War-crimes deniers

BALKAN WITNESS

Articles on the Kosovo and Bosnia Conflicts:

Deniers of Serbia's War Crimes

NEW: Speech by war-crimes denier Michael Parenti
cancelled by U.S. peace group, May 2012
A campaign by progressives, Bosniak survivors, and Muslims
convinced the group to withdraw a speaking invitation to Parenti.

On trial beside Mladic in The Hague is a disturbing case of infectious idiocy and denial which the left can no longer ignore If people who claim to care about justice and humanity cannot resist what looks to me like blatant genocide denial, we find ourselves in a very dark place. By George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK), May 21, 2012

If, like truth, the lie had but one face, we would be on better terms. For we would accept as certain the opposite of what the liar would say. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
--Montaigne

There seems to be a kind of leftist monsterphilia around. The same people who embraced Slobodan Milošević, Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Qaddafi now embrace Bashar al-Assad, again loudly protesting against American imperialist designs against this public benefactor.
--Uri Avnery, Bloody Spring, August 11, 2012

Contents
Ali, Tariq Alternative Press Review Blum, William Bodansky, Yossef Bogdanich, George Chomsky, Noam Clark, Neil Clark, Ramsey Cohn, Marjorie Fairness and Accuracy in Media Gibbs, David	Handke, Peter Herman, Edward S. Johnstone, Diana Karganovic, Stephen Media Lens Parenti, Michael Pilger, John Project Censored Seymour, Richard "Lenin" "Srebrenica Historical Project" van der Pijl, Kees	Woodward, Susan Workers World Party/ International Action Center/ ANSWER Multiple characters, including David Chandler Michel Chossudovsky Peter Gowan Philip Hammond Tom Hayden Kate Hudson Arianna Huffington Mick Hume Jared Israel Nebojsa Malic Michael Moore David Peterson Harold Pinter Justin Raimondo
Srebrenica deniers: Antiwar.com James Bissett General Lewis MacKenzie As well as some of those above
More on BOSNIA - Trnopolje and Srebrenica

Edward S. Herman: Click here

Diana Johnstone:

Raçak - Mutation of a Massacre This review of a Diana Johnstone article shows that she uncritically repeats Serbian government propaganda on Racak, and that her work is characterized by missing evidence, a paucity of sources, the spreading of untruths, and conspiracy theories. By Peter Wuttke, November 18, 1999 (Newly translated from the original German, March 2002.)

Johnstone's Fools Crusade is reviewed by Richard Caplan in International Affairs, Vol. 79, Issue 2, June 18, 2003.

Diana Johnstone's Fools Crusade is rebutted at Proving Genocide in Bosnia, by Alan Kocevic, July 8, 2005.

Johnstone's article "Srebrenica Revisited," is reviewed by Eric Gordy, October 13, 2005.

Johnstone's writings are reviewed in The Left Revisionists, by Marko Hoare, November 2003

Johnstone's Fools Crusade is reviewed by Kirk Johnson, 2006. Several installments, linked from the cited page.

Josh Mason, a former editor at In These Times, explains in an online PEN forum (April 8, 1999) that the magazine stopped using Diana Johnstone's articles on the former Yugoslavia because they didn't meet the publication's journalistic standards:

We felt we couldn't publish her stuff not only because she was insisting that there was no Serb role in the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia after the facts were long in, but because her friendship with Milosevic's wife Mirjana Markovic, going back to her time as student in Yugoslavia in the '60s, colored her writing to the point of dishonesty. For instance, in a piece on the Serbian opposition, she presented Ms. Markovic's party as Serbia's main democratic opposition.

Markovic's Yugoslav Left party was actually allied with Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, and she was held as intellectual mastermind of her husband's "Greater Serbia" ideology.

Johnstone on European fascists: Johnstone describes the 2nd-generation French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen as "basically on the Left." Johnstone is one confused person.

Noam Chomsky:

A listing of various Chomsky statements denying or minimizing Serbian crimes against the peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo.
Correspondence with Noam Chomsky, in which Chomsky shows himself to be incapable of responding to criticism that he endorsed Edward Herman and David Peterson's denial of the Bosnia and Rwanda genocides. By George Monbiot, June 2011
A Critical Chomsky Reader When Truthdig interviewed Noam Chomsky in April 2010, three activists who had respect for his work were disappointed. The article ignored Chomsky's persistent misrepresentation of Balkan war crimes, even though author Chris Hedges had risked his life to report them. There are broader lessons for radicals here, about humanity, solidarity, and complexity. Western involvement in the wars of Yugoslav dissolution has confused many anti-imperialists, who still distort the facts to fit preconceptions. Though we've valued Chomsky's insights on other subjects, from Israel and Palestine to propaganda, we’ve been forced to reappraise his analysis. By Roger Lippman, Daniel Simpson, and Owen Beith, May 2010
Noam Chomsky and Ian Williams engage in a debate over the UN's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) declaration, and others weigh in. In the course of the discussion, Chomsky still defends his statement that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo," and Ian Williams rebuts.
The articles:
Ban Ki Moon and R2P, by Ian Williams, August 3, 2009
Kosovo, East Timor, R2P, and Ian Williams, by Noam Chomsky, August 17, 2009
Response to Chomsky, by Ian Williams, August 21, 2009
Response to Williams, by Noam Chomsky, September 1, 2009
Response to Chomsky II, by Ian Williams, September 8, 2009
Noam Chomsky and genocidal causality, by Marko Hoare, August 25, 2009
In a 2006 interview with the New Statesman, Noam Chomsky, if he is quoted accurately, makes an egregiously false statement about the 1999 Kosovo war. Speaking of Serbian actions in Kosovo, Chomsky says that "there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the [NATO] bombings."
Chomsky's ethical and political failure is tragic for those of us who agree in substance with many of his positions on US foreign policy, most notably the catastrophe in Iraq. By legitimizing historical deceit and diminishing the sufferings of the Bosnians and Kosovars, he only succeeds in causing moral and political confusion where authentic principle and political clarity are most needed.
   Response by Roger Lippman, June 21, 2006
   Response by Michael Bérubé, June 22, 2006
   Response by David Watson, June 23, 2006
Response by Oliver Kamm, June 2006. Refutes Chomsky's reference to a British parliamentary inquiry.
In writings and interviews, Chomsky misrepresents the statements of a former high Clinton State Department official on the causes of the Kosovo intervention. Click here for several discussions of this issue.
Chomsky has expressed his support for one of the most notorious Serbian ultra-nationalist war criminals facing the Hague Tribunal, Vojislav Seselj, who set up paramilitary groups to accomplish the annihilation of Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Muslims. (See his party's Program for "Cleansing" Kosovo, 1991 and Program for a Greater Serbia Theocracy, 1996.)
- Chomsky appears at the top of a list of Seselj's foreign supporters. (Scroll down, to find Chomsky in the company of such genocide apologists as Edward Herman, Sara Flounders, and David Peterson.)
- Seselj says he expects to pay for the services of famous experts, including the US intellectual Noam Chomsky.
- When Seselj's Serbian Radical Party held a rally in Belgrade in December 2006 demanding Seselj's release, Noam Chomsky sent a letter of support that was read aloud at the event. See report in Der Tagesspiegel, December 4, 2006, in German.

In April 1999, Chomsky and others signed a manifesto entitled "Academics Against NATO's War in Kosovo." For critical comments on Chomsky's statement, see the response by Igor Korsic of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Chomsky condemned the NATO action in Kosovo on principle without being able to offer plausible alternatives, using theories often based on a world order that no longer exists. Discussion of ill-informed observations by Chomsky and other Left critics, and how their words were appropriated by the Serb lobby. The Serb Lobby in the United Kingdom, By Carole Hodge, 2003

Controversy over the interview with Chomsky in the Guardian (UK) Though flawed, the Guardian article had some interesting observations on Chomsky's attitude toward the Srebrenica massacre. October 31, 2005

Chomsky ignores lessons of wars on Kosovo Review of Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism, criticizing Chomsky for not making enough of Milosevic's crimes. -- Peter Hudis, July 2005

Srebrenica and Honesty The writer criticizes Chomsky for soft-peddling the Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. "I cannot believe you are ignorant of the facts about Srebrenica and the Yugoslavian wars. You've devoted your life to uncovering hypocrisy and dispelling ignorance. So how am I to understand your bias in this matter?" By Julie Wornan, member of Americans Against the War, France, January 4, 2005

Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans II In an interview with Radio-TV Serbia, Chomsky endorses the lies of LM Magazine (see below). Oliver Kamm rebuts and rebukes Chomsky. June 2006

Chomsky misrepresents the Dutch investigation of Srebrenica. June 2006

Sadly, the so-called radical movement is losing its sense of complexity, of history, of ambivalence, and ultimately its own humanity. Most ostensible oppositionist discourse on the Balkans, from the hard Marxist left to the independent socialist left to even many anarchists, has sunk to a duckspeak of conspiracy mongering and holocaust denial, or to the nostrums of diplomatic conflict-resolution, or to crass and aggressive apologetics for mass murderers.

Readers who think this characterization an exaggeration will have to judge for themselves. They can only do so by studying the matter in depth, since leftist magazines and internet sites are a cesspool of misinformation, where one can find myriad examples of holocaust denial from leftists and rightists - it is a kind of a red-brown front, in fact - that Serb concentration camps never existed, or that the Bosnians "bombed themselves" in Sarajevo, or that the mass execution of thousands of men after the fall of the Srebenica enclave was a "hoax." And some leftists are even circulating a petition to free poor old Slobodan Milosevic (while demanding the head of Pinochet).

One has to find this depressing in part because some of these people have had reasonable things to say about US support for dictatorships abroad, global capitalism, and other important related issues, and so they now function either to recruit the naturally skeptical into a counter-cult with its own authoritarian mystifications, or they simply discredit worthy opposition altogether through a kind of Gresham's law by which healthy ethical reasoning is driven out by paranoia and dogmatism. Any radical movement serious about changing life, whether or not it can do anything in the near future about the social crises it faces, must never allow itself to become a purveyor of lies.

As Theodor Adorno put it in Minima Moralia, "The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us." We have no choice but to demystify so-called demystification.

David Watson, in the Fifth Estate, winter 2002

You can't negotiate with a war criminal But a circus tent of NATO opponents, from Tom Hayden to Arianna Huffington, won't face reality. By Ian Williams, Salon.com, May 27, 1999