tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post7053070474362517025..comments2023-05-03T09:05:55.102-07:00Comments on Jacobinism: Victimisers as VictimsUnrepentant Jacobinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09256579083755037018noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-73344710960140764282014-06-13T14:30:56.712-07:002014-06-13T14:30:56.712-07:00I'm quite dissapointed to see Mehdi Hasan fall...I'm quite dissapointed to see Mehdi Hasan fall to this level. I defended him even after his comments about 'kuffar' came to light, and from a lot of the crap he took from Richard Dawkins. <br /><br />The sort of "route-cause" arguments that Hasan and others use in regard to anti-Semitism, to justify and mitigate it, could just as easily be used in reference to Islamophobia, and indeed often are. It's pretty common to hear in discussions relating to Islamophobia in the West arguments like, "what about Saudi Arabia?". It's just the same sort of apologist sophistry.<br /><br />Mehdi Hasan's invocation of the Srebrenica massacre at the end of the article is truly appalling. Leaving aside the historical inaccuracy in trying to conflate the political currents in BiH at the time with Europe today, Mehdi Hasan is on record denouncing the intervention in Kosovo, which brought down Milosevic. Besides what you point out, Mehdi Hasan on twitter also denounced the campaign and came dangerously close to whitewashing Milosevic's atrocities against the Kosovar Albanians. It's the same sort of shameless hypocracy shown by Edward Said; he (righltly) denounced the West for its failure to intervene in Kosovo, but then denounced the intervention in Kosovo, even going as far as to describe Milosevic's atrocities in Kosovo as a "Sunday school picnic" compared to Turkish atrocities against the Kurds.<br /><br />I also note in his article about the Ukraine that he expressed no concern whatsoever about the fate of the (mostly Muslim) Crimean Tatars, who have been subject to violence and harassment by the Russian security forces.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00751427152869896534noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-44012335094459471802014-06-12T15:39:42.331-07:002014-06-12T15:39:42.331-07:002. "Commander Naser Oric was even showing vid...2. "Commander Naser Oric was even showing video tapes in January 1994 (middle of the war) to foreign reporters visiting in Srebrenica. The videos showed SCENE AFTER SCENE of dead Serbs and Naser Oric grinned as he described how they were killed: by explosives, cold weapons, etc."<br /><br />This is a reference to an article in the Toronto Star by Bill Schiller on 16 July 1995. The article can be read here (from pro-Milosevic site):<br />http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/oric.htm<br /><br />Leaving aside the fact that nobody else has ever seen these videos, you will notice that nowhere does it mention the killing of civilians. Naser Oric was (quite rightly) attacking militarized Serb targets from which Srebrenica was being shelled, sniped and systematically starved. This is mentioned in the above article by Schiller.<br /><br />Of course, what is particularly ironic about this is that one of the major themes of Serbian propaganda is that the media vastly exaggerated or invented Serb atrocities. So when Ed Vulliamy or Maggie O'Kane talk about Serb concentration or rape camps, the above poster will claim it's all lies. Like all good Chomskyites, they view themselves as Wise Men with a unique gift for deciding which newspaper articles represent The Truth and which are simply Imperialist Propaganda. I do not share their genius in this field, so I can only guess how they do it, but it seems that any newspaper article that supports their line represents The Truth, while all those that do not support their line can be dismissed as Imperialist Propaganda; so media reports of Serb wrongdoing are simply propaganda, media reports of Muslim or Croat wrongdoing are to be accepted uncritically at face value.<br /><br />"They weren't innocent and the Bosnian Muslims had the largest infantry within Bosnia and Herzegovina."<br /><br />This is only true in the later stages of the war. Even then, the balance of military equipment was overwhelmingly skewed in the Serb's favour.