Ratko Mladic

The arrest of Ratko Mladic- a general who was very good at shooting unarmed civilians in the head but not so good when his opponents could shoot back- is certainly welcome news and maybe means that some of his surviving victims can get some peace.

As with Osama Bin Laden, it is pretty clear that he must have had help avoiding detection for over a decade and that revulsion at his cimes is by no means universal in his homeland.There are also apologists in the West but as more and more evidence mounts their credibility sinks lower.

It is a tremendous pity that the Hague does not have the death penalty.

Bad Art & Fanaticism.

Before he became a war criminal, the former Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was a poet, in fact he even appeared on the BBC's arts programme Bookmark to discuss his poetry back in 1992 when they didn't do anything so vulgar as probe non-literary activities such as ethnic cleansing that philistines like me would have thought worth mentioning. It kind of puts last week's Question Time into perspective.

I don't speak Serbo-Croat but I'd be willing to guess that his poems were on a level with Saddam's novels and Hitler's paintings, which is to say crap. I don't say this out of simple prejudice or because I've internalised a kind of Halo Effect, in which I assume that someone dreadful couldn't possibly have redeeming qualities, but because of an observation made by Eric Hoffer more than 6 decades ago in The True Believer:

Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are outstanding examples of fanatics arising from the ranks of noncreative men of words. Peter Viereck points out that most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize. Hitler tried painting and architecture; Goebbels, drama, the novel and poetry; Rosenberg, architecture and philosophy; von Shirach, poetry; Funk, music; Streicher, painting. "Almost all were failures, not only by the usual vulgar criterion of success but by their own artistic criteria." Their artistic and literary ambitions "were originally far deeper than political ambitions: and were integral parts of their personalities."

The creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. So long as he is conscious of the creative flow within him, he will not find fulfillment in leading millions and in winning victories.

In other words fanaticism is a refuge for failure. I know some genuinely talented people have fanatical views, in fact extremism is often almost de rigour, but they don't actually take in the movement itself, they write a few words in support or wear a Sandinista tee-shirt they don't become key players in the movements.

Cuckoo Cuckoo.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic certainly seems to have stirred up the nutters.

The fact that it has taken 13 years to find a man who was living in a major city and writing a magazine column on alternative medicine suggests that he might just have had some assistance from the Serbian government.

Perhaps the alternative medicine will form part of his defence strategy- "No we didn't shoot them all in the head, we were simply applying a form of extreme accupuncture to release their negative chi".

Srebrenica.

The UN ICJ tribunal into Srebrenica have rather curiously cleared Serbia of responsibility for the crime. In theory the verdict that Serbian forces armed, supported and participated in some of the killings should be pretty damning, but no one would be a Srebrenica denier if they respected facts, so the likes of John Laughland are spinning as a vindication which it certainly is not. I was going to use this as another opportunity to criticise the buffoons at Israpundit (as someone who is sympathetic to Israel I find it embarrassing that they choose to identify with Israel), but is there really any point in responding to people, Ted Belman in this instance, who are so utterly ignorant they don't even know that Srebrenica is in Bosnia not Kosovo

.So the Court determined that the intent to destroy a substantial part of the group is required and for this purpose the “group” can be limited to a certain area. Thus the Court had to decide if Serbia intended to destroy Kosovo Muslims by killing part of the group at Srebrenica.

Nutters & Liars Part Two.

This post is a continuation of the previous post.

Lie #2
There was no massacre of Bosniak Men & Boys at Srebronica.

This is one of the most preposterous claims made at Israpundit, one example of the denial will suffice although I could provide further examples if required:

But it is the word “Srebrenica” that represents the most villainous use of this word “Massacre”. There, indeed, there was a ***real massacre, but it happened in the years before the Serbs retook Srebrenica, when thousands of the simplest and most innocent of rural Serbian folk were systematically liquidated, usually at night under cover of darkness, by the Islamofascists in that area. This was ignored by the Media and took place under the noses of the UN “peace” keeping taskforce.

Meanwhile, though, the truth about the Srebrenica Massacre that was pinned on the Serbs was that it did not happen, and not a shred of proof has been produced by Albright and co that it did happen.

Unsurprisingly every factual claim made in that passage is untrue. Evidence for the atrocity at Srebrenica includes:

Testimonies From Survivors.

The testimony of a man who miraculously survived the mass executions that followed the fall of Srebrenica was heard this week in tribunal’s biggest-ever case.Mevludin Oric is believed to be one of only 12 men to have escaped the July 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, carried out by Bosnian Serb forces soon after they overran the enclave.He said he had stayed alive only because he hid under a pile of dead bodies for hours before fleeing the execution site.

According to Israpundit, Oric must have made this up, and the people he accuses are actually heroes.

There Are Confessions By The Perpetrators.

These are even more damning than survivor testimonies, if you follow the Israpundit line then it must be difficult to explain why men like Momir Nikolic would confess to crimes they did not commit.

Some of the mass graves have been discovered.

No doubt there is a perfectly reasonable explanation why thousands of bodies or body parts have been found in the vicinity of Srebrenica.

