No, Srebrenica did not ‘inspire’ Christchurch
Max Parry
Earlier this month, popular ‘progressive’ news website The Intercept published an article entitled “From El Paso to Sarajevo: How White Nationalists Are Inspired by the Bosnia Genocide”, written by journalist and staff writer Murtaza Hussain.
The piece argued that many of the perpetrators behind mass shootings and domestic terrorism in the West — from the convicted far-right extremist behind the 2011 Norway attacks to the suspect charged in the recent mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand — were influenced by ethnic cleansing committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
Hussain uses a one-sided and Western-centric account of the inter-ethnic conflict in the Balkans to assess the Islamophobia burgeoning in Europe and the United States today. His analogy employs the same misreading used by NATO to facilitate the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia and justify its illegal military intervention and war crimes against Serbia.
It is an irresponsible variety of yellow journalism that should be ruthlessly critiqued whenever it appears, especially at a news organization which purports to be “fearless, adversarial journalism that holds the powerful accountable”.
It also does nothing to help address the growing foundations of fascism by diverting attention away from its real origins.
Hussain begins by accurately noting that the Australian-born suspect behind the massacre at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch, New Zealand, Brenton Tarrant, during his live-stream video prior to the carnage played the song Remove Kabab (Serbia Strong), an upbeat patriotic tune that pays tribute to former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.
Removed from the context of the Yugoslav Wars, the Serbian folk song and its accompanying wartime propaganda video were rediscovered by Western right-wing fanatics like Tarrant when it became a popular internet meme among the online fringe as an anthem for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in reaction to the influx of refugees from the European migrant crisis.
The infamous convicted terrorist behind the July 2011 mass shooting and car bombing in Norway, Anders Breivik, also expressed affinity for the Serbs in his epic manifesto and was cited as an influence by Tarrant. However, despite the article title the author provides no evidence whatsoever to support the implication that the El Paso shooter, 21-year old Patrick Crusius, was in any way motivated by the Balkan conflict.
Brentan Tarrant also wrote the names of several historical Serbian military figures who fought against the Ottoman Empire in previous centuries in Cyrillic on his semi-automatic rifle used to carry out the slaughter. Curiously, he also wrote ‘Skanderbeg’, a legendary national hero of Albania who as a medieval military commander defected from the Ottoman Turks and prevented their expansion toward western Europe in the 15th century.
Despite his historical legacy of rescuing ‘Christendom’ from an Islamic empire to which Tarrant was likely referring, Skanderbeg holds varying significance to different peoples and for the predominantly Muslim Albanians he is viewed as a source of national pride and identity.
During WWII when Albania was under the Axis Powers sphere of influence, it was Muslim volunteers who formed the nucleus of the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian), whose foremost victims were Christian Orthodox Serbs, in addition to Jews and Roma.
In the Yugoslav Wars, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) de-listed terrorist group backed by NATO which fought against Serbia sought to establish the modern equivalent of the ethnically pure ‘Greater Albania’ as envisioned by Benito Mussolini during WWII in the Kosovo protectorate.
So if the Australian-born gunman was incited by Balkan history, it is because he was as confused and unknowledgeable about the complex subject as Hussain, given that he also wrote the number 14 on his firearm in reference to “the 14 words” from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Before falsifying the history of the Yugoslav Wars, Hussain does correctly observe that:
The Balkans are often condescendingly stereotyped as a backward region stuck in the grip of old prejudices. In reality, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims had lived together as compatriots in the former Yugoslavia for a long time before violent demagogues came to power; it took years of effort during the late 1980s and early 1990s for ultranationalist leaders to drum up the level of fear and hatred necessary for war to start.”
Unfortunately, the author does not bother to investigate why they had successfully lived together in harmony as southern slavs for decades (under socialism), nor how such leaders took power and incited the different ethnicities into warring with each other as the country disintegrated, as if everything occurred in a vacuum.
Following WWII, partisan leader Josip Broz Tito had indeed united the various Yugoslav peoples in congruity under a popular motto that the country consisted of ‘six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets — but one Yugoslav.’
Even the most fervent critics of socialism admit the republic was a relative success as it enjoyed freedom from being undermined by economic embargo as a neutral ‘non-aligned’ country during the Cold War after relations soured between Stalin and Tito and it became a strategic buffer between the West and the Soviets.
Following Tito’s death in 1980, a series of austerity programs sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were put into effect and much like a recent study concluded regarding Weimar Germany in the 1930s, the gutting of the welfare system and the social fabric led to a resurgence of right-wing nationalism in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia went through the same neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ as Chile the decade prior when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sent the CIA to “make the economy scream” to prevent Salvador Allende from taking power, as well as post-Soviet Russia which the author’s The Intercept colleague Naomi Klein described so thoroughly in The Shock Doctrine.
