, revealing how the wider game of Kosovo is played:
The all-time low in prosecuting terrorists and murderers in Kosovo dawned on February 17, 2001, when a bus carrying Serbs of all ages to visit a cemetery in Kosovo was blown up by Albanian terrorists as it passed along a road supposedly cleared by UN troops...In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, Kellock recommended that "a special task force be assigned immediately to the investigation. I expressed this desire to every senior official to attend the scene."
However, the chief detective's request was not granted, and "even more sinister was the fact that evidence from the scene was suppressed and destroyed even before the commencement of the official investigation. It was this lack of co-operation and direction that subsequently proved my intuition [regarding whitewashing KLA crimes] was correct."
Indeed, as The Washington Post reported in July of that year, "after the bus bombing, NATO paved over the crater on the Nis highway within hours, an act that several police officers said destroyed potential evidence." Furthermore, NATO did not share intelligence with the UN police, phone logs of suspects' calls were hidden in Monaco, where Kosovo's main mobile operator is based, and the main suspect miraculously escaped from the most secure location in all of Kosovo- the American Camp Bondsteel.
Referring to the dramatic jailbreak of Florim Ejupi, a [then] 23 year-old Kosovo Albanian whose DNA was traced to the crime scene, Detective Kellock said at the time that in his opinion, Ejupi "did not escape...in my opinion he was taken elsewhere for questioning or something and I still do not understand why we, the police in the investigation who held jurisdiction, were not involved." ... "There seemed to be a certain paranoia in dealing with the KPC [Kosovo Protection Corps/former KLA], and I was often delayed in making arrests or conducting operations until 'clearing' them with higher authority," he states.
Several other UN officials quoted at the time in relation to the bus bombing confirmed Kellock's suspicions. One was Christer Karphammar, a Swedish prosecutor and then Kosovo's first Western judge. He told the paper that "...U.N. and KFOR senior officials opposed or blocked prosecution of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, including some now in the KPC. 'That means some of the former [KLA] had an immunity. The investigations were stopped on a high level.'"
American covert influence was again detected with the failure to arrest another suspect, Sami Lushtaku. The newspaper fingered one Jock Covey, "...a U.S. diplomat serving as deputy head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo" as having been "...instrumental in blocking Lushtaku's arrest on at least two occasions... he told colleagues that if Lushtaku, who is popular in Kosovo, were jailed, it could destabilize the province on the eve of municipal elections and bolster hard-liners in Serbian parliamentary elections in December..."
OH NO! Not those Serbian "hard-liners" that I'm always losing sleep over! That's such a bigger threat than having Albanian terrorists running loose.
The upshot on the mastermind behind the Podujevo bus bombing? EULEX's first ruling upon taking over for the UN: EU judges free Albanian over Kosovo bus bombing, March 13, 2009
So we can see how much atrocities count for anything that our government does in the region.
What's more, if Serbian atrocities were so rampant as to warrant an international bombing campaign, why would news crews have had to toss Albanian refugee children into the mud to get tears for the camera? And why the need for the famous Rajmonda Rreci fabrication that fooled award-winning Canadian journalist Nancy Durham, who even after learning she'd been duped still couldn't manage to extricate herself from seeing the war as per official diktat.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in one case after another, what Albanians were doing to Serbs, Roma, Gorani and Albanians -- especially rivals and "collaborators" -- was inverted so that in print it turned out as Serbs doing it to Albanians. As Peter Brock documented in his book Media Cleansing -- and as happened in Croatia and Bosnia -- some of the victims of "Serbian atrocities" turned out to be Serbian victims of Albanian atrocities, but these details were either left out of news reports or discernible only in the last paragraphs of them based on the victim's name (meaning that a reader would have to be able to tell a Serbian name from an Albanian one). The effect was to pad the public's sense of rampant atrocities taking place (by implication Serbian ones), leaving otherwise fair-minded people like Mr. Shirk with a lasting, irreparable impression that during the war "Milosevic's atrocities" were the main ones and that our involvement had anything to do with them in the first place.
