I thought Atlas readers would be interested in this exchange between intrepid journalist Julia Gorin (the foremost investigative reporter on the Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo conflict) and the dhimmi St Louis Dispatch.
It is revealing in that it exposes the media mechanisms involved in swaying (tricking) the American people into engaging in a war, wrongly taking up arms against Christians in support of Muslims (under President Clinton) in order to pave the way for an Islamic state in the heart of Europe.
On
Oct. 17, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which boasts the largest concentration of
Bosnian Muslims outside Bosnia, published one of its typical
Bosniak-bruise-stroking pieces, this time in the Religion section by writer Tim
Townsend. The particular event being reported on was a visit paid by Bosnia’s
ubiquitous chief mufti Mustafa Ceric, doing one of his usual “interfaith” numbers. Here is an excerpt from the
seemingly innocuous report from that evening:
Grand Mufti of Bosnia addresses St. Louis interfaith
gathering
About
420 people of all religious stripes converged on the Hilton St. Louis Frontenac
Thursday night to share a meal and hear from the night’s keynote speaker,
Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia.
Imam
Muhamed Hasic of the Islamic Community Center, a largely Bosnian mosque in St.
Louis, said Ceric was “the highest authority for Bosnian Muslims. He’s like the
pope for us.”
St.
Louis is home to between 60,000 and 70,000 Bosnians, according to the
International Institute, making it the largest Bosnian community outside Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Many of them fled their country during the Yugoslav civil war
of the early 1990s, an ethnic conflict that killed an estimated 100,000 people,
including 8,000 Bosnian Muslims during the massacre [sic] in 1995 in
Srebrenica.
…
“It means so much to us,” said Hasic. “He’s the most
respected person in Bosnia and in the diaspora.” […]
The
item recalled the steady stream of Post-Dispatch pieces which dutifully
reinforce the already cemented, exclusively Muslim version of the Bosnian war
that we get as the official truth. The newspaper habitually lavishes more
victimhood on the Muslims than they themselves ever imagined they could garner.
I recalled the Post-Dispatch article titled “The Long Shadow of Bosnia’s Genocide” by a
Patrick McCarthy, a victimhood-monger who’s apparently made a career of casting
the Bosniaks as innocent victims of genocide. A no longer online-accessible
excerpt of his Holocaust-language-laden op-ed from 2007
reads:
Thousands
of Bosnian Muslims and Catholics had been herded into the Omarska mining complex
outside the city of Prijedor where they were being subjected to unspeakable acts
of barbarism and cruelty. Images broadcast around the globe of skeletal Omarska
inmates echoed the Holocaust and awakened the realization that genocide had
returned to Europe in our lifetime.
…
After working hard to reestablish
themselves in a new culture, Bosnians from Prijedor now are ready to tell their
wartime stories. The St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center will present
an exhibit this fall called “Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide” that
will feature documentary artifacts, photographs and first-person accounts by
Prijedor survivors in St. Louis.
…
The Prijedor exhibit at the Holocaust
Museum and Learning Center offers us another opportunity to witness, listen and
learn as we renew a tattered commitment to the pledge, “Never Again.”
Of
course, we don’t need this hack to tell us what the Omarska camp was or wasn’t. But for good measure, a St. Louis Jewish publication
helped
shill for that “Holocaust” exhibit at the museum, which is a department of
the Jewish Federation. Even more appalling, Bosnian Ambassador Bisera
Turkovic — who issued passports to mujahedeen — inaugurated the exhibit.
Then
the next nauseus Post-Dispatch account came to mind, concerning a “Memorial
Quilt” that the Bosnians were sewing and hoping to place in the U.S. Holocaust
Museum. Here was the dripping, dramatic opening to that
one:
Tribute to massacre victims
By Michele Munz
ST. LOUIS
POST-DISPATCH
07/09/2007
Senahid,
17, student.
Saban,
48, father of six children.
Nino,
20, a journalist.
These
are just three of the 20 Bosnian genocide [sic] victims whose names were woven
into a quilt unveiled Sunday in St. Louis….The memorial quilt was woven in
Bosnia-Herzegovina to commemorate the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica.