<br /><br />1. On the Serbian genocidal attack on the Drina Valley at the beginning of the war, see Daniel Toljaga's admittedly partisan but still well sourced Prelude to the Srebrenica Genocide. See also Prosecutor vs Naser Oric (Case number IT-03-68-T) paragraphs 93-109. See also http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/the-bizarre-world-of-genocide-denial/ and http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson-humiliate-themselves/ on this specific argument often used by SDS apologists. Another useful account of these events are Chuck Sudetic Blood and Vengeance : One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia (New York, 1998) pp.99-134, 150-155. The most authoritative and thorough account of these events is Edina Becerevic, Na Drini Genocid (Sarajevo, 2009).<br /><br />2. For the details of Naser Oric's attacks, see Prosecutor vs Naser Oric (Case number IT-03-68-T). See also the above mentioned links, and Becerevic, Na Drini Genocid, p. 215. An interesting first hand account is also available in Sudetic Blood and Vengeance, pp. 156-159 and 161-164Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00751427152869896534noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-28733718976872315912014-06-12T15:38:35.615-07:002014-06-12T15:38:35.615-07:00The case of Srebrenica initially followed the same...The case of Srebrenica initially followed the same pattern as other eastern Bosnian towns; on 17 April 1992 the SDS (Serb nationalist party) demanded that the local Muslim police force surrender its weapons as a prelude to a takeover of the town and threatened the Bosniak population to “leave quietly or be killed”. The same day they took over the neighboring municipality of Bratunac and systematically exterminated and expelled the Bosniak population (massacring at least 400-600). Knowing that the Serbs were about to attack the town, the police (unusually) evacuated most of the local population into the surrounding hills, but some refused to leave or were too old or infirm to do so. The next day, on 18 April 1992 Serb paramilitaries attacked Srebrenica and took over the town, carrying out a massacre against the remaining population that had not fled and burning their houses. However, at the beginning of May 1992 Bosniak policemen who had fled into the woods counterattacked, killing the local Serb paramilitary leader, and were able to drive Serb paramilitaries out of Srebrenica and establish the town as a safe haven for refugees fleeing from the genocidal assault occurring against the Bosniak population across the wider Drina Valley. As a result, the town became flooded with refugees, who consisted over over 85% of the population and swelled the population to over 40,000. Serbian forces continued to besiege the enclave, systematically starving the population (leading to hundreds of deaths) and regularly attacked it with artillery and sniper attacks. Under pressure from the starving population, Bosnian army forces, largely drawn from the local MUP and a ragtag group of militias who had formed a ‘war presidency’, launched generally successful counter-attacks against villages in which the Bosnian Serb army was based. These actions primarily took place between June 1992 and March 1993. As a result of these raids, supplies of food were obtained, and weapons were acquired. At the same time, Bosniak defenders neutralized Serb military positions from which forces had shelled Srebrenica, holding it under siege. During most of these raids, groups of civilian refugees known as Torbari (Bag people) who raided food and other supplies followed the Bosnian defenders.<br /><br />Your twisted history omits mention of the beginning of the war in the Drina Valley and the genocidal attack on the Bosniak population that this involved, in order to portray the Serbs as innocent victims and to present Bosniak counter-attacks as being isolated acts of aggression coming out of the blue. The military actions of Oric’s forces against neighbouring militarized Serb villages were those of defenders of a beleaguered and besieged enclave whose inhabitants were threatened with starvation, massacre, rape, torture and expulsion already inflicted on other towns all over East Bosnia. That you lay such stress on Oric’s small-scale raids while wholly neglecting to mention the incomparably greater-in-scale Serb offensives and atrocities in the same region that preceded them is distortion of the most blatant kind; really the equivalent of writing about the Van Uprising without bothering to mention the Armenian Genocide, or the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without mentioning the Holocaust. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00751427152869896534noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-54351685282625203682014-06-12T15:36:33.569-07:002014-06-12T15:36:33.569-07:00You don't seem to understand that this sort of...You don't seem to understand that this sort of ragbag of the usual quarter-truths and misinformation is past its sell-by date. It doesn't work and it's worse, it's conterproductive - Serbs who were genuine victims get ignored and disbelieved because they're lumped in with the propagandists and the war criminal defense teams.