Among the commemorations around the world of the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany was a memorial service at Boston’s Faneuil Hall marking the liberation of the death camps. Around 20 members of a neo-Nazi group from Arkansas called White Revolution travelled all the way to Massachusetts to protest the May 8 memorial. They marched through Boston’s streets without a permit, and waved Jew-hating placards and slabs of ham outside the hall. While the memorial organizers, including Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Mayor Thomas M. Menino, urged attendees to ignore the Nazi rabble, hundreds of anti-racist counter-protesters took to the streets. (Boston Herald, May 9) There were some scuffles, and two arrests–a Black counter-protester and a white Nazi-symp, who apparently traded blows. There were a few minor injuries, including a Jewish high school student from Brookline who received a gash above his eye from a police baton. (Boston Herald again)
Even the notoriously staid Boston Globe cheered on the anti-Nazi protesters in a fine May 10 editorial. Unfortunately, as the editorial makes all too clear, the credit for the counter-protest was hogged by the creepy International Action Center (IAC). The Globe, like many left activists, is too naive to understand that the IAC has its own enthusiasm for neo-fascism and genocide, being the chief stateside cheerleader for Slobodan Milosevic. See WW4 REPORT #s 53 & 96.
Neo-Nazi exploitation of the recent spate of WWII commemorations seems to be a global phenomenon.
Why repeat the State Department spin on Yugoslavia?
Why the hysterical bit of State Department propaganda at the end? The random attack on Milosevic is totally out of place. Even the Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command, from November 1992 to July 1995 doesn’t think Serbian forces committed Genocide in Bosnia http://www.swans.com/library/art5/zig020.html . And Milosevic did not control the Bosnian Serbs anyways. Nothing has turned up at the Hague Tribunal’s showtrial to prove he did. In fact, he supported just about every peace plan that came down the pike as Lord David Owen and others have testified. You have a problem with IAC and Ramsey Clark. So do other people. That doesn’t mean they are always wrong and it doesn’t change the fact that you’re repeating the NATO propaganda line.
Why repeat Slobo-sucker “spin”?
There is nothing either “random” or “out of place” about my attack on Milosevic. Gen. Boyd is objecting to one-sided demonization of the Serbs, something I do not engage in. Now that that red herring is out the way, I encourage IAC fellow-travellers to examine their own double standards. Maybe what happened in Bosnia wasn’t quite “genocide” (do war crimes have to be actual genocide before oppose them?), but 8,000 (minimum) dead at Srebrenica alone, another 10,000 dead in Sarajevo, forced expulsions across half of Bosnia and mass rape campaigns starts to sound like it. Let’s see–2,000 dead at Sabra and Shatila. Was that genocide? 500 dead at Jenin. Was that genocide? 45 dead at Acteal. Was that genocide? Funny how the IAC presumably supports war crimes charges against Sharon, but turns Milosevic into a hero. I never said Milosevic “controlled” the Bosnian Serbs. Sharon insisted he didn’t “control” the Phalange. Bush doesn’t exactly “control” the Colombian paramilitaries. Why is the bar so much lower for your pal Slobo? And formulating the question in terms of Slobo’s “control” of the Bosnian Serbs also conveniently overlooks the whole question of Kosova. Until the “left” adopts a single-standard approach to the question of war crimes and genocide, it will deserve its own marginalization.