For decades before the conflict and for the decade since, Serbian atrocities were not large-scale (especially when compared to Albanian ones), and certainly weren't "ordered." Just the opposite:
SEIZED KLA DOCUMENTS SPEAK OF CAMPAIGN OF INTIMIDATION by Andy Wilcoxson (May 18, 2005)
Gen. Obrad Stevanovic began his third day of testimony at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Wednesday. Stevanovic was Serbia's assistant interior minister during the 1990s.
Stevanovic's testimony has been accompanied by hundreds of documents. Among his exhibits were KLA documents seized by the Serbian police during raids on KLA facilities. These particular documents were seized in 1998 during anti-terrorist operations in Leskovac.
The documents showed that the KLA had established elite squadrons for kidnapping and assassinations. The KLA had also established illegal prisons and so-called "execution squads."
The seized KLA documents spoke of the civilian population moving as the result of fighting, not as the result of any Serbian ethnic cleansing...The documents showed that the KLA was engaged in the intimidation of Albanian civilians. One of the documents was a letter written by the KLA that was intended for a particular Albanian. The letter threatened that this Albanian would be kidnapped or killed if he did not give his car, his pistol, and thousands of Deutsche-marks to the KLA.
Gen. Stevanovic gave testimony regarding the actions of the [Yugoslav] police. He said that the police only used force in special circumstances, and that they did not use excessive force...To bear this point out, Milosevic had Stevanovic read out the orders the police were given. The police were ordered to protect the civilian population regardless of their ethnicity, and to abide by the Geneva Conventions.
The police were specifically ordered to arrest military and police personnel who committed crimes against the civilian population. Not only were the police issued those orders directly, the orders were published in the Politika newspaper so that everybody would be aware of them.
Stevanovic testified that the police mostly reacted to terrorist attacks, although there were special circumstances where anti-terrorist operations were planned. Force was only used in these planned operations when civilians would not be placed in jeopardy. Force was used in a gradual nature. The witness said that force would start out minimal and then build-up as the situation warranted. ... According to the official statistics of the Serbian Interior Ministry, between January 1, 1999 and June 20, 1999, 3,614 Albanians were reported to be the victims of violent crimes in Kosovo [whether by Serbs or Albanians]. The MUP arrested 2,788 persons, including members of the army and police, for the commission of those crimes against the Albanian population.
The statistics showed that the NATO bombing killed 617 people in Kosovo, of whom 305 were Albanians, 253 were Serbs, and 59 were others. The NATO bombing killed more people than the anti-terrorist actions of the Serbian police. The anti-terrorist actions killed 564 people in Kosovo, the vast majority of whom were Albanian terrorists.
During Stevanovic's testimony Judge Robinson acted like he had trouble understanding the nature of Milosevic's defense. ... Milosevic's defense is very simple. Milosevic claims that the joint criminal enterprise, alleged by the indictment, never existed. The primary aim of his defense is to show that there never was a conspiracy to create "Greater Serbia" or to ethnically cleanse the non-Serbian population. ... Milosevic uses his defense as a platform to defend Serbia and the Serbian people. He has conclusively shown that the Racak massacre was a hoax, and that the Serbian police never executed prisoners at the Dubrava prison. ... Milosevic does not deny that individual crimes were committed. He is showing through witnesses like Gen. Stevanovic and Gen. Gojovic that those crimes were punished, and that they were committed in violation of the orders that the army and police were given. [...]
Even the man who was supposed to be the ICTY prosecution's star witness against Milosevic -- former Serbian secret police chief Radomir Markoic -- testified in 2002 that his forces had strict orders to protect civilians.
