"Texan" wrote in message
news:aaomu39s53571b3unoksmahqmmee9r4gdh@4ax.com...

In the beautiful spring of 1999, while Jews were commemorating
Shoah and celebrating Passover, bombs rained down on the
sovereign nation of Yugoslavia. In the United States, major Jewish
organizations defended the thousands of devastating NATO
bombing sorties.
Many Jews called for ground troops. Both the mainstream and
Jewish press vilified the Serbs and characterized Yugoslavia as
an aggressor nation.The holocaust analogy was replayed as it had
been during the Bosnian War, when James Harff, of the public
relations firm Ruder Finn, had boasted to a French interviewer that
Jewish support for NATO in Bosnia was a prize. "By a single move,
we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys
which would thereafter play itself out." " We won," he said, "by
targeting the Jewish audience." He admitted, "Our work is not to
verify information, ... we are not paid to be moral."

American Jewry did nothing in 1995 when the Croatians, headed
by Kosovo Albanian Lieutenant General Agim Ceku, ethnically
cleansed from the Krajina 300,000 Serbs whose roots went back
300 years. American Jews did not repudiate Croatian President
Franjo Tudjman, despite his denial of the Shoah, and his boast
that his wife was neither a Serb nor a Jew. The effectiveness of
the Ruder Finn campaign was such that most Americans accepted
without question the right of Bosnian Moslems to break away
from Yugoslavia. The US government and the media did not discuss
Alia Izetbegovic as a Moslem Fundamentalist, nor did they remind
us that the Bosnian President never renounced his Islamic
Declaration, in which he said, "There can be no peace between
the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies."

Few Americans know much about Balkan history, and when
the war in Kosovo erupted on the front pages of US newspapers,
Americans once again accepted the "simple story of good guys
and bad guys" that cast the Serbs as the enemy and the Kosovo
Albanians as the victims. Jewish acceptance of this story is
troubling. As with the Bosnian Moslems in the NATO intervention
in 1992-5 and the Croatian ethnic cleansing of the Krajina in
1995, American Jews took sides against the Serbs who had
been their only friends in the Balkans during World War II.
Between 1941 and 1945 the Croatian Ustache government, the
Bosnian Moslems, and the Kosovar Albanians, under the Italian
Fascist Albanian government, had murdered over 60,000
Jews and 1,000,000 Serbs. Jewish support for NATO intervention
was troubling for other reasons. American Jewish organizations
tacitly supported the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA was
funded in part by reactionary Islamic forces, the United States,
and Germany. In the "civil war" between 1997 and 1999, Jews
joined in the condemnation of the government of Slobodan
Milosovic, and urged NATO bombing of Belgrade and the rest
of Yugoslavia.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Jewish support for the 78
days of NATO bombing was the facile acceptance of claims such
as "genocide" and "holocaust," terms used again and again to
describe the experiences of the Kosovo Albanians. A "simple
story of good guys and bad guys" got twisted into an outrageous
comparison. 2000 people, one third of them Serbs, died in Kosovo
in the year before the bombing began. There had been fighting
between the KLA and the Yugoslav Army, and civilians and armed
forces both perished. But the media claimed "genocide," and the
comparison to Shoah was quickly made. This was a monstrous
misrepresentation of the truth which simultaneously desecrated
the experience of Jews in the Holocaust.

During the NATO bombing campaign Kosovo Albanians were
placed on trains and sent to Macedonia and Montenegro. They
were sent to NATO and UN-run refugee camps, not concentration
camps. NATO bombardments decimated Yugoslavia. The Serbs
were bombed daily; most of the "Kosovars" were saved.

Albanians in Kosovo had been the first to try to rid the province
of Serbs and Roms in 1981 and 1982, and it was they who used
the expression "ethnic cleansing" to describe their purification
campaign. The KLA is a very secretive organization, but it is not
a recent phenomenon. Kosovo Albanians from Germany and
Albania, whose family roots went back to the notorious Skanderbeg
division which slaughtered Jews, Serbs and Rom people in World
War II, comprised the leading faction of the KLA. In December
1998, the State Department wrote an alarming report, which
clearly stated, "the KLA harass or kidnap anyone who comes
to the (Yugoslav) police."
The report continued, "KLA representatives had threatened to kill
villagers or burn their homes if they did not join the KLA." Yet the
United States supported the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Press reports abound linking the KLA to organized crime. In fact,
the Albanians and their KLA contacts "own" 40%% of the heroin trade
of Europe. Their drug lord allies in Turkey provide 75%% of Europe's
heroin. We must ask ourselves as Jews: why are we supporting such
a force?

It was clear to observers that Yugoslavia's "ethnic cleansing" of
the Albanians began only after NATO bombing began. But Jews here
and in Israel offered asylum and comfort to the Kosovo Albanians.
Did the Jewish press express compassion for the Serb or Rom victims
of NATO bombing? Where was the public anguish about the destruction
of hospitals, schools, factories, bridges, railway stations,
religious edifices and tens of thousands of homes in Yugoslavia?
Which Jews spoke out against the Balkan ecocide produced by NATO
bombing of chemical factories and the use of Depleted Uranium (DU)
which causes cancer and birth defects?

200,000 Serbs and Roms have been, since the war ended, murdered
or driven out of Kosovo by the KLA forces. Agim Ceku has been head
of the KLA since February, so he knows the US will turn a blind eye to
ethnic cleansing of Serbs. .

The spin doctors may have manipulated the sympathies of concerned
citizens, but NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia had, according to Le
Monde Diplomatique, "not the least international legitimacy." The
United States fought on the side of drug traffickers and Nazis.
Germany, in violation of its own laws, sent its armed forces and
Luftwaffe out on military missions against Yugoslavia. Have we,
who pride ourselves on having brought moral law into the world,
abandoned our belief in the Rule of Law?

Have Jews allowed our "moral authority" to be used in the interests
of the expansion of international capitalism against the last
socialist nation of Europe? There is evidence for this analysis,
but there are other indications that also significant. The
expansion of NATO was a Pandora's Box that was locked until the
dismemberment of Yugoslavia began. NATO involvement in Yugoslavia
was the key that opened Eastern Europe and Central Asia to NATO
expansion, and NATO expansion opened the door to the expansion
eastward of the new Global Economy. NATO's new role in Europe is
the police force for the New World Order. Kosovo sits atop a five
billion-dollar lead, zinc, silver, cadmium, and gold mine, "the
most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans." Kosovo has
seventeen billion tons of coal. The Danube flows through Yugoslavia
and is more important to trade in central and southern Europe than
any other river. The oil and natural gas pipelines of Europe
criss-cross Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia is proximate to the West's next
oil and natural gas bonanza: the Caspian region. The petroleum
there is the answer to the NATO nations' quest for more oil.
Germany is particularly concerned about this.

These are issues for a Jewish Left that has been convinced that our
interests lie with US policy. All the President's men and Madeleine
Albright support the premise clearly delineated by Richard Holbrooke.
"The United States must lead in the creation of a security architecture
that includes and stabilizes all of Europe." Yugoslavia enabled the
"expansion of NATO." The expansion of NATO has more to do with
markets than morality.

But US policy supports Israel. Israel could face the loss of US
support. Let us not forget; Yugoslavia once enjoyed a special
relationship with the United States just as Israel now does.

In April of 1999 the Yugoslav ambassador to the United Nations
wrote a letter to several Jewish organizations, begging for
support. NATO had bombed the Bridge at Novi Sad and the
adjacent Memorial Park. "The Bridge and the Park had special
significance to Jews and Serbs," wrote the ambassador, because,
"a few thousand Jews and Serbs were summarily executed by
the Nazis and thrown into the Danube under that bridge" on April 1, 1
942. But there was silence; no Jewish organization responded.
That silence must be broken.

Let us ask ourselves why we are cooperating with politicians in
league with capitalists, militarists, arms makers, fascists and
drug traffickers. Let us question how we participated in the
demonizing of the Serbs, allowing them to become the world's
pariahs. And let us as ourselves whether we betrayed the friendship
of those who fought and died with us in the Holocaust. Can such
betrayal of principle be "good for the Jews?"

NATO in the Balkans: Jews and the Kosovo Crisis

by Alvin Dorfman and Heather Cottin
Printed in Jewish Currents - April, 2000

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"It is difficult to understand how U.S. policy toward the Balkans could
have taken such a turn in any reasonably democratic country.
Unfortunately, a large part of the explanation is that public opinion in
this matter has been driven into something like a frenzy by what seems
to be an officially inspired and large-scale campaign of propaganda.
(...)
Facts were distorted. Lies were reiterated so many times that they
became "facts."
(...)
The Croatian campaign in the Krajina was the largest and most violent
attack on European soil since the end of World War II. And much of it,
because the Croatian Serb Army was quickly shattered, was directed
at unarmed civilians. The international media called the Serbs "rebels"
even though this region was recognized as Serb by the Croatian
government during World War II. No CNN horror films catalogued the
Croatian air force strafing of Serb refugees, the destruction of their
churches, the cold-blooded assassination of old people, the burning
of more than 16,000 homes and other properties.
No American refugee organization concerned themselves with the
hundreds of thousands of Serbs, from Croatia and Western Bosnia,
streaming into Yugoslavia.
And since, by the summer of 1995, American Jews had been properly
brainwashed and made anti-Serb, no Jews spoke out about a horror
which should been chillingly familiar. Somehow the fact that Croatia
expelled more than 40,000 Serbs when it declared its independence
in 1991 has been ignored."

U.S. Jews and the Balkan Situation

by Alvin Dorfman and Heather Cottin
Printed in Jewish Currents - April, 1996