Yet for Hussain, the driving force in Yugoslavia’s downfall was bigotry itself, somehow isolated from the disaster capitalism forced upon it.
As only an empire denialist could overlook, Hussain makes no mention of the “encouragement of racism” on the part of US imperialism, beginning with the coercive diplomacy of the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriation Act which instigated the separatist movements by providing aid exclusively to the republics that seceded and declared independence at the exclusion of the Yugoslav government.
After the bill was passed by congress at the behest of the George H.W. Bush administration, only the federation of Serbia and Montenegro remained under the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. According to a declassified memorandum, the CIA had already been anticipating this collapse for several years.
Suddenly, much of the population consisting of the many different ethnic communities of the Balkans found themselves trapped within various newly formed ethno-nation states that were not their own overnight. They then began establishing proto-states within these new republics, spurring violent conflicts and territorial disputes resulting in ethnic cleansing (on all sides) across the country.
Yugoslavia did not implode simply because of its own internal contradictions, but was the subject of exploitation by a more powerful outside actor seeking to economically and militarily dominate the Caspian Sea region in order to gain access to its crude oil and natural gas resources.
Serbian nationalism only saw a resurgence within Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina once Serbs became hostages under new hostile regimes, when we were told by the NATO acolytes in corporate media that it was Belgrade who were the real nationalists even though most Serbians still identified as Yugoslavs and generally wished to preserve the federation being partitioned.
In fact, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague posthumously concluded that the late Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, who died mysteriously while in custody on trial in the Netherlands, was not responsible for war crimes committed during the Bosnian war.
When Radovan Karadžić was convicted by the ICTY, it was determined the Bosnian Serbs acted on their own accord and were frequently at variance with Belgrade on the execution of the war:
Based on the evidence before the Chamber regarding the diverging interests that emerged between the Bosnian Serb and Serbian leaderships during the conflict and in particular, Milošević’s repeated criticism and disapproval of the policies and decisions made by the Accused and the Bosnian Serb leadership, the Chamber is not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milošević agreed with the common plan.”
Serbs certainly committed their share of war crimes, but why do Western journalists dare not speak of the thousands of Serbs ethnically cleansed in Croatia from the self-proclaimed quasi-state of Krajina? Or the mass deportations of Serbs from Kosovo in the years since? The innocent heroes and stigmatized villains were pre-selected and to do so would be actual “fearless, adversarial journalism.”
Many of the war crimes committed by Muslims against Serbs and Croats in the Yugoslav Wars were by foreign mujahideen volunteers whose ranks even consisted of two of the future 9/11 hijackers — the Saudi nationals Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — who allegedly seized American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into The Pentagon. Their barbaric acts included beheadings of Serb victims that were likely inspired by the Ustaše who did the same in WWII.
Hussain repeatedly refers to what took place in Bosnia as a “genocide”, citing the dubious Srebrenica massacre in July 1995.
While it is certain that a horrific war crime took place in the town, to use such a politicized term is a slanted parroting of the NATO interventionist narrative.
Virtually all of the victims were Bosniak Muslim men and boys as the Bosnian Serbs had specifically evacuated women and children from the enclave and the disputed, highly inflated quantity of Bosniak victims were most likely a combination of fatalities from the battle for the town and retaliatory summary executions by Bosnian Serbs once they besieged the territory.
Prior to the incident, Srebrenica had been under the protection of the UN peacekeeping forces which Bosnian Muslim warlord Naser Orić had used to shield his militias following their routine attacks on neighboring Serb villages whose losses also numbered in the thousands.
UN General Phillipe Morillon testified that the Srebrenica massacre was motivated by retribution for the war crimes committed by Orić:
JUDGE ROBINSON: Are you saying, then, General, that what happened in 1995 was a direct reaction to what Naser Orić did to the Serbs two years before?
THE WITNESS: Yes. Yes, Your Honour. I am convinced of that. This doesn’t mean to pardon or diminish the responsibility of the people who committed that crime, but I am convinced of that, yes.
If there were deliberate killings of large groups based on their ethnonationality on all sides, then what occurred was part of a civil war, not “genocide.”
Noam Chomsky observed that while NATO based its intervention on the g-word, one of its member states in Turkey was carrying out far worse atrocities against Kurds and that to use the term was an insult to the victims of the Nazis in the region’s past.
Who were the principal victims of the Ustaše and the Nazi puppet regime of the Independent State of Croatia during WWII? Serbs.