<br /> <br />I can't be bothered wading through the gutter of your lies again, so I'll only deal with a few of your allegations:<br /><br />1. "Further, the Srebrenica brigade had carried out a scorched-earth campaign on all the surrounding Serbian villages for years. In a huge radius around Srebrenica, homes had been burnt down and the people killed or chased away by the 28th brigade."<br /><br />This is, at best, highly misleading. What actually happened is this; at the very beginning of the war in April 1992 the Drina Valley (eastern Bosnia) was attacked by the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army, ‘Special Units’ of the Serbian State Security Service and Ministry of Internal Affairs (in particular Arkan’s Tigers and Šešelj’s Chetniks), Serbian Territorial Defence forces, Serb paramilitary forces, and units of the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb) Ministry of Internal Affairs. The first municipality attacked was on Bijeljina on 1 April 1992 by ‘Special Units’ of the Serbian State Security Service (Arkan’s Tigers) and local Territorial Defence units, who quickly occupied the town and began a reign of terror against the non-Serb population, killings dozens and turning thousands into refugees within a few days. These offensives expanded with the attacks on Foča on 6 April, Višegrad on 7 April and Zvornik on 8 April. By late April these Serb offensives had conquered essentially the entire Drina Valley, except some small isolated enclaves. These offensives and takeovers, generally (except in the case of Foča) faced insignificant resistance and came hand in hand with a genocidal assault on the Bosniak population in the region, involving a campaign of widespread and systematic massacres, mass rapes and expulsions. This resulted in tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands ethnicly cleansed within 3 months (April-June 1992). More Bosniaks were actually massacred in the Drina valley in 1992 than in 1995 (the year of the Srebrenica massacre).Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00751427152869896534noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-22809117529872369352014-06-12T12:09:07.579-07:002014-06-12T12:09:07.579-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00751427152869896534noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-28520412818762324972014-06-11T18:37:18.337-07:002014-06-11T18:37:18.337-07:00Murtaza Hussain said:
"As a counterpoint Maa...Murtaza Hussain said:<br /><br />"As a counterpoint Maajid Nawaz, while very intelligent and often very right, sadly suffers from some Julian Assange-like megalomania and arrogance"<br /><br />HAHAHA<br /><br />Mehdi Hasan's arrogance and ego is so large it risks ripping open the space time continuum.<br /><br />Great article Jacobin!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-39437395636178124772014-06-11T09:11:04.565-07:002014-06-11T09:11:04.565-07:00An excellent analysis, which led me to glance over...An excellent analysis, which led me to glance over some of your other writings. Why the "unrepentant Jacobin" label? Your views strike me as those of an "unrepentant Burkean." Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-45133290057936099062014-06-10T02:33:49.666-07:002014-06-10T02:33:49.666-07:00Great Article, well saidGreat Article, well saidAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-83943638621079340622014-06-09T22:24:10.256-07:002014-06-09T22:24:10.256-07:00The Srebrenica numbers are cooked and false. They ...The Srebrenica numbers are cooked and false. They are counting soldiers who died throughout the whole war. For instance when Bosnian Muslim military records have shown the ones they claimed died during the fall were reported as dying months or years earlier, the Muslims simply disavow their own records to manufacture the false number.<br /><br />In Srebrenica the Bosnian Muslims had an ENTIRE BRIGADE - the 28th Brigade led by Commander Naser Oric (who is still alive and well living in Tuzla) - and it was ordered off their positions and to walk out of Srebrenica the DAY BEFORE THE FALL.<br /><br />Despite that the Brigade was much larger than the Serbian forces around, despite that they were well-armed and entrenched, they were ordered out by their brigade commanders and the UN.<br /><br />It was an arranged fall. Most of the army and men arrived in Tuzla on foot a week later - some of the army were sent to other fronts. Any that died on those other fronts would be claimed as a victim of the fall and their remains brought to Srebrenica and buried with big hype, propaganda and fanfare.