It's also worth noting the breathtaking speed with which NATO rehabilitated the supposedly ghastly Serbian military once NATO forces began understanding what they'd unleashed. This BBC article, printed not two years after the bombing -- and while Albanians spread their conquest to neighboring areas -- should cause one to question just how true the atrocity allegations coming from the selfsame NATO were:
Yugoslav army to spread out in safety zone (March 18, 2001)
NATO IS planning to authorise the controversial return of Yugoslav troops to the entire previously demilitarised security strip around Kosovo following last week's redeployment of forces in a small sector of the buffer zone.
The move will put the Western alliance on a collision course with ethnic Albanian insurgents whose guerrilla campaign to carve out a fiefdom inside the zone, in southern Serbia's Presevo Valley, has prompted the Nato rethink.
The speed with which the West has switched sides to work with Yugoslav forces following the fall of the old Milosevic regime in Belgrade has alarmed some military analysts because there has been little overhaul of the security forces since the Kosovo war.
However, the experiences that Nato troops had with the Yugoslav army during and after the Kosovo war has left them with a grudging respect for its professionalism. In contrast, they never felt at ease with the workings of a largely renegade, poorly trained and loosely allied Albanian force.
The latest decision has heightened the danger that Albanian extremists inside Kosovo or the Presevo Valley will turn their guns on Nato peacekeepers whom they accuse of betrayal, especially at a time when rebels in neighbouring Macedonia are on the offensive.
Tensions mounted in the valley ahead of a big Albanian protest rally yesterday when suspected guerrillas broke a ceasefire and fired at Serbian police posts. In a separate incident, one Serbian officer was badly hurt and another injured when their vehicle hit a land mine.
The three-mile wide Ground Safety Zone (GSZ) along Kosovo's borders with Yugoslavia was imposed by Nato after the end of the 1999 war to keep President Milosevic's military forces away from the territory. However, guerrillas of the Albanian rebel force, the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (the UCPMB) turned the strip into a safe haven to launch a campaign in Albanian areas lying outside Kosovo.
Last week, more than 1,000 Yugoslav troops returned to Sector Charlie East, a three-square-mile strip of the zone on the Serbian-Macedonian border, under a deal struck by Nato to restrict rebel activities. Within 48 hours, British and Finnish troops sent to monitor the redeployment declared it a success and Nato now plans to press ahead with the return of Yugoslav security forces throughout the GSZ.
Lt Col Richard Barrons, who headed the 15-man international monitoring team, said that he expected Yugoslav troops to be allowed back into the uncontested Sector A that stretches around northern and north-eastern Kosovo "in the short-term". That leaves Sector B, which contains the three main villages where Albanian extremists were battling Serb forces in the Presevo Valley before last week's ceasefire. ... Albanian guerrillas have made it clear that they would fight any redeployment in that sector...In the nearby rebel headquarters in Koncul, just inside Serbia, fighters were hostile to Western journalists whom they once welcomed. Shefket Musliu, the bearded, shaven-headed top UCPMB [KLA's Presevo extension] commander, aggressively ordered us out of the ethnic Albanian stronghold.
... Gen Nebojsa Pavkovic, the new chief of general staff who commanded Yugoslav forces in Kosovo during the war, oversaw Wednesday's re-deployment. Also included in the forces re-entering the zone were members of Serbia's elite Special Police Force and units of the infamous 7th Battalion, formerly based in Montenegro.
Lt Col Barrons, commanding officer of 3 Reg, Royal Horse Artillery, insisted that "one stipulation [of the deployment] is that commanders and soldiers should not be those who were prominent in Kosovo in 1999″.
A similar report from the same week:
Yugoslavia given green light to fight Albanians (March 11, 2001)
YUGOSLAVIA is preparing to use forces from the Kosovo war against ethnic Albanian radicals inside a Nato buffer zone - threatening to escalate the conflict spreading across the Balkans.
The move emerged as Albanian militants intensified raids on two fronts despite ceasefire talks sponsored by the alliance. The guerrillas snubbed the talks and launched attacks on Serbian forces in the Presevo Valley from the haven of the security zone along the Kosovan frontier.