It is also incredible that for a journalist so fixated on neo-fascism, Hussain did not find it significant that Bosnia and Herzegovina President Alija Izetbegović had been a literal member of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Handschar” (1st Croatian) in his youth during WWII when Bosnia was under the Ustaše and did three years in prison under Tito for his offense.
Why did the UN peacekeepers fail to protect Srebrenica? It is an important question considering it brought the real turning point in the war. Not long after, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force against Ratko Mladić’s forces resulting in the Bosnian Serbs capitulating to a return to negotiations in the Dayton Accord later that year.
The former mayor of Srebrenica, Hakija Meholjić, claimed the town was deliberately sacrificed as part of a ‘red line’ agreement between Izetbegović and US President Bill Clinton in a ‘false flag’ to prompt the NATO intervention, as shown in a 2008 Wikileaks Cable:
Meholjic suggested that Bosniak leaders “sold” Srebrenica to the RS (and abetted genocide) when “key members of the international community started saying publicly that enclaves cannot survive.” (Note: Oric, who left Srebrenica in 1993, was not asked to defend it in 1995; ever since there have been accusations that the then Bosnian leadership deliberately allowed the enclave to fall).”
Hussain truly loses any remaining “progressive” credibility when he goes on to praise the Otpor! political organization which organized protests that led to the ouster of “dictator” Milošević (actually thrice democratically-elected) in 2000 following the three month NATO bombing campaign the previous year which left Serbia with the highest cancer rate in Europe from the use of depleted uranium ammunition, “justified” by the same lopsided argument made in the article.
Otpor! was portrayed as a bona fide, grassroots movement while behind the scenes it was the recipient of millions of dollars from the US government through “soft power” NGOs and CIA-fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, financed by the non-profit industrial complex or what author Arundhati Roy has called the “NGO-ization of resistance.”
The success of Otpor! became the formula for Western regime change operations via indistinguishable “pro-democracy” Color Revolutions throughout Eastern Europe in the ensuing decade. Documentary filmmaker Boris Maligurski’s The Weight of Chains series is an excellent overview of the history of Yugoslavia and its first two installments are highly recommended, while the trailer for the forthcoming third film was just released.
Perhaps the reason Hussain unquestioningly heaps praise upon Otpor! is the enormous undisclosed conflict of interest on the part of The Intercept’s ownership in billionaire entrepreneur and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who established the site’s parent organization First Look Media.
In The CIA as Organized Crime, journalist and author Douglas Valentine explains how Omidyar’s “philanthropic” investment firm co-financed with the US State Department many of the NGOs in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution such as Center UA which flipped the 2004 Ukrainian election results to a pro-Western candidate.
It went on to do the same funding the Euromaidan protests and subsequent coup in 2014 and both so-called Color Revolutions were modeled on the Otpor! movement.
Then again, the entire premise behind First Look Media is suspect considering it made its name covering the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden while Omidyar’s eBay simultaneously owns Paypal, one of the biggest backers of NSA surveillance. What better way to commandeer dissent then to throw money at journalists?
Hussain also eagerly mentions that “Russian volunteers” participated in the killings at Srebrenica, omitting the equal number of Greek militiamen. This is another instance of thinly veiled Russophobia and the assignment of guilt towards Moscow for the rise of the far-right in the West. Its intention is to include Russia within The Clash of Civilizations narrative which is itself a hypothesis for ‘remaking the world order’ through a division and conquering of Eurasia.
Hussain does so by isolating the Yugoslav Wars from its context and weaponizing the region‘s history so as to deflect fault for the Islamophobia in the Anglosphere.
However, Samuel P. Huntington excluded the Christian Orthodox nations of Russia and Serbia from his “core civilizations” and rather considered them ‘torn countries’ among the major civilizations.
In Brenton Tarrant’s mind he may have been elevating the Yugoslav Wars through his act of terrorism, when all he accomplished was provide ammunition for the Western yellow press to further slander the Serbian victims of US imperialism and drag their name through the mud for something they had nothing to do with.
As for the mass shooting in El Paso, the author should try directing the blame closer to home. One can’t help but be reminded of the brilliant observation made by documentary filmmaker Michael Moore (before he became a shill for the Democratic Party) who made a connection between the Columbine High School shooting and its occurrence in the midst of the unilateral “humanitarian intervention” in Yugoslavia on the day the US dropped the most amount of bombs in the Kosovo campaign which he further examined in his film Bowling For Columbine<.
President Clinton had to give two press conferences the morning of April 20th, 1999 — one addressing the Columbine massacre and another giving an explanation for the NATO killing of civilians in Serbia.