The Serbian government admits it!

The Dutch Government Resigned Over Their Soldier's Failiure To Intervene.

Genocide deniers like those at Israpundit point to a Western conspiracy, but why would a government conspire to bring themselves down?

Some Of The Killings Were Captured On Film.

The video shows men wearing camouflaged uniforms executing a number of young men, two of which were identified this week by their families as missing after the fall of Srebrenica. Four appear to be minors, two in their Thirties.

The tape, which carries no visible time or date, begins with the alleged Serbian paramilitary unit members leading the six captives from a lorry through a wooded area to a place of execution, prodding them like cattle.

The Muslims walk calmly, with their hands tied, their eyes on the ground, looking subdued. The paramilitaries then tell their captives to stop, position them for execution and then shoot them point blank, killing four.

Serbian prime minister Vojislav Kostunica – for a long time staunch opponent of the tribunal – appeared on a press conference in Belgrade on June 2 together with the Hague chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte to announce the arrests, which came after the tape had been aired in Serbia.

Deniers of the Srebrenica massacre have somewhat less in the way of evidence. Indeed their primary source for there claims appears to be the website Emperors Clothes, and its sister site. Unsurprisingly this is not the only conspiracy those two websites peddle (it never is), the editor Jared Israel is also a keen 9/11 truther! Still the truthers look comparatively sane next to the Srebrenica liars at Emperors Clothes who claim, and I swear that I'm not making this up, that what really happened at Srebrenica was that the Muslim population was transported to places like Ireland and Australia by the Red Cross to make it look as if a massacre had occurred, in order for Nato to have a cause to attack Serbia.

It seems as though the Red Cross, the UNHCR, and a host of "western" governments around the world were engaged in hiding the fact that these men were not massacred.

Nutters & Liars.

Oliver Kamm has been writing recently about his encounter with the commentators of Israpundit, many of whom are, to put it kindly, people whom nursey hasn't dosed up fully.

To put it less kindly they are ill informed, paranoid conspiracy theorists who have developed a counter factual fantasy about the wars in the former Yugoslavia in which the principle perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing, particulary the Bosnian Serb army and to a lesser extent the Belgrade government, are portrayed as innocent victims who were caught up in islamist plots to turn Bosnia into an Islamic state. The victims of the genocide are dismissed as either non existant or as having brought their fate upon themselves.

Having once had an unproductive discussion with one Israpundit contributer (Felix Quigley, on another blog), in the wake of Slobadon Milosevic's death last year, I feel obliged to warn Oliver Kamm that things like facts, evidence or logic will be of little use if he is planning on changing the minds of the hardcore genocide deniers but as I am at a loose end I shall take some time to nail a few of the more obvious lies spread by Israpundit's contributers.

Lie #1.
President Alija Izetbegovic Was An Islamofascist.

This is a claim that has been made frequently by various Israpundit contributers. One frequently cited out of context quote (or often a misquote) of Izetbegovic's recurs repeatedly:

there is no peace between the islamic faith and non islamic social and political institutions.

This was from a book he wrote in the 1960s called the 'islamic declaration', which as Noel Malcolm explains in 'Bosnia- A Short History' was specifically referring to countries where an absolute majority of practisin muslims existed, it plainly could not apply to Bosnia wher only 43% of the population were even nominally islamic and of those, according to a 1985 survey, only 17% actually practiced the religion. So only 7% of the total Bosnian population were practicing muslims. As someone who does not not like what Islam itself very much, I must say the vision Izetbegovic wanted, in the 1960s, for islamic societies does not appeal to me at all but he clearly did not think it could be imposed on a society by force and Bosnia was a non starter as Islam was not widely practiced in any case. He explicitly rejects the creation of such a state by physical force.

By the 1980s the views Izetbegovic was expressing was even further removed from those held by islamist extremists, explicitly praising Christianity as a 'near union of supreme religion and supreme ethics' and praising Anglo American culture and philosophy, in a time where the USA was being regularly denounced as the Great Satan in Iran.

Ironically given the fondness of Israpundit for the epiphat 'islamofascist', the man who coined the word, Stephen Schwartz, is an unabashed admirer of Izetbegovic, who during the 1990s was being even more explicit in his condemnation of the islamic chauvinism of the Wahabbis and ayatollahs, telling an islamic meeting in Iran that:

The West is neither corrupted nor degenerate. It is strong, well educated, and organized. Their schools are better than ours. Their cities are cleaner than ours. The level of respect for human rights in the West is higher, and the care for the poor and less capable is better organized. Westerners are usually responsible and accurate in their words. Instead of hating the West, let us proclaim cooperation instead of confrontation

Is it even imaginable that the genuine breeds of islamofascism in Saudi Arabia or Iran could utter such words? It would be unthinkable.

The other claim about Izetbegovic is that he recruited for the SS during WW2, this is based on essentially no evidence whatsoever, so I shall not spend any time refuting it, but suffice to say if the people who make the claim had any evidence I am sure it would have been produced long ago.