…
“It
is very comparable to the AIDS quilt in how it raised awareness,” said Nihad
Sinanovic, who was 11 when he escaped from Srebrenica in 1993 [i.e. bussed out
by the Bosnian-Serbs along with the rest of the women and children]. “It will
bring a lot of attention to how 8,000 men and boys [of fighting age] were
killed.”
…
[Advocacy Project director Iain] Guest hung the quilt outside
the Islamic Community Center in St. Louis, where a special religious
commemoration ceremony was held Sunday. He snapped pictures while women in
traditional head scarves laid roses underneath the quilt.
…
“It’s a
perfect idea,” said Rusmin Topalovic, vice president of the local group of
Srebrenica survivors. “We are going to work as much as possible to get all the
names on it.” He said he envisioned the quilt eventually resting at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum — “to stay there
forever.”
The
same summer, some St. Louis Jews helped
Bosnian Muslims get a new mosque approved by the city: “Jews help Muslims fight county council,” July 16, 2007, by Tim
Townsend:
When
Rick Isserman found out last month that St. Louis County wouldn’t allow a group
of Muslims to build a new mosque in south St. Louis County, the story sounded
too familiar.
Forty-eight
years earlier, Isserman’s grandfather, Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman, fought to move
his congregation, Temple Israel, from the city to the county, where the Jewish
population had been relocating for some years. The city of Creve Coeur cited
zoning problems and tried to block the move, but the rabbi and his flock took
the case to the Missouri Supreme Court and prevailed.
…
In the spring, the
St. Louis County Council refused the Islamic Community Center’s request to
rezone a 4.7-acre parcel it bought a year before for $1.25 million. The Muslims
— mostly Bosnian immigrants — planned to build a second mosque and community
center in addition to the current mosque and center off South Kingshighway in
St. Louis.
When
Khalid Shah, a member of the mosque and a friend of Isserman’s, told him about
the council’s decision, the 53-year-old Department of Agriculture employee began
making the connection to his family’s legal legacy. “I’m fighting the same
battle as my grandfather 50 years ago,” Isserman said. “It’s a different
community and a different place, but it’s the same issue.”
A
county attorney brushed off notions that the dispute is rooted in dramatic
constitutional questions of religious freedom… “They didn’t think it was
appropriate zoning,” [Robert Grant] said…[T]he charge of discrimination is
contentious, even among Bosnians. “In my opinion this was not religious
discrimination,” said Sukrija Dzidzovic, publisher and editor of Sabah, a
Bosnian-American weekly newspaper based in St. Louis. “This was a mistake on
Imam Hasic’s part. He should not have bought land that was zoned for commercial
use, hoping that he could change the zoning.” […]
Finally,
I remembered another Post-Dispatch piece from that year, titled “Local Bosnians
condemn U.N. acquittal of Serbia in genocide,” (Feb. 27) which yet again
presented the Muslim side with sympathetic indignation:
They
saw their houses destroyed, family members killed and were forced to flee their
homeland. On Monday, many Bosnians in St. Louis suffered what they called their
latest indignity when the International Court of Justice cleared Serbia of
direct intent to commit genocide although it says the country failed to prevent
the 1995 massacre [sic] at Srebrenica.
…
On Gravois Avenue near Bevo Mill,
in the heart of the St. Louis Bosnian community, the court’s ruling was met with
indignation and anger. “Obviously, I’m upset,” said Enes Bajric, as he sat in a
booth at Cafe Milano, smoked and sipped strong coffee. Bajric, 24, came to St.
Louis 10 years ago. He lost an uncle and two cousins in the war. “It can never
be repaired, what’s been done to us,'’ he said. “They killed us.”
…
“With
this ruling, the world has confirmed that genocide and extermination of European
Muslims was justified, and anyone who wants to continue and do it again will
have support from Europe,” said [Amir] Hotich, a travel agency owner who also
operates a Bosnian language newspaper.
SO
GETTING TO THE POINT. By the time I read about the mufti’s recent visit, I’d
already had enough. So I decided to politely reach out to one of the nobodies
who runs that small pond press. The letters editor seemed like a logical choice
to start with. And so I emailed letters editor Jamie Riley the
following:
Dear
Ms. Riley,
Is
it too late to respond to a piece that ran on Oct. 17??