American society is suffering from a severely disconnected collective psyche when it fails to make a connection between mass shootings domestically and its endless wars abroad, the real catalyst for the Islamophobic reaction to the refugee crisis.
US gun culture is a product of the Cold War which conditioned a mass psychology of fear and liberals shedding crocodile tears who think gun control legislation is somehow a solution to the problem when it would only put a small band-aid on a much deeper wound are unwilling to explore the real roots of the issue.
It’s true the US is the only country that suffers from routine mass shootings like in El Paso and Dayton, but the US is also the only country with 800+ military bases in more than 80 countries around the world while currently bombing 7 different nations.
America is an insecure, terrified country that resolves everything with violence, at home and abroad, and until this connection is recognized, mass shootings like El Paso will likely continue just like our wars.
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Should we have any reason to believe this story of an alleged illegal Serb, Milan Trisic, 55, (magic multiple of 11) who admitted to being a member of the Bratunac Brigade …
And what about the big pile of shoes stacked in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in 2010 as a memorial to the victims of the, shoes being a clear Masonic symbol that we see most memorably a lot of at the Westminster bridge vehicle rampage nonsense.
https://americansecuritytoday.com/soldier-srebrenica-massacre-sentenced-immigration-fraud/
The fakery is simply phenomenal.
It will be interesting to see if Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize is revoked. Very, very shameful if it is.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-nobel-prize-literature-balkans-idUKKBN1WQ20I
Yugoslavia was a fine country, pity that it did not last longer.
Unfortunately, this article, and most of the comments below, espouse a very simplistic, Marxist-Russian Orthodox narrative that year by year is getting even more conspiratorial and distant from the facts on the ground.
That Jugoslavia survived as long as it did is a tribute largely to one man Princip Broz Tito, who during world war 2 was supported by the Allies including both Churchill and Stalin, and who himself a Croat was supported by the other states that made up Jugoslavia. Putting his success down simply to Jugoslavia’s brand of socialism, frankly, is disingenuous, as anyone who watched Emir Kusturica’s masterpiece film, Underground will likely already know.
Kusturica, a Bosnian born Muslim who has moved from Satrajevo to Serbia, recently converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and is a close friend of Vladimir Putin, describes in his surreal account of Yugoslavia from the German invasion to the country’s collapse, the majority of Jugoslavians as being kept in the dark and in a constant state of war readiness, whist party bosses profiteered.
The film includes newsreel film of the genuine grief that Tito’s death led to throughout Jugoslavia, but when the film was released Kusturica was met with criticism for Serbian bias by contrasting the warm response that the Nazis met in Croatia and Slovenia with the sullen response in Belgrade. The US certainly played its part in the collapse of Jugoslavia a s did Europe, especially Germany, the first to recognise Croatia, I suspect a continuance of its long term policy of ‘Drang nach osten’.
Croatia is an interesting case, being the only nation throughout German occupied Europe that built and staffed its own concentration camps, where Serbs and Muslims alike were murdered by Roman Catholic Croations in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the region. The communist Tito’s victory over Nazism allowed him to reunite Jugoslavia. That said, I cannot conceive of any single figure, apart from Tito, himself a Croat, could have reunited his people, but the cost of socialism in terms of public cynicism, corruption and lack of development when compared to western Europe was high, whilst the ethnic differences that were kept just below the surface seemed inevitable following Tito’s death.
The story of the west’s support for the separation of Kosovo from Serbia and the resulting ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Albanians is a disgrace, but I would rather believe that the spirit of Balkan unity is still not dead. I find it remarkable that Kusturicas still believes in Jugoslavia and that one day it will rise again. Former Jugoslav pop singer, Goran Bregovic, whose parents were Croat and Serb does too. This world artist and composer of very original multi- ethnic Balkan music shows that what unites the Balkans is far greater that what divides.
Underground is one of my favorite films!!
I’m a great fan of Kusturica too and recently got the original TV series, ‘Once Upon a Time there was a Country’ which was edited into Underground. If you haven’t seen it it’s well worth a watch.
It is a tragedy that Yugoslavia was broken up and destroyed by globalist intrigue and western aggression.
It was a very civilised and successful multicultural moderate socialist society. A beautiful country with sensible economic policies, permitting private enterprise employing up to 25 people. Reasonably prosperous, independent, with people free to travel and work abroad (and millions did.)
It could have provided a coherent development model for countries like the USSR and GDR.
Yugoslavia fell apart because the corrupt communist regime in Belgrade, after Tito died, started to expel other Yugoslavs from the party and from the army.
