Here is another one for you nuke...this now a Jewish perspective...no time to edit this one. RECOMMENDED reading!
[ Article reposted from alt.current-events.russia ]
[ Author was dtormat@sports.com ]
[ Posted on Thu, 15 Apr 1999 23:44:32 -0400 ]
Statement from the Jewish Serbian Friendship Society
12 April 1999
By Heather Cottin
Today is Yom Hashoah. Today, the little nation of
Yugoslavia is being bombed in a blitzkreig more deadly than
any the Nazis ever leveled at any nation in World War II.
The Serbs, who were the only friends Jews had in Yugoslavia
during World War II, have been demonized and accused of genocide.
Cynical media manipulation has placed the American people on
the side of this murderous policy. In the early 1990s, the
Croatian and Bosnian governments paid a Washington public
relations firm, Ruder and Finn, to come up with strategies
to win over the Jews to their side. The president of Croatia,
Franjo Tudjman had declared that only one million Jews died in
the Holocaust. He also publicly stated that he was glad his
wife was neither a Serb nor a Jew. During World War II at
Jasanovac, the Croatian Auschwitz, the Fascist Ustashe
government murdered 60,000 Jews and 750,000 Serbs and
40,000 Romani (gypsies). When the war was over, hundreds of
these Ustashe leaders were smuggled out of Croatia into
Argentina and other welcoming lands with US, German and
Vatican complicity. Croatia needed good P.R.
Bosnian leader Alia Izetbekovic wrote The Islamic Declaration.
"There can be no peace between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic
societies," he said in 1970; and he has never recanted this
statement.
The Jews supported both these leaders and their agendas. The
head of Ruder and Finn boasted at the time that Jewish public
opinion was a prize to be won. "By a single move we were able
to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys WHICH WOULD
THEREAFTER PLAY ITSELF, . . . we won by targeting the Jewish
audience," he said in an interview with a French journalist.
He boldly stated, "Our work is not to verify information,
. . .we are not paid to be moral."
"Not paid to be moral." And yet it is the moralizing incantation
of the words "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "holocaust"
which have been repeated over and over that sets the tone
justifying US policy in Yugoslavia. But the REASON WHY JEWS
ABOVE ALL OTHER PEOPLE have been sympathetic to NATO policy
in the Balkans is because they have appealed to our sense of
justice and morality! That's how they did it. The Holocaust
survivor experience, and the memories that we as a people share
collectively have been manipulated to make us view the Serbs
as the new Nazis.
The Holocaust is a specific experience. The Nazis killed
6,000,000 Jewish people. We were satanized, as the late
British scholar Nora Beloff said, for being Jewish. But
Kosovar Albanians have experienced similar treatment at the
hands of the Serbs, you say. That's what the media says.
That's what the government says. This is simply NOT TRUE.
While it is so that hundreds of thousands of Albanian peasants
have fled from their homes in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo,
it is criminal and a grotesque distortion of the truth to compare
their experience to that of the Jews in World War II. Most of
the Allied Powers did nothing to help the Jews. But for the
past several years, the KLA, a mercenary "liberation" army
of Kosovo, has received money and weapons and training from
Iran, the Mujahaddin of Afghanistan, the Albanian government,
and above all the United States and Germany. They used these
arms to launch a campaign to take over Kosovo, a part of Serbia
for 600 years. When the Yugoslavs moved in to put down the KLA
"rebellion," the US cried "genocide." The Albanian peasants
were in the crossfire, and when NATO bombing began to carpet
their region with fire and death, they fled. But the media and
Western governments call this ethnic cleansing.
Israel has for 50 years been in an alliance with the United
States. This political and military association has never
brought peace to Israel; it has brought decades of war.
Israel's friendship with the United States has forced Israel
into affiliation in the last quarter century with Apartheid
South Africa, the deadly governments in El Salvador and
Guatemala, with Chile's Pinochet government, and today, with
the repressive Turkish regime.
Has Israel's association with US foreign policy been in the
true and ethical interests of the Jewish people? Are the
Kosovo Albanians closer to peace as a result of their alliance
with the US? Have they not been used, and has Israel not been
used to further the interests of the US? Conflict and war have
hurt only the people of the Middle East. The strategic goals
of the United States have been met while the Balkanized
Middle East has been at war. The oil flows out of the Middle
East no matter how many people die there.
There are 4 trillion dollars worth of oil in the Caspian
region alone. They have what the West really wants. To get
this oil on our own terms, the Balkans must be Balkanized.
Yugoslavia is at the crossroads of all of the oil and gas
pipelines of the region. Kosovo sits atop the richest lead,
silver, and gold mine of Eastern Europe, Stari Trg. If and
when NATO ground forces are called in they will go to protect
markets and resources. This policy is not about human rights!
The United States armed and has allied itself with the Albanian
government. Albanian drug traders control half the heroin trade
of Europe. And the Albanians have publicly and recently stated
that American Jews will be on their side in this confrontation.
Ruder and Finn must work for them, too.
Can we support drug dealers and mercenaries and those who
demonize the only friends in Eastern Europe who fought to
save the Jewish people in World War II? The Yugoslav Ambassador
to the United Nations wrote a letter this week, begging Jewish
organizations to remember the Serbs. He writes, "On the night
of April 1, 1999, the NATO bombed Novi Sad (and) destroyed
the 'Bridge of Sorrow,' and the adjacent Memorial Park. The
Bridge and the Park had special significance to Jews and Serbs
(because) a few thousand Jews and Serbs were summarily executed
by the Nazis (and the) victims were thrown into the Danube
under that bridge."
The Forward this week is filled with letters from major
Jewish organizations supporting the NATO bombing and calling
for ground troops, comparing this situation to the Shoah.
But Germany's Luftwaffe is part of the nineteen nation air
barrage wreaking German revenge on the Serbs for defeating
them in 1945.
For Jews to support NATO bombs and ground troops, we must
support a policy that has, as Le Monde Diplomatique writes
in its April issue, "NOT THE LEAST INTERNATIONAL LEGITIMACY."
The article notes that, European Social Democrats, inheritors
of a long tradition of international legalism have ceded to
pressure from Washington to embark on this "war adventure."
Jews have a long tradition of respect for and creation of
law too. Are we to abandon it when we are manipulated and
lied to? Even Bibi Netanhahu was reluctant to support NATO
bombs, though he came around. Are we so dominated by the
wishes of the German and American policy makers that we will
accept the Shoah comparison with what is happening now in
Kosovo? Doesn't the strident repetition of incredible
stories begin to sound very suspicious? Aren't we wary of
systematized demonization of a people?
On Serbian Easter the bombs rained down on Yugoslavia.
Even Iraq got one day free from bombing on the first day
of Ramadan. Can Jews advocate blitzkreig? The US
participated in the 1995 ethnic cleansing of Croatia's
Krajina region, when 300,000 Serbs were driven out of
their homes in which they as a people lived for 600 years.
Did we get NATO to bomb Zagreb, or did Zagreb get more US
support? Yugoslav Jews in Israel were very clear about
that and wrote and marched in support of their Serbian
friends. They are marching and writing now, and are
horrified at overwhelming Jewish American support for
widening the war.
Does our history and suffering permit us to defend the
destruction of a sovereign nation? The Jewish-Serbian
Friendship Society asks all who read this to oppose
this barbarity.
The Jewish- Serbian Friendship Society
New York Metropolitan Region
Chicago, Illinois
Los Angeles, California
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