It’s
actually a rather important letter, as it responds to the benevolent
presentation of the Bosnian mufti to your readers. In fact, he speaks out of one
side of his mouth when speaking to Westerners, and out of another when speaking
in Bosnia or to Muslims in Europe. Criticized recently by the Bosnian-Muslim
media (for glossing over a pedophilic imam’s crimes), he accused the Bosnians of
Islamophobia. But that’s the least of the disturbing news about chief mufti
Mustafa Ceric. He’s not the man that Tim Townsend is portraying to your
readers.
Sorry
for the yapping. Would just like to hear if it’s not too late to proceed with a
letter about the grand mufti.
Best,
Julia Gorin
Las
Vegas
I
got an immediate, pleasant reply:
From:
Jamie Riley [mailto:jamieriley@post-dispatch.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 27,
2009 5:20 PM
To: Julia Gorin
Subject: RE: quick question: is it too
late…
It’s
not too late.
I
look forward to reading your letter.
Jamie
So
I wrote the following letter and emailed it to Ms. Riley that night. Here is
what it said:
Dear
Jamie,
I spent the last three hours cutting this in half. I’m still over the
proper word count, but I wanted to give you the option of determining what’s
most interesting to keep in, and what can go. Thanks again, and I’ll stay
tuned.
Yours,
Julia Gorin
==============
Dear
Editor:
Your
paper should be careful about inuring readers to the Bosnian mufti Mustafa Ceric
as he does the interfaith tango on our shores. (“Grand Mufti of Bosnia addresses
St. Louis interfaith gathering,” Oct. 17.) These one-way tolerance-building
exercises have been a good cover for the mufti, who says one thing to Western
audiences and another to European Muslims. They also help fair-minded Americans
let their guards down. But Ceric’s background calls for our guards to be
up.
Ceric
twice this summer called for incorporating Sharia law into the Bosnian
constitution — which also governs increasingly wary Catholic Croats and Orthodox
Serbs. He recently conducted Bosnia’s first mass Sharia wedding, paid for by
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Before that, Ceric suggested that all European Muslims
should have a single political and religious leader, and last year he defended
fundamentalists who beat up a TV crew reporting on a pedophilic imam. When
criticized, Ceric called the Bosnian media Islamophobic.
Ceric
regularly insists that no one in Bosnia is cooperating with al-Qaeda. In
addition to the disrupted, Bosnia-hatched plot to assassinate world leaders at
Pope John Paul’s funeral in 2005, the Washington Times in 2003 reported that
Bosnia “now serves as a base for al Qaeda operatives.” A 2004 AFP dispatch read,
“Osama bin Laden is actively directing terrorist cells in the former Yugoslav
republic of Bosnia.” Further, Bosnia’s Zenica region provided the training
ground for those who conducted a series of Baghdad suicide attacks in August
2003. And a 2005 raid on a Sarajevo apartment turned up suicide vests, exploding
bullets, rifles and a machine gun, to be used on the British embassy. The
International Herald Tribune recalled that “Bosnia gave passports to more than
800 former fighters and ‘aid workers’ from the Middle East.” These included 9/11
mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, whom Bosnia had secretly granted citizenship
to.
In
2007 Ceric attended a Mecca conference, hosted by the Saudi-funded Muslim World
League, which has called Jews and Christians “apes” and “pigs” and beseeched the
world’s Muslims to “put pressure” on Serbs and Jews. Ceric’s co-panelists
included authors of textbooks denouncing Christians and the “wicked nation” of
Jews as enemies of Muslims. The same year, Ceric dispatched imam Sulejman Bugari
to tour North America. Bugari has told his Sarajevo flock, “With the Americans’
help, [Jews] have again outsmarted the entire world, especially the economy. We
consume American-Jewish products every day…” At sermons he reminds worshippers
that “jihad was necessary and will be necessary.”
