HERMAN AND ZNET ATTACK SERBS AND JEWS

We continue our series on 4international about the lies told against the Serbs over Srebrenica. Here we focus on one Edward S. Herman who attacks the Serbs and also the Jews of Israel.

Edward S. Herman of ZNet

by Felix Quigley

We on 4international take issue with this writer Herman and the Znet site on the issue of Srebrenica. I break his analysis into two parts. One is that he accepts, or more accurately claims, that Serbs did on entering Srebrenica commit a massacre, only not as big a massacre as the Media and the Imperialists like Kamm and Hoare claimed. Second is his position towards Israel. Herman is full of hatred for Israel and is a supporter of the Palestine Arab Fascist movement and has nothing to say that its origins lie in the Islamofascist Nazi creator of the Holocaust Hajj Amin el Husseini. We produce some of Herman’s writing here for the reader to see for himself. 

From an article on Znet may 17, 2004

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5538

begin quote here

It is truly Orwellian to see the Yugoslavia Tribunal struggling to pin the “genocide” label on Milosevic, and to have done that already against Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic. In Milosevic’s case, the prosecutor, sensing that only 4-5,000 bodies—from all causes and on all sides–having been found in Kosovo after a bloody war, would not sustain a charge of genocide, decided to try to make him responsible for all Bosnian Serb killings in Bosnia, something the Tribunal had forgotten to do over the five previous years. This effort has been a notorious failure.

In the Krstic case, the genocide charge was based on the Srebrenica events of July 1995, where some substantial but uncertain number of Bosnian Muslims were killed, some in fighting and some executed.

This is where we on 4international disagree most strongly with Herman. He says “and some executed”, but Herman does not and cannot give any evidence to back this up. So why does he make the claim. He has joined in with the Serb slanderers and is really on the side of Kamm and co!

Here again the number of bodies in the discovered grave sites in the Srebrenica area is under 5,000, and certainly includes large numbers killed in the fighting during July. The Tribunal court claimed a Bosnian Serb plan and intent to kill all military age Srebrenica males, although no document or credible witness statement was found sustaining this charge, although thousands of Bosnian Muslim soldiers were allowed passage to safety, although many wounded Bosnian Muslims were allowed repatriation, and although the Bosnian Serbs made a number of actual deals and broader proposals for a prisoner exchange.

The alternative view, that there was no such plan, only a vengeance motive and an intent to locate and execute the Bosnian Muslim cadres responsible for the killing of several thousand Serbs in the Srebrenica vicinity over the prior three years, was quickly dismissed by the Tribunal court. Vengeance as a motive is only acceptable for Western-backed killers (and David Rieff and company have relied on this to explain away the massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo under NATO auspices). It is also well-known and conceded by the court that all the Bosnian Muslim women and children in Srebrenica were helped to safety in Bosnian Muslim territory, strange behavior with a genocidal intent. The Tribunal reasoning is that in a patriarchal society, the removal of males is especially important for making community survival difficult. Of course, the idea of genocide in one small town is also a pathbreaking idea, perhaps to be followed by genocide in one household. But for such a noble enterprise as putting the Serbs in their place, and making “humanitarian intervention” palatable, creative thought is useful.

So much hot air from Herman but he is really a weak writer who makes claims which he does not substantiate. He claims that the Serbs on going into Srebrenica did execute which is the same as saying they are guilty of a massacre of Muslims. As I said no proof. Next this lying method is carried on into his politics of antisemitism of the Fascist Left re Israel.

The contrast between the treatment of Yugoslavia and Israel-Palestine remains truly dramatic. For one thing, Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the “promised land” has been going on for half a century, and it is clear that the steady expropriations, demolitions, and killings of the Palestinians is for the benefit of Jewish settlements, not for “security.” So this is as pure an illustration of ethnic cleansing as can be found on the face of the earth; Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his recent acknowledgement of this “ethnic purification,” complained only that it hadn’t gone far enough. By contrast, the Serb attacks on Kosovo Albanians before and during the 1999 bombing war were never to provide room for Serb settlements, they were a feature of an ongoing civil war (stoked by outsiders), so that this wasn’t true ethnic cleansing at all. There was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia, but it was carried out by all parties, struggling to establish land control in an externally encouraged civil war. Nevertheless, the phrase ethnic cleansing was used lavishly to describe Serb actions in Kosovo, as well as Bosnia, but it is rarely applied to Israeli behavior.

In the Genocide Convention of 1948, the word genocide was defined loosely, as any act “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.” Genocidal acts included causing serious “mental harm” or inflicting “conditions of life” aimed at such destruction. Can anything be clearer than that the Sharon government is trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group by creating intolerable “conditions of life”? Under “Operation Defensive Shield” Israel carried out a “systematic process of demolition of Palestinian public and private property, and mass expropriation of Palestinian land on behalf of settlers” (Appeal by 153 Israeli academics); “the Israeli army deliberately trashed the inside of every Palestinian institution that it did not entirely destroy—schools, charities, health organizations, banks, radio and TV stations, even a puppet theatre“ (Gila Svirsky). As Rania Awwad has said, “Sharon’s solution is to depopulate as much as possible the Occupied Palestinian Territories by making life for its citizens unbearable. And what could be more unbearable than watching your children cry themselves to sleep from hunger, night after night?” The Israeli leadership is not trying to exterminate all Palestinians, but they are prepared to kill them freely, take away their land, and make life so harsh that they will die off or leave. That this is a genocidal process is sometimes suggested in the Israeli media, but not in the Free Press.

We can see here that Herman is 1. unable to defend the Serbs against the lies of the enemy and 2. engages in the usual Fascist Left’s lies about Israel and has swallowed the Islamofascist Arab lies on the issue