war crimes
How the US government and the media have used and manipulated a small but critical American minority to support US /NATO intervention.
By Heather Cottin, Jewish Serbian Friendship Society
Why did the majority of American Jewish organizations and the Jewish press support so unquestioningly the US attack on Yugoslavia? Why have so many Jewish people accepted the analogy between the Holocaust and the Kosovo crisis? And what is the meaning of Jewish support for and NATO in the Balkans?
These questions are not just troubling to members of the Jewish Serbian Friendship Society, they demonstrate how the US government and the media have used and manipulated a small but critical American minority to support US /NATO intervention. Jews have become, because of the Holocaust, what Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent, called, "worthy victims." Our suffering has been publicly acknowledged and hallowed as the defining oppression by which all other oppressed groups may be measured. This has placed Jews in a significant political position; Jewish public opinion has become a sort of arbiter of who is and who is not worthy of the sympathy of the American public. Jewish sympathy is not universal; there has been scant support for Turkish Kurds, for East Timorese, for any of the beleaguered groups whose misery has been the result of US foreign policy.
Jewish sympathy for the Bosnian Moslems earlier in the decade and the Kosovo Albanians since 1998 was key to US government and media efforts to win public support for US Balkan interventions. This sympathy was the product of an effective public relations campaign, engineered by James Harff, of the PR firm, Ruder Finn. The firm chose the Jews as targets of a public relations campaign to win support for Bosnian Moslems in 1993. "We won," Harff said, "by targeting the Jewish audience." He noted, "Our work is not to verify information, we are not paid to be moral."
Ruder Finn got the Bosnian Moslem account, the Croatia account and the Kosovo Albanian account, according to Justice Department documents. Harff said, "By a single move we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would thereafter play itself out." What was this simple story? It was the holocaust analogy, the genocide ploy, the ethnic cleansing tale. The story did indeed "play itself out," as most Jews embraced the official US lies about Yugoslavia, accepting the demonization of Serbs in the process. NATO propaganda portrayed Serbs as "the new Nazis." April 12th’s Newsweek called the Serbs a "Race," who were "expert" and "seasoned haters."
As many know, this was a particularly appalling aspect of this campaign of deception. The Serbs were the main fighters in Yugoslavia against the Nazis in World War II. They protected and supported the Jews, who joined them in the partisan movement, and died with them at the Ustache’s concentration camp, Jasenovacs. Although there were Bosnian Moslems, Croatians, and Kosovo Albanians in the Resistance movements, the vast majority of the Partisans in Yugoslavia in World War II were Serbs. Croatian, Bosnian Moslem, and Kosovo Albanian forces supported fascism, joined SS divisions, and were murderously Anti Semitic. This history Ruder Finn covered up. And the US media is mum. One might think that the US Jewish press would discuss it, but the Forward, the leading US Jewish newspaper, was more concerned this spring with the US moving its embassy to Jerusalem than with remembering the shared history of Jews and Serbs during World War II.
In various "op ed" pieces of late the history of World War II has been rewritten; Serbs are now being called the Nazis of the Balkans. The Yugoslav Resistance fought a successful guerrilla war against Croatian, Bosnian, and Albanian fascists. Croatian Ustaches, Bosnian Fascists and Kosovo Albanian SS liquidated over one million Serbs, Jews and Roma people but this history is missing from the media today.
Because of the friendship of Serbs and Jews in World War II and because Jews were citizens in multiethnic Yugoslavia, and because they knew that Yugoslavia was being destabilized by outside forces, Jews in Yugoslavia and Yugoslav Jews in the US and especially Israel have protested the media disinformation campaign. The Yugoslav ambassador to the UN wrote a letter on April first of this year to major US Jewish organizations after NATO bombed the bridge and Memorial Park at Novi Sad. He wrote, "The bridge and park had special significance to Jews and Serbs (because) a few thousand Jews and Serbs were executed by the Nazis and thrown into the Danube under that bridge," on that date.
But American Jewish organizations and the Jewish press stuck to their belief in the "genocide" story; Kosovo Albanians were the victims, Yugoslav Serbs were murderers, the new Nazis, Milosovic was Hitler. This story was carefully managed; Diana Johnstone, in a recent article called it "Holocaust Relativism," and noted the successful efforts of Ruder Finn to cast Slobodan Milosovic as "the new Hitler," noting, "any journalist who might challenge such exaggeration could be accused of ‘revisionism" or ‘Auchwitz denial." "Faced with a ‘New Hitler" and alleged ‘genocide,’" Johnstone pointed out, ". . . the issue is reduced to identifying the ‘bad guy’ and standing up to him."
For Jews to accept this specious history is a crime in itself, not merely because story of the Kosovo Albanian uprising and the nature of the KLA in the American press was filled with lies. Any comparison between what happened in Yugoslavia and what happened to Jews in the Holocaust is outrageous. Six million innocent civilians were rounded up and killed. Was that in any way analogous to the civil war in Kosovo fomented and funded by Kosovo Albanian drug running terrorists, with extensive help from Iran, Mujahaddin, Germany and the US? Did US Jewish spokespeople read the stories of KLA terrorism and control of Europe’s heroin trade which have appeared in major newspapers prior to, during and since NATO’s bombing campaign? Without blinking an eye, most Jewish organizations fell into line in support of US/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and indeed many called for ground troops! Did American Jews know that Kosovo Albanians enthusiastically had joined the notorious Skanderbeg Division in World War II? Some of them did know, because the Jewish Serbian Friendship Committee sent out a great deal of information. But they turned a blind eye.
* * * * *
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in Manufacturing Consent, told us that, the function of mass media was to, "inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society." (p.1) Once upon a time a significant segment of American Jews were once imperfectly integrated into the institutional structures of American society. They did anti-institutional things like forming labor unions, being "premature anti-fascists." They joined movements against such American institutional structures" as racism, militarism, and sexism. Today, most Jews seem to support the "values, beliefs and codes of behavior" and do not question American foreign policy. They have accepted the propaganda and bombing campaign that destroyed a sovereign nation.
This summer the American Jewish Congress expressed its appreciation for the German army’s actions in Kosovo. These are insane times, driven by dangerous and immoral people. Because of the Holocaust, Jews are seen to be wearing a mantle of moral authority. But they have shrugged it off. Supporting NATO and the US policy in the Balkans is not good for the Jews. Cynical and nefarious forces are manipulating Jews, as one ethnic group against another. We know where that leads.
Commission of Inquiry
c/o International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
