Serbs have been unfairly accused and attacked

By Ted Belman

If you are like me, you find it difficult to find the time to wrap your minds around the allegations made by our erudite commenters Peter North, Franciso Gil-White, Nathan Pearlstein and Felix Quigley to the effect that Jews must understand what the west did to the Serbs i.e demonize and attack them, is a precursor of what the west will do to the Jews.

Now Nathan Pearlstein brings to my attention When will world confront the undead of Croatia? by Julia Gorin.

President Bush recently echoed Vice President Dick Cheney’s support for Croatia to join the European Union, a bid that has been stalled because of the former Yugoslav republic’s slowness to own up to and prosecute its 1990s war crimes and its failure to ensure protections and rights for minorities, including returning Serb refugees. [..]

Old habits are hard to break. “In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia,” A. M. Rosenthal wrote in The New York Times in 1998. “They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western Allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servivors.

[..] Such were the “allies” to whom retired American generals were dispatched in the 1990s to train against the Serbs and help restore Croatia to its Hitler-defined borders. (We later did the same for Kosovo, whose independence we continue to push for.) One has to wonder at the ubiquitous “Nazi” analogies hurled at the Serbs – the designated villains of the Balkans – considering that this analogy was started by a former Nazi state that in 1995 ethnically cleansed 350,000 Serbs and by its Muslim former apprentices who helped kill hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and other undesirables in 40 of Croatia’s World War II concentration camps.

One has to wonder also because Croatia (along with Bosnia and Kosovo) hired American PR firms to make the analogy stick. Sure enough, our policymakers and our media – on the same page when it comes to the Balkans – bought it and recycled the propaganda to us, and continue to do so today. This despite the fact that our ally, President Franjo Tudjman – the “Father of Croatia” – was about to be hit with a war crimes indictment that was finally, slowly and quietly being prepared by the United Nations, allowing him to die a free man. (As was the case with wartime Bosnian-Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, a fundamentalist who asked to be buried “next to the martyrs.”)

The Serbs weren’t angels, but they are the only Balkans players to have admitted as much and actively done something about it. The media, our policymakers and our filmmakers still refuse to take the messier but more accurate view of the Balkans. For it is the more daunting task, one that could force the realization that the Serbs weren’t just fighting their enemies; they were fighting ours.

Julia Gorin notes in her blog Republican Riot under the title Lest We Believe Mainstream Nazism be Dead

My editor at the Baltimore Sun tells me that the secretary, who has been there for ages, has never in all her years in the newspaper business, witnessed the storm that my article last week elicited. In case you missed it, the piece was titled “When Will World Confront the Undead of Croatia?” and it called attention to the fact that not only has Croatia not sufficiently acknowledged its zealous Nazi past of WW2, but the past followed it into the 1990s — and the criminals of that decade are widely celebrated by Croatians even today.

Apparently, this was the first piece of mainstream American journalism that didn’t place the blame for the 1990s Balkan wars squarely on Serb shoulders. For unlike the Serbs — who are accustomed to being vilified in the press on a daily basis for 15 years now — the hundreds of Croats, Croat defenders and Serbophobes I heard from were breathless in their fury and disbelief.

I will make an effort to post some of their letters, including letters in support of the article. But I will start by posting a letter, with my comments, that The Sun published on Saturday, written by Josip Babic, press attaché for Croatia’s embassy to the United States: [CONTINUE TO READ THESE LETTERS AND HER COMMENTS]

Nathan Pearlstein writes,

Now you know why the Croatians allied themselves with the Izetbegovic Islamo-fascists: to combine forces to more quickly slaughter the philo-semitic anti-fascist Serbs.