An 11-year-old Serb boy was reportedly hurt by shrapnel. Another Albanian faction clashed with Macedonian troops on Kosovo's southern border. Against this backdrop, a specially-created Yugoslav task force will soon be sent into the buffer strip at the Serbian-Macedonian border.
A senior Yugoslav official has told The Telegraph that the force will contain units from the anti-terrorist police force, members of the old Pristina army corps and sections of the infamous seventh battalion formerly based in Montenegro. It could be deployed within days.
Nato's move to allow the Yugoslav units into the zone represents a policy shift because the alliance has consistently accused these same forces of brutality during the Kosovo war. Major Fergus Smith, the spokesman for the British sector of the Kfor peacekeepers, said he had no concerns about Yugoslav forces moving into the zone to face the Albanians.
He said: "Over the past two years, the Yugoslav Army have proven they are a disciplined organisation. They deserve Nato's confidence." The buffer zone, created two years ago to separate Yugoslav forces from Kfor peacekeepers, is the launch pad for daily attacks by Albanian extremists against Serbian troops and, more recently, Macedonians. Their aim is to annex the areas and unite them with Kosovo.
A pan-Slavic coalition force involving Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Bulgaria - possibly backed by Greece - may also be formed to combat a co-ordinated Albanian guerrilla campaign...
Intensified attacks by the Albanians have brought the region to the brink of another Balkan war. Last week, the conflict spilt into neighbouring Macedonia with armed Albanians killing three Macedonian soldiers on the Kosovo border and attacking an army-escorted aid convoy. Three Yugoslav soldiers died when their vehicle rolled onto a mine in southern Serbia. Nato commanders and senior Yugoslav leaders met on a roadside in northern Kosovo to put together a ceasefire plan to halt violence in the alley. ... International officials in Kosovo fear that Nato's efforts to clamp down on the Albanians might lead to the West's worst-case scenario in the province: Albanian weapons trained on Kfor, their former saviours. A Nato official said: "If one American soldier was killed or wounded by Albanian rebels, then the whole nature of the game would change."
As the valley, now filled with barren trees, turns green, the Albanian fighters will find it easier to launch their attacks. With deaths rising, Yugoslavia's policy of restraint - which has won President Kostunica praise from Western governments - looks increasingly untenable. A Serb police commander said last week: "No one can stop us from defending ourselves and our country."
What I've presented in this one blog is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to exculpatory evidence for the Serbian side in its war against the infinitely more terrifying and less morality-bound Albanian side. In addition to me, the late Daniel Pearl debunked the level and scope of atrocities that almost 100% of the world clings to as truth; British journalist Neil Clark has debunked them; writers Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwartz debunked them in The Washington Post. And all that is just a microscopic fraction of the myth-busting that has taken place over the past 12 years but which few trouble themselves with, especially after Milosevic did the liars and their believers the favor of dying.
In the face of the myth-busting or atrocity-comparing, people will often wave a dismissive hand at the whole thing, trying to exit the conversation with the cliche that's applied to both Serbs and Israelis vis-à-vis their respective enemies: "Oh, well, both sides were committing all kinds of crimes, blah blah blah." This is, as one reader called it, "a load of horsecrap used by the sponsors of savagery to slander the victims of that savagery."
In case the uninterested still haven't heard -- and we know they haven't -- the infamous Operation Horseshoe turned out to be a myth. Such that, quite entertainingly, the Prosecution at the Hague -- after it was shown repeatedly that Albanians weren't fleeing Serbian forces but NATO bombs along with everyone else -- tried to change the story. Get this:
Milosevic calculated that his crackdown would result in a NATO bombing that would cause the population to flee from Kosovo, thereby indirectly achieving his desired result of ethnic cleansing. (Following this stuff is addicting, I tell you!) Never mind that proportionally more Serbs than Albanians fled Kosovo during the NATO bombing (that is, during Milosevic's secret plan all along!)
