This is a guest post by Adam Barnett
It may – or may not – have surprised you to read a report by Charles Johnson that Stop Islamization of America’s director, Pamela Geller, has ‘denied’ the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. I was spared the polluting experience of reading the story as an innocent, having investigated Ms. Geller’s organistaion for a One Law for All report, (due to be published later this month). But I think it should be better known than it is that the Sheila Broflovski of American politics has a record of apology for Serbian fascism, and of both slandering and denying its victims.
Geller has written in defence of Radovan Karadzic, lamenting the injustice of his war crimes trial, (which she likened to a ‘Sharia court’), and asserting that the Muslims of Bosnia ‘self-killed’ in order to ‘blame the infidel’. She has also described the Srebrenica genocide as a ‘propaganda lie’. Her favourite source for these claims is hack stand-up and bigot Julia Gorin, whose long and ridiculous articles often appear in full on Geller’s web log. In her writings, Gorin refers to the ‘‘8000’ Muslims supposedly executed by Serbian forces’, places scare quotes around the word ‘genocide’, and laughably cites Andy Wilcoxson of slobodan-milosevic.org as an objective source. Ms. Gorin is also on the advisory board of the ‘American Council for Kosovo’, which opposes independence for what it calls the ‘Serbian province of Kosovo’ subsequent to its being ‘forcibly and illegally detached from sovereign Serbia’, on the grounds that an independent Kosovo would ‘strengthen global jihad terrorism’.
Also on the ACK’s advisory board is Ms. Geller’s partner in Muslim-baiting, Robert Spencer, who has published apologies for the Milosevic project by both Wilcoxson and Gorin on his blog. In the comments section of the Wilcoxson article, (which sees its author pathetically recall that ‘Slobodan Milosevic publicly denied, on numerous occasions, that he wanted any kind of a greater Serbia’), a reader addressed Spencer as ‘a staunch defender of the Christian Serbs and their cause’. In response, Spencer took exception to another of the reader’s remarks, which he considered defamatory and false.
With Mladic and Karadzic now on trial, and with the sixteenth anniversary of the events in question approaching, conservatives and left-liberals ought to be made to face the awkward fact that figureheads of their respective ‘wings’, (be it the Geller-Spencer nexus or a certain professor of Linguistics), find it necessary to drop these Serbian atrocities down the memory hole. Recent events suggest that the issue of Muslim democrats being massacred by dictators is not one we’ll be rid of anytime soon. To acknowledge this is to accept the urgent necessity for honesty, and as far as possible objectivity, concerning the recent past.
As for Ms. Geller, I expect she will blame the Left, the Right, the Muslims, the ‘faux Jews’, and the media for her own actions, (in keeping with her ‘M.O.’, as she might put it). But perhaps this time, having defended a fascist death squad from the reach of justice, and having tried to downplay or deny the planned erasure of a people, she’ll finally have the courage to look her true enemy directly in the mirror.
Adam Barnett is Research Co-ordinator for the One Law for All campaign, and author of the forthcoming pamphlet ‘Enemies Not Allies’.