<br /><br />Plus virtually all the Srebrenica dead have turned out to be soldiers, so not civilians, not women and children at all!<br /><br />Further, the Srebrenica brigade had carried out a scorched-earth campaign on all the surrounding Serbian villages for years. In a huge radius around Srebrenica, homes had been burnt down and the people killed or chased away by the 28th brigade.<br /><br />Commander Naser Oric was even showing video tapes in January 1994 (middle of the war) to foreign reporters visiting in Srebrenica. The videos showed SCENE AFTER SCENE of dead Serbs and Naser Oric grinned as he described how they were killed: by explosives, cold weapons, etc.<br /><br />They weren't innocent and the Bosnian Muslims had the largest infantry within Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not to mention that Croatia had 40,000 troops fighting in BiH for the whole war - Croatia was not threatened with sanctions nor bombed despite that its army was in Bosnia destroying villages and infrastructure and running torture camps for Serbs (but also for Muslims in a smaller number of cases - especially during the Muslim-Croat war phase of the Bosnian war).<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-13126724709133252412014-06-09T17:03:14.951-07:002014-06-09T17:03:14.951-07:00"CAIR arguments or the Ramadan-Erdogan-Zawahi..."CAIR arguments or the Ramadan-Erdogan-Zawahiri nexus"<br /><br />The FBI won't talk to CAIR on intelligence specifically because of their extremist ties and efforts to prevent terrorism investigations. And yes, Ramadan has the same end-goals as Al-Qaeda (beginning with implementing sharia law - by definition Islamic supremacism) but he does not want to use violence towards those goals.<br /><br />So care to elaborate on why 'its beneath Jacob?'Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-80923314930435856902014-06-09T14:15:44.160-07:002014-06-09T14:15:44.160-07:00Quote re: Bosnia “And it did all this over the obj...Quote re: Bosnia “And it did all this over the objections of people like Hasan,”<br /><br />So “people like Hasan” but not “Hasan”. This is a nice rhetorical sleight of hand here, attributing views to him he’s never expressed based on what you think he’d feel. I have views similar to Mehdi and am deeply skeptical of most military intervention, but to me it was clear that this particular one was justified and warranted. Using your logic to infer my beliefs to prove a point (as you’ve done to Mehdi) you’d wrongly attribute me as an opponent and lambast me for my callousness and – most objectionably - my supposed ingratitude to the magnanimous country which has generously decided to rescue me from the Land of Mordor. Needless to say that’s a ridiculous and disingenuous tactic, and as an aside I’ve noticed you have a bad habit of conflating interventions where there is already a war going on (Mali, Libya, Rwanda, Bosnia) with those where there is no such war (Iraq, potentially Iran if many had their way). There is a massive qualitative difference between the two: intervening to stop bloodshed in a situation which has already delved into chaos is not the same as initiating bloodshed and plunging a country into chaos in order to achieve some archaic foreign policy objective.<br /><br />Like I said I’m not going to indulge the CAIR arguments or the Ramadan-Erdogan-Zawahiri nexus, frankly I think that’s beneath you, but I will say that Mehdi has a lot of credibility when he calls out anti-Semitism and other social ills within the Muslim community. As a counterpoint Maajid Nawaz, while very intelligent and often very right, sadly suffers from some Julian Assange-like megalomania and arrogance which alienates even people (like I think Mehdi) who would generally otherwise side with him. It’s not a genuine way to effect change if that is what one sincerely wants; attempting to utterly destroy everyone whose politics or beliefs exhibit the slightest variance from your own. While certain people deserve to be called out its possible to go too far and become a truly illiberal “liberal”.<br /><br />Murtaza<br />Murtaza Hussainnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-85608720192568670072014-06-09T14:14:59.423-07:002014-06-09T14:14:59.423-07:00It’s unfortunate you decided to end your piece by ...It’s unfortunate you decided to end your piece by diving directly into the fever swamps of the American far-right by characterizing CAIR as some kind of institutional Al-Qaeda cell and conflating Tariq Ramadan with Ayman Al-Zawahiri but I feel the rest of it is at least worthy of a response.<br /><br />While you’re remiss to ignore the fact that there are some similarities between the pre-war hysteria and fear that existed around Jewish communities (including their being a dissembling, supremacist fifth column with plots of imposing atavistic laws on the rest of society) - I agree that when you unpack the circumstances there are material differences. Muslims are not a few steps away from being led to the gas chambers as its stands in Europe today and the comparison right now is certainly overrought. <br /><br />Having said that the amount of mutual recrimination, fear and paranoia that often exists between Muslim communities and the broader societies they exist within is still potentially dangerous; particularly in the event of a future economic collapse similar to that which occurred in Europe in the pre-war years. All this negative tension can be actualized one day when the circumstances are right. When people get used to talking and thinking about a particular minority group a certain way it can end badly. To put it another way, Muslims may not be pre-1939 Jews in Europe right now but they’re arguably skating on thin ice; partly due to reasons of their own manufacture and partly not.<br /><br />Your quote:<br /><br />“I'm afraid I'm unable to see why being targeted by the Islamist assassins of al Qaeda is an improvement on being targeted by the nationalist far-right.”<br /><br />Indeed it is little difference to the unfortunate people who are killed (inna lilahi wa inna illahi rajioon) in attacks by vile Al Qaeda terrorists, but there is a slight qualitative difference that unlike the nationalist far-right there’s precisely zero chance that such groups could get elected to power in the country and take control of the violent capabilities of the state. So it is something of an “improvement” in the sense that the danger of mass, state-led repression is nil for Jewish communities, but decidedly not nil for Muslim communities – even if based on present circumstances you’d say its still remote.<br /><br />“Nonetheless, the idea persists that the conflict in Palestine is responsible, at least in part, for Islamist terror directed at diaspora Jews.”<br /><br />Sorry but there has been a long history of such terrorism (as well as terrorism going the other way) which far predates the events of September 11th. Osama bin Laden was clearly an opportunist who saw the Palestinian cause as a means to further his own quixotic ambitions but there is a huge corpus of other examples one could readily bring up to rebut your claims here. Of course until recent decades such terrorism was perpetrated by leftist groups and not Islamists, but I think you’d agree that’s hardly “an improvement”.<br /><br />Murtaza Hussainnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-87489092224639132952014-06-09T13:35:14.827-07:002014-06-09T13:35:14.827-07:00Oh yes, I nearly forgot: Saif Rahman does a good t...Oh yes, I nearly forgot: Saif Rahman does a good take-down of Mehdi, 'The Great Pretender', here:<br />http://my.telegraph.co.uk/saifrahman/saifrahman/129/mehdi-hasan-the-great-pretender-2/Jim Denhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01642992463679646250noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-71072610877526423512014-06-09T13:30:16.255-07:002014-06-09T13:30:16.255-07:00The same article was published in last week's ...The same article was published in last week's New Statesman. I too was taken aback by it, though I found it quite difficult to put my finger upon exactly why. I suppose the quote about the shootings at the Jewish museum, so easily passed over by Hasan n(or so it seems), was what disturbed me. I also noted the apparent glee with which he quoted Haaretz (for no very obvious reason in terms of the main point of his article), stating: "Some of the far-right parties in Belgium, such as Vlaams Belang, have actually tried to transform their image and hide their anti-Semitic legacy, professing to be friendly to Jews and supportive of Israel."<br /><br />So what, exactly? Most far-right parties and individuals remain implacably anti-Semitic and hostile to Israel. Some even express admiration for Islamism. But Mehdi can't resist a little swipe at Israel.Jim Denhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01642992463679646250noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5380090049852721671.post-18020908244730480992014-06-09T13:14:44.722-07:002014-06-09T13:14:44.722-07:00Excellent analysis!Excellent analysis!Janne Ahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05807455077008944838noreply@blogger.com