The only American politician who was remotely skeptical about the reality of Operation Horseshoe was Alan Keyes. Excerpt from a 2000 Republican primary debate in Arizona (Dec. 6, 1999):
Moderator Judy Woodruff, of CNN: Mr. Keyes, another Kosovo question. You have said that you thought the scale of Serb atrocities there was grossly overstated and that what the U.S. did through NATO in intervening was more dangerous than what happened inside the province itself. My question is that there is a new report just out that [comes from] a neutral organization that confirms an overwhelming, brutal Serb campaign to drive out a million Albanians from Kosovo. Do you still stand by your view that the U.S. through NATO should have stood by and done nothing?
Alan Keyes responds: I understand the report, it confirms an intention, Ma'am. It's not entirely clear to me we react in foreign policy to intentions. We've got to react to facts. And the facts as they have been established on the ground do not support all the reports that came out in the course of that war, and you and I know it. The Pentagon has said so, others have said so. We have got to be very careful to not lower the threshold of intervention. It was the pretext of the abuse of minorities in Poland and elsewhere that Hitler used for his aggression, that other countries have used for their aggression. If we are to maintain the principle of non-aggression that has been the bedrock principle for which Americans have died, then we have got to be very careful not to set an example ourselves that allows an easy pretext to be out there in the world for would-be aggression. It's gonna cause far more trouble than the trouble we resolve, as we are discovering, I believe, right now in Kosovo.
In closing, I ask again: Which atrocities is it that Mr. Shirk thinks he's talking about? And why is it always necessary to bring up these nebulous atrocities even in articles that hope to get a reevaluation of that conflict going -- thereby perpetuating the public's moral and historical confusion about a conflict that we had no business in unless we intended to bomb the other side? Indeed, the mass of the Serbian atrocities that did take place happened once NATO unleashed chaos, a chaos that continues to the present day. The time for de-programming on that war is long past due. It was past due on September 12, 2001. But the public remains so indoctrinated and easily fooled that it inspires hopelessness about the prospects for humanity's future.
There is a reason that a right-leaning college student who in 1999 knew nothing about the Balkans except that Bill Clinton couldn't be trusted -- has named his website after a socialist apparatchik in Yugoslavia whom he would have otherwise never noticed, respected, or been sympathetic to: Andy Wilcoxson's Slobodan-Milosevic.org.
Milosevic was the left-leaning multi-culti "we're-all-family" Brotherhood & Unity type that Mr. Shirk describes in his article as facilitating the conquest of Western civilization -- for which the Balkans have served as a historical bulwark. He was not a "fascist" or a "nationalist" as accused. You are either a nationalist, or you are a socialist-communist sort, and Milosevic was the latter. Interestingly, in the wake of the organ-trafficking story, this obvious but suppressed fact is finally seeping into articles. To wit, Stephen Glover in the UK Daily Mail: "[M]any on the Left had branded Milosevic a 'fascist' (actually, he was a barely reconstructed former communist)."
The point of the paragraph above -- that Milosevic was a multi-culti type who left his country vulnerable for takeover even without our help -- can't be overstated. That's why some of us recognized the bombing of Belgrade as a self-killing: we were bombing the same hapless suckers of Islam that we've become, and doing so on behalf of Islam. I saw us bombing us.
On that point, another name that has recently been speaking out occasionally on the West's evil in the Balkans is Daniel Greenfield, and he saw the intervention for what it was -- "Terrorizing Our Own":
In 1999, we dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Yugoslavia, bombing trains, fuel depots, homes, bridges and people. We did that in order to give the Muslim drug dealing terrorists of the KLA their own state. Today that state is a gateway for drug trafficking and sex slaves into Europe, and a training ground for terrorists.
I guess my bottom line on Mr. Shirk's terrific piece and other welcome works like it: If you're going to associate the word "atrocities" with the Serbian side, do the same with the far more culpable Albanian, Bosniak and Croatian sides.
Posted by Robert on January 23, 2011 11:59 AM
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