Ceric
was recently named by the Bosnian NGO ‘Croatia Libertas’ in charges it
filed against Bosnian-Muslim political, military and religious leaders for
war crimes committed at over 300 concentration camps set up for non-Muslims by
the Bosnia-Herzegovina government in 1991-95. And yet St. Louis Bosnians refer
to “the most respected” Ceric, “the highest authority for Bosnian Muslims,” as
Tim Townsend reported.
Townsend’s
article was just the paper’s latest in a continuous stream of dutiful
affirmations of exclusively Muslim victimhood and Serbian villainy. This doesn’t
do any favors for the wider readership, surrounded by the “largest
Bosnian-Muslim community,” as the paper likes to boast. The longer we adhere to
Bosnian war dogma, the harder it will be to stray from it later, as more light
is shed on that era. The Post-Dispatch must start giving St. Louis a more
realistic and balanced assessment of the war, and thereby of the community in
its midst. Salt Lake City got that assessment the hard way, via the 2007 Trolley
Square massacre. The Bosnian shooter’s father lied about his military record on
his refugee application. He wasn’t the only one.
The
following day passed without a peep from the initially responsive Ms. Riley. And
so did the next day. Not even a rejection, nor a response to my one-sentence
follow-up asking if I should shorten the letter further, nor to my note
below:
From:
Julia Gorin
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 3:58 PM
To:
‘jriley@post-dispatch.com’; ‘jamieriley@post-dispatch.com’
Subject: so am i
still staying tuned?
Dear
Jamie,
Just checking in — since October is almost over and Oct. 17th is
seeming more distant. You said you were looking forward to getting the letter
that I therefore proceeded to work on. I submitted it yesterday morning. Just
hoping to get a status report. Thanks much.
Julia
So
it was pretty obvious that my usual experience with mainstream editors and their
great wall of silence concerning the Balkans was replaying itself at yet another
clone paper. But in the event that Ms. Riley had taken a sudden vacation or
died, I decided on Friday morning to just make sure my letter would be
considered, and therefore emailed the next nobody — the paper’s editorial page
editor, Gilbert Bailon. Here is what I sent him:
From:
Julia Gorin
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 4:58 AM
To:
‘gbailon@post-dispatch.com’
Subject: The Post Dispatch’s Bosnian-Muslim
coverage
Dear
Mr. Bailon,
On Tuesday Oct. 27 I emailed Jamie Riley asking if it was too
late to respond to a piece that ran on Oct. 17. I explained why the Bosnian
chief mufti whose visit Tim Townsend covered was not someone that St. Louis
readers should be inured to…Jamie emailed back almost immediately saying that it
wasn’t too late, and that she was looking forward to my letter.
After
crafting it for several hours, then spending as many hours cutting it in half, I
sent it to her Tuesday night, so that she would have gotten it Wednesday
morning. But in contrast to her initial responsiveness, the entire rest of the
day — and then all of Thursday — I got only stone silence…
I
fear that, unless she coincidentally took a vacation these past two days, the
letter may have scared her off. (I include it for you below.) This is actually a
frequent phenomenon when editors are faced with the unthinkable: a dissenting
voice on the official narrative of the Bosnian war…
In
addition to illuminating mufti Ceric’s background, my letter made a wider point,
and perhaps that’s what scared off Ms. Riley. It was asking for a more
realistic, balanced, and accurate approach to Bosnia-related coverage than your
paper habitually gives…I’m not going to use the hostile word “pander” when I say
that I understand your paper’s need to serve your 60-70,000-strong
Bosnian-Muslim community. But sometimes a readership is better served when it is
challenged, and not always nodded to. The readership should be challenged to
recall what many Muslims of the armed Srebrenica “safe haven” did to neighboring
Serb villages — for years before they finally met with a response.
I’ll
understand if you simply delete this email. Not to sound too dramatic, but I
speak from my own experience and that of others when I say that casting a
critical eye on the Balkan wars is the hardest thing a journalist can do — and
so most don’t. Certainly if you endeavor to present readers with a more
realistic and accurate picture of the war and therefore some of those 60-70,000
in your midst, the paper will not have the peace it currently enjoys with the
news and opinion as it is. After all, Serbian-Americans are used to the
one-sidedness, the demonization and the futility of asking for balance, and
therefore do not call, fax or email by the thousands with angry reactions or
threats every time a paper publishes another fictitious claim about the 1990s.