Over a decade the Yugoslav army was defacto the Serbian Army.
Quite rightly the other republics were not going to put up with that.
Stick that in your Trotsky-Orthodox conspiratorial narrative pipe and smoke it.
You should educated yourself beyond that and read about the thousands of innocent Croatian civilians including children placed into Yugoslav communist concentration camps at the end of the war and who starved to death.
Cognitive dissonance.
From the intentional dismemberment of the Yugoslavia to the Maghreb and the ME were all designed and prepared by the western elite think tank the likes of Chattam House, CFR ,Brookings Institute and the Atlantic Council. ONce the Soviet Union imploded the western oligarchs felt their was nothing in their way to total spectrum dominance.
Post Scriptum: Tolstoi”History would be a wonderful thing, if only it were true”
The Serbs, especially the Bosnian variety were utterly evil and murderous bastards during the Yugoslav war which THEY kicked off in retaliation to the independence desires of the other Yugoslav republics.
It seems they have many fans, apologists and replicants 25-30 years later.
Lol, strong argument.
All sides committed war crimes and atrocities in a bloody civil war. The Serbs were no better or worse than any of the other bloodthirsty gangster factions. They were just demonised with fake atrocity stories like Srebrenica and “100,000 (surprised it wasn’t six million) murdered Kosovans” because this served western globalist and corporate interests at the time.
Fake? Try popping down to Sarajavo, standing in the public square and declaring your pathetic, disgusting, apologist claptrap.
Once you’ve finished, and if you are still in one piece, then please pop over to Tel Aviv and similarly declare your stated views about Jewish people.
Srebrenica is just another Iraq Incubator Babies style hoax used to justify a criminal war of aggression.
What really happened is that Bosnian moslems massacred 2,000 Serb civilians.
500 Bosnian civilians were then massacred by Serbs by way of reprisal.
“Yet for Hussain, the driving force in Yugoslavia’s downfall was bigotry itself, somehow isolated from the disaster capitalism forced upon it.”
This familiar mystical approach is clear from an early line in Hussain’s piece,
“Nearly two decades after the war ended, Bosnia is still struggling to emerge from the vortex of hatred that destroyed the country during the 1990s.”
The “vortex of hatred” i.e. “Pure Evil”, “Satan”, “The Horror at the Heart Of Human Nature” – and all those other incantations that divert from any serious investigation into root causes.
And I read this at the bottom of the Hussain piece:
“Research for this story was supported with a grant from the Transatlantic Media Fellowship of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Washington, D.C.”
This Heinrich Böll Foundation is another one of those proliferating “green concerned” NGOs.
I think the following analysis shows so very clearly that we are lied to and lied to and lied to and lied to and that we cannot have any faith whatsoever in what the media tell us. One thing we can have faith in though is that they clearly tell us that they’re lying to us.
I found this “pre-genocide” story done in 1993 by Tony Birtley, Australian ABC News introduced by news anchor, US ABC News of which I provide an analysis below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz_dVScxOtg
We are told that Tony Birtley travelled by foot and horseback to get into Srebrenica and since arriving has run out of food and been injured by Serbian fire but still he managed to smuggle out the story. We see a couple of snippets of Tony talking to camera (showing no evidence of injury) but these could be from anywhere in the general region – there is no footage in this story to suggest that they originate from Tony’s own experience. For example, there is video in colour of villagers around fires followed by black and white video of them allegedly going up a hillside. As the story tells us that they are walking from the fires to the hillsides we have to wonder at this change. Overall, there is nothing convincing to suggest that the various bits of footage are connected or genuinely represent the story told.
Tony tells us that after 11 months of the Serbian siege, villagers light fires on the streets and on the hillsides waiting for what they call the “Plane from God”, US air drops of food made in the dead of night on the steep hillsides – their only lifeline.
From 2:34
Villager says, “I found this about 600 yards uphill. I don’t know what it is. It could be medicine or something.”
Comment: The box is labelled and the villagers have been receiving these packages “for weeks now” according to the American anchor who introduces the story. Does the man not know how to recognise what’s what still at this stage? The v/o is not Tony’s voice indicating the footage is from another story.
Tony Birtley:
“The lucky ones collect their treasured package of 12 meals and head home but in the morning the empty packets lying on the mountain track show that some were so desperate for the food that they couldn’t wait.”
Comment: What we are shown looks like more like random rubbish passed over by vehicles than packaging dropped on steep hillsides from meals opened the night before. Also, the people we are shown sitting beside fires don’t really look desperate and if the people going up the mountain are representatives of their family we have to wonder why they wouldn’t wait till they got together with their family to share the meals.