But if your coverage ever did do what journalists used to do — create
controversy by presenting uncomfortable truths — you’d see a clear change in
reaction.
If
you’ve gotten this far, I thank you. The reason I wrote to you specifically is
that I don’t know what forum in your paper I could make this point in other than
the opinion section (there is no ombudsman section for longer
letter-publishing). In the unlikely event that you would be willing to publish
my nearly commentary-length letter below as an op-ed (it’s 500-some words), I’d
be willing. Or I could compose an altogether new piece if you indicate what you
feel are the most compelling points between what I’ve written above and the
letter below. Thanks very much.
Yours,
Julia Gorin
True
to clone form, Bailon didn’t write anything back either. And so the complacent
Post-Dispatch continues to enjoy the temporary peace it gets from coddling its
Muslim readership. Such that when the St. Louis version of the Salt Lake City
shooter Sulejman Talovic finally introduces himself to Post-Dispatch readers, it
will take them completely by surprise.
No
sooner did I call this small pond press’s attention to the real Mustafa Ceric
than there was an update on the good mufti, who has it in for the U.S.
ambassador to Bosnia, Raffi Gregorian, whom he accuses of being behind a recently published report and
criminal-network diagram “that featured a number of top Bosnian Muslim
political, religious and business leaders. Ceric and Fahrudin
Radoncic, the owner of the country’s largest newspaper publisher Avaz, were
shown at the centre of the
criminal network, which also included
the Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency Haris Silajdzic and the
leader of the Muslim main Party of Democratic Action (SDA), Sulejman Tihic.
…Ceric said the published documents resembled the “(Nazi
Germany’s) final solution for Jews in Europe.”
The
episode echoes Ceric’s comments from the summer of 2007, when Gregorian finally
first admitted that many of the still un-deported mujahedeen in
Bosnia have al Qaeda links and that there are Bosnian officials who help al
Qaeda by “hiding agents [and/or] giving financial assistance or false
documents.”
In
response, Ceric “accused Deputy High Representative Raffi Gregorian of spreading
Islamophobia with his claims that some persons of Afro-Asian origin who were
granted Bosnian citizenship are probably linked with this terrorist group…
‘It is a sin and immoral to link Bosnian Muslims with terrorist
organizations,’ Ceric said. ‘Such statements give us grounds to fear that
this is an introduction for the next act of genocide against our people,’ Ceric
told believers who gathered in the south-eastern town of Nevesinje for the
ceremony of opening a reconstructed mosque. In his strong-worded address, Ceric
said that the same language had been used about Jews before the Holocaust was
committed.”
So
that’s our Bosnian mufti. An excellent summary of this “pope” to St. Louis
Bosniaks follows, from blogger Colin Meade in 2006:
[Ceric]
demanded the introduction of religious education in schools,
and said that Muslims had to reject “European trash” — alcohol, drugs and
prostitution. He launched a campaign against ethnically mixed marriages. He
prohibited the sale of pork in Sarajevo — an order taken by the Western media as
proof that Islamic fundamentalism was penetrating the heart of Europe…He has
suggested that Bosnian Muslims should follow the example of the world’s 1
billion Muslims and reject western secular society.
According to
Ceric himself, Bosnia today is a halfway house between the House of Islam
(Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb). In this halfway house, known
as the Dar al-Sulh (House of the Truce), “Islam or the shariah cannot be
implemented fully, but the government should endeavour to put it into practice
as much as possible”. [So in Bosnia] “it is unrealistic to expect us to
implement shariah completely. That’s what I want, of course, but it will not
happen just like that.”
On
interfaith dialogue, Ceric has this to say: “Muslims who want to meet people of
other faiths have every right to do so but it is wrong to accept much from such
forums (…) Islam is the religion of God and it is the best way forward known to
man. In it lies the salvation of humanity, dignity and all that is required for
a creature to be classified as a human”. [incidentally does the last bit mean
that non-Muslims are non-human creatures?]
In
Europe, as Ceric explained to the BBC’s Dominic Casciani in February 2005,
“governments must essentially buy the trust of Muslims by institutionalizing
their faith — giving it state sponsorship through schools, official bodies and
so on…” He also calls for the establishment of a unified European representative
Muslim agency at European level. Thus, according to Ceric, the way for Europeans
to integrate Muslims is to allow — or even force them — to live under an
Iranian-style system governed by authoritative figures such as himself in the
very heart of Europe.
In
interviews with Western journalists, Ceric gives replies of the utmost
obscurity, hoping that our fervent desire that there should be no “Muslim
threat” will lead us to hear what we wish to hear.
But
the Mufti dissembles. “At a dinner to honour the [British] foreign guests who
attended Mustafa Ceric’s installation as Ra’is al-Ulama”, writes a British Muslim who was there, “Dr Ceric…spoke
brilliantly, totally at ease, free of the constraints that the presence
of non-Muslims had imposed elsewhere.”
In
closing, I’ll just note that my odyssey with the Post-Dispatch was actually my
second attempt to get a letter into its pages. I’d sent the first one to the
previous letters editor, a Maureen Tomczak, in response to the 2007
Put-Our-Quilt-in-the-Holocaust-Museum article, and it too was summarily
ignored:
Dear
Maureen,
This is the letter I had in mind. Just a warning: it’s not pretty,
it’s not politically correct, and it will be a bitter pill for many to
swallow…
“Tribute
to Massacre Victims” (July 9) quoted Srebrenica survivor group spokesman Rusmin
Topalovic as saying that he envisions the memorial quilt eventually resting at
the US Holocaust Museum. If the museum does agree to hang the quilt, it should
do so after it hangs up photographs of the Bosnian Muslims who fought alongside
the Nazis during WWII as part of the Waffen SS Handzar and SS Kama divisions.
These, too, are an important part of Holocaust history. As is the Jerusalem
Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who created these units of Bosniaks with the
intention of clearing Europe, and then Palestine, of the Jews — killing
thousands of Serbs, Roma (gypsies) and Jews along the way.
Next
to the quilt and these companion exhibits, the museum should display a photo of
the late fundamentalist Muslim president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, who
remains a hero to Bosnian Muslims everywhere for starting Bosnia’s war of
independence from multi-ethnic Yugoslavia — and who in his youth was a recruiter
for the Waffen SS. This would be the same Alija Izetbegovic who resurrected the
Handzar Division in 1991 and unleashed them upon Serbian and Croatian civilians.
[In
1991, six months before the civil war started], the cover article of a glossy
Bosnian-Muslim youth magazine named “VOX” was titled “The Handzar Division is
Ready…The Fourth Reich is Coming; Welcome,” and showed a drawing of a Muslim in
a Nazi SS uniform and a fez, with his boot on the blood-dripping, severed head
of the Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (pictured next to three other
severed Serbian heads). This Sarajevo-based magazine should be included in the
exhibit as well, along with photos of the mutilated, decapitated and burned
bodies of 3,262 Serbs killed by Srebrenica Muslims who were launching attacks
from that designated “safe haven.”
With
the full exhibit thus in place, Bosniaks might better understand how it came to
be that between 3,000 and 7,000 of their males of fighting age were put into
their graves after they refused to surrender their position at Srebrenica and
later fled with their guns blazing. Further, with the above-suggested reminder
of the contributions by their parents, grandparents and revered leaders to the
Holocaust, Bosniaks might also understand why their quilt should be rejected by
a Holocaust museum, though it probably won’t be.
As
a post-script I’ll add that, in the midst of my back-and-forth with the
Post-Dispatch, the next clone paper committed more of the same. This time it was
Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, publishing a Bosnian Muslim with his usual
lamentations about Western indifference to the self-imposed Bosnian-Muslim
suffering. So again, I set pen to paper and promptly heard nothing
back:
Dear
Editor:
It
couldn’t escape my notice that every relative Mr. Duric mentions as killed in
the Bosnian war ( “I Dream, but I’m Still in Bosnia,” Nov. 1) was a male of
fighting age. He might notice that he, a seven-year-old, was left alive in the
Serb-run concentration camp that the West gives Bosnian Muslims free reign to
compare to WWII concentration camps — where upon arrival Jewish children were
sent to the gas chamber and babies had their skulls smashed into walls. The same
happened to Serbian children in Croatia’s never-mentioned WWII concentration
complex Jasenovac, where Bosnian Muslims guarded the grounds and helped round up
Serbs, Jews, gypsies and anti-Fascists. So naturally, when Croatia and Bosnia
illegally seceded and usurped the internationally recognized borders of UN
member Yugoslavia, the regions of Serbs they took with them weren’t prepared to
live under the knife of the Croatians who had killed their families, nor under
the Islamic state that was the ambition of our pal, the fundamentalist Bosnian
wartime president Alija Izetbegovic.
Mr.
Duric wants readers to think that in the 90s only Muslims were placed into
concentration camps; pay no attention to the charges filed by the NGO “Croatia
Libertas” against Bosnian political, military and religious leaders for war
crimes committed at 331 concentration camps set up for non-Muslims by the
Bosnian government. Indeed, as Mr. Duric describes the feeling of seeing the man
who killed his father — perhaps in combat, but the writer won’t tell us —
walking freely, he doesn’t seem to have any qualms about the free-walking Naser
Oric, commander of the Srebrenica Muslims who slaughtered whole villages of
Serbs nearby. Nor is the writer disturbed by any number of other Bosnian-Muslim
commanders and soldiers who were either acquitted or had their sentences reduced
or overturned after the Hague — almost 10 years into the Tribunal’s mandate —
finally started prosecuting more than just Serbian war
criminals.
Amid
the phantasmagoria of exclusive and pure Bosnian victimhood, there isn’t an iota
of print space devoted to even one non-Muslim victim of a war that the Muslim
side forced — and then ensured when Izetbegovic removed his signature from the
1992 Lisbon Agreement. There are more documented cases of Serbian women raped by
Croatians (800) than the long-debunked figure that Mr. Duric recycles of
“50,000” Muslims raped by Serbs. (See Peter Brock’s 2006 book “Media
Cleansing.”) Mr. Duric’s statistical handiwork reappears with the “200,000”
Bosnian war dead that he attributes “to some sources.” Mr. Duric is cleverly
referring readers to pre-2005 sources, since the figure has been reduced to a confirmed 93,000 on all sides, expected to go up
to 100,000, according to Sarajevo’s Investigation and Documentation Center, as
first reported by Reuters in 2004.
Mr.
Duric continues to berate the West for not doing enough and reproaches the UN
weapons embargo — an embargo which we went around illegally in order to help the
Muslim side, which was also receiving help from Croatia, Iran, and thousands of
mujahedeen. Why was the West supposed to do even more than we did on behalf of
the bellicose party? Neither our one-sided help nor the one-sided history we’ve
been writing on their behalf is enough for Bosnian Muslims. But having thus
reinforced their sense of grievance, in response we get Bosnian Muslim Sulejman
Talovic shooting nine Americans in the 2007 Salt Lake City massacre (killing
five); a Bosnian conspirator named Anes Subasic in the North Carolina-based plot
that was disrupted over the summer; a Bosnian nexus for the plan targeting world
leaders at the pope’s funeral in 2005; and a Bosnian soldier’s bomb instructions
found by our troops when they invaded Afghanistan in October, 2001. To name just
a few.
I
am not going to call Mr. Duric a liar, because when a person has suffered
greatly, as Mr. Duric clearly has, it’s natural to engage in self-deception
about the big picture in whose crossfire he was caught — as were so many Serbs
and Croats who suffered at the hands of Bosnian Muslims and their chainsawing
mujahedeen accomplices. But it doesn’t mean the rest of us also have to keep
lying to ourselves about that war and continue swallowing the cartoonish and
exclusively Muslim version of it.
]
![Kurdistan](http://<a href="http://northerniraq.info" title="northern iraq"><img src="http://northerniraq.info/northlogo.gif" width="135px" height="68px" alt="northern iraq"><br>northern iraq </a>){kind=link}