“American planes have successfully dropped aid … for the last five nights running. The villagers say they have only received one lunch packet. The rest has been taken by the army.”
Comment: “Five nights running” is at odds with “for weeks now” from American anchor. Also at odds is “only one lunch packet” with “treasured package of 12 meals” above.
“Most people have only been eating bread made from hay and corn for the last two months. That has finished. They now make it from the flour from a hazelnut tree.”
Comment: Hay and corn? Is there just the one hazelnut tree and how long will they make bread for the villagers from the hazelnuts from that tree? If they had hazelnuts wouldn’t they have made bread first from that more nutritious source rather than from hay?
“The father of this family demonstrates how much weight he has lost in the last 11 months. It is not a famine here but it can be best described as slow starvation.”
Comment: We are shown a man who looks perfectly normal weight (in fact, with a slight belly) with a belt around his waist whose length extends considerably beyond his girth. We have to wonder at being shown this. I also have a belt whose length extends beyond my girth considerably but it isn’t as a result of losing weight.
We are shown a villager brandishing a plant who says, “This is what I eat.”
Comment: She and her children look normal weight.
At 7:19
Tony Birtley
“This 75-year-old lady lies exhausted after a trek of 17 hours across mountain tracks. There is no food to feed her and she’ll probably die within a few days.”
Comment: The footage of the woman does not obviously suggest this and we have to wonder why she and the others trekked over mountains to Srebrenica for 17 hours.
I think it most doubtful that an “horrific war crime”, dubious or otherwise took place in Srebrenica. Certainly, Jared Israel does not think so.
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/texts.htm
It’s looking a little engineered in this Dutch documentary about Srebrenica being planned in Washington and Sarajevo
From the UN investigation:
“Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them that he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.”
In this video of Bosnians commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the alleged massacre we see the banner, Don’t forget Srebrenica – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixNUI_eOOG0. While this banner could be perfectly genuine, of course, I immediately thought of the banner for the 2014 commemoration of the alleged deaths of 85 people at Bologna station in 1980, “Bologna non dimentica” http://www.arcibologna.it/2_agosto_2014_arci_bologna_in_piazza_per_non_dimenticare.html. The evidence shows that this event, like a number of others, involved the bombing of an evacuated area – https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/other-events.html.
I actually addressed this if you read the whole piece. The police chief of Srebrenica’s claims about the red line agreement between BiH and the Clinton admin I quote in a WikiLeaks cable.
So you did, Max, and my apologies that I did not read your article properly. I simply reacted to “Christchurch” and then went to see if Srebrenica seemed staged or not. In fact, just to be clear I think it was completely staged, that there was zero kind of massacre. The fact that we see complete lies in the pre-genocide story from Tony Birtley and that there seemed to be planning of a massacre of at least 5,000 suggests strongly to me that the whole thing would be staged, not actually carried out.
You should be very wary of any “false flag” that anyone is “admitting” to. There is a kind of recognition that Pearl Harbour was a semi false-flag. It was not – it was a completely staged event. There was a bombing but the evidence shows it was in an evacuated area. Similarly, the 1980 Bologna station bombing is an admitted false flag but it was also a bombing in an evacuated area- see https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/other-events.html. I’ve dropped the term false flag from my vocabulary and simply use psyop. I’ve never seen an event that corresponds with “act committed by one group and blamed on another for an ulterior motive such as war” which is the common understanding of the term. There are a number of false-flag like events but none that actually fit that definition. I think it’s a misleading term. People think of 9/11 as a false flag but it wasn’t, it was a straight-out psyop where only the building collapses and the very large number of drills were real.
The first thing I do when a massacre or bombing is reported is google the images. If you look at the images for Srebrenica while they look massacre-ish there is no clear image of a single dead person. We see the odd skull but why would the flesh be so completely absent at this stage? If you can find a convincing image of a single massacre victim please point me to it.
El Paso and all other US mass shootings reported breathlessly across the globe are staged … and they tell us clearly. I’ve analysed Sandy Hook and gave the example of the ricocheted bullet at Las Vegas in another comment on your article.
May not always agree with you Max, but I always learn something from your pieces. Thanks
Srebrenica was the opening volley in the renewal of Anglo Zio Capitalism’s “Century of Resource Wars”. The world of PipeLineistan. The AZC path of unimpeded rapine led NATZO countries through Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya… And then they were checked. First defeat in Syria: after 9 years of NATZO-ISIS invasion Syria stands bloody but unbowed. And now Yemen, despite murderous aid to Saudi invaders by UK and Israeli warplanes from U$ bases. [note by Vexarb: Saudi Arabia is an Anglo Zionist oil company masquerading as an Arab kingdom]:
“Mass surrender! Thousands of Saudi soldiers ‘captured or killed’ by Houthi rebels” reports claim.
Yemeni rebels say they have captured thousands of Saudi troops. It’s been called one of the most significant events in the Middle East in recent years.
https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/mass-surrender-thousands-of-saudi-soldiers-captured-or-killed-by-houthi-rebels/news-story/ea1478d17bf5b9eede9648ba213191de
PS also on RT: Houthis whack KSA
https://www.rt.com/news/469837-yemen-houthi-najran-saudis-captured/
Christchurch was yet another in the continuum of events staged by the power elite which starts at least as far back as the Great Fire of London in 1666 (see Gloria Moss’s fascinating article – https://off-guardian.org/2019/09/01/the-great-fire-of-london-cui-bono/) and, as with all staged events, they give us the signs loud and clear.
Just to give a good sense of the continuum I show below where the hallmark of “Miracle Survivor” appears in the Great Fire (narrow escape rather than miracle), Pearl Harbour, 9/11, the Las Vegas shooting and Christchurch.
The Great Fire of 1666 – the Farriner family (but not the poor maid) escape fire
It seemed that a fire had started in their bake-house and the blaze had become so well established that thick fumes and orange heat roared up the stairs of their ramshackle house. With their main exit blocked, the only means of escape was through a window and over the roof. Thomas Farriner and his adult son and teenage daughter climbed out to save themselves; his daughter scorched her skin a little during their escape. Too fearful to follow, their maid remained behind and perished in the flames. As they scrambled to safety, the bundles of faggots stored in Thomas Farriner’s yard quickly caught alight and the blaze began to spread to the adjacent houses.
http://www.thehistoryreader.com/medieval-history/thomas-farriner/
Pearl Harbour
Donald Stratton, miracle survivor of severe burns
With the burns he alleged he suffered he could not possibly have inched his way along a 70ft rope, nor re-enlisted after discharge to fight in 5 crucial invasions, nor is there evidence of any part of his ear missing or burns to his face in images of him.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/740478/Pearl-Harbour-attack-anniversary-survivor-memoir-Donald-Stratton
9/11
Pasquale Buzzelli, miracle survivor of North tower collapse (yep, it collapsed when he reached the 22nd floor)
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/2003/n_9189/
When you watch the tower collapse this simply isn’t credible, nor is the fact that he seems to not have suffered a scratch. Being a structural engineer you really have to wonder why he didn’t work out the collapse that nearly killed him was a controlled demolition.
Las Vegas shooting – Natalie Vanderstay, miracle survivor of ricocheted bullet
In an interview with Dr Phil, nurse, Natalie Vanderstay, describes bullet ricocheting off her stomach
https://www.drphil.com/videos/my-heart-is-hurting-for-all-the-people-i-couldnt-help-says-nurse-wounded-in-vegas-shooting/
Christchurch mosque shooting – Temel Atacocugu, 9-bullet miracle survivor
Temel Atacocugu was shot nine times and he’s wearing a compression bandage! And his scars have healed so quickly we can see he’s already wearing socks over them. What a guy!
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/112147145/terror-attack-survivor-who-was-shot-nine-times-had-to-tell-victims-parents-of-death
I haven’t looked closely at the Oslo shooting but I think we can safely infer that that was fake. In this Daily Mail article we see a photo of 22 year-old Ina Rangones Libak who was allegedly shot in the jaw and chest. Does her bandaging look consistent with such injuries? And then there’s 17 year-old, Ingvild Stensrud, 17,
“who [said she] was shot in the leg and shoulder, … [and] sought refuge in the summer camp’s cafe on the island of Utoya, hiding behind a piano, only to get trapped as Breivik walked from room to room in the small building, killing more than a dozen people.
She said she only survived because another victim fell on her, knocking her to the floor and giving the impression she was dead.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2145395/Girl-17-shot-Norwegian-massacre-recalls-terrifying-moment-heard-Breivik-shout.html
This last sentence is reminiscent of Christchurch where people were on top of each other in the mosque, no?
The NZ Christchurch analyst, Alan Ireland, said this when he was first reading about Christchurch:
http://chchtruth.com/
I have never thought to question Balkan events but I shall research them now. I mean I know people die and die horribly and in very large numbers but it’s amazing the amount of fakery too.
I am open to anything but in general I think most of thes “complete hoax” ideas related to events like 9/11 and Christchurch are implanted and promoted by the establishment itself to discredit the more genuine theories challenging official narratives.
Max, I judge only by the evidence. The idea that 9/11 was a complete hoax as opposed to a false flag is almost as unpopular among truthers as it is among non-truthers. It’s ironic, isn’t it? If you’re a truther it’s OK to say that the US government cold-bloodedly and callously killed those poor people in the buildings while it is taboo to say, “Naah, they didn’t kill them, they only pretended to,” although to me now it seems utter insanity to think they’d kill them even if I thought so myself for four whole years of study.
It’s only taken me 5 years of study but I’ve now worked out how truly simple the basics are to show that 9/11 was indeed a hoax or, using my preferred term, a psyop – and when I say psyop I mean the real meaning of the term, not the inappropriate application where people call it a psyop but understand by the term that 3,000 people were killed when that was not a desired outcome of the psyop. That is not a psyop! Nothing psyoppy about it!
It’s so simple, Max.
Planes do not melt into buildings so automatically we know that the footage of Flights 11 and 175 melting into the towers is faked and thus we know the story of the 19 terrorists is a load of BS and that rogue elements within the US government are responsible for “9/11”.
See this YouTuber show how the plane hitting the twin tower in the 1978 film presaging 9/11, The Medusa Touch, emulates crash physics better than Flight 175 into the South tower in “real life” 9/11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhNR6lx97E&feature=youtu.be
From this we know that the alleged 265 passengers of the four planes did not die (unless, of course, we think that the perps may have sequestered these people off somewhere and killed them that way … but there is no evidence of that).
As the perps managed to fake the deaths of those 265 passengers we have no reason to think that they didn’t fake the remaining 2,735 deaths as they had complete control of evacuation and collapse of the buildings. After all, they only wanted us to believe that 3,000 people died – they had no interest in that being a reality.
All the available evidence supports this hypothesis and there is zero evidence that contradicts it.
What I’ve learnt in the last five years about the power elite is this:
— They hoax us constantly … however
— They are very generous with signs that they’re hoaxing us (sloppiness of execution, over-the-top ridiculousness, things that don’t add up, smiling grievers, contradictions in the story, contradictions between show and tell, the actual truth and on and on)
— They are utterly scrupulous in never faking evidence so well that it can be used to defend their story.
If you believe that 9/11 was the work of 19 terrorists armed with boxcutters or that it was indeed an inside conspiracy where the US government callously and cold-bloodedly killed 3,000 of its citizens in their psyop, you will find a few challenges on this webpage to which – so far – not a single person has responded. https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/5000-challenge.html
What an informative article! Great job! Thank you for going into the history and some of the background to explain the events. It makes all the difference when reporting real news. As I was reading it I kept thinking “the Intercept is not a very informative website since it is funded by Omidyar” and amazingly you included that in your history of things too!
To jog my memory about the Columbine High School shooting I came across a very interesting report done in 2015 (not MSM) that went into great detail about the history of the boys in their personal lives leading up to the day of the tragic events. The writer included police evidence that was withheld from the public until 2006. It is very well done and explains a lot about our public school system and how teachers and students are being let down in a big way…on purpose?
Here is the link: https://allthatsinteresting.com/columbine-high-school-shooting
While I appreciate this article we should remember that Chomsky was vilified for questioning the Srebrenica massacre and yet he is derided on this website as a “gatekeeper.” This week I was appalled by the attack on Chris Hedges. Please check out his program on RT where he interviews some of the most interesting people of the left before calling Chris a disinformation agent. OffGuardian , while publishing some very good stuff, seems like a hangout for ex-revolutionaries from fringe groups like RCP (Revolutionary Communist party). Goodbye and good luck.
Ed Curtin’s piece was not an indictment of Hedges as a whole, it simply pointed out some of his inconsistencies which are understandable considering he comes from an MSM background but was purged for his accurate coverage of the Iraq war. No one, including those who write for OffG like myself, should be exempt from criticism.
IMO, it is not about the person Hedges or Chomsky, but about the biases these persons have when they discuss for instance the war on Yugoslavia. Now for Chomsky, you are right in mentioning that he an Edward Herman were villified (by George Monbiot) for denying ‘genocide’ in Srebrenica.
What Chomsky was not villified for however is that he thinks that Serbian leader Milosovic was a monster and that NATO bombed those awful Serbians (it was just that he thought that the bombing was too much, after the bombing took place) Same applies to his viewpoint on Libya and Syria. That is a clear bias, and rather convenient if you are a power who wants to have the consent to bomb a country with only some hand wringing comments from ‘dissidents’ like Chomsky after the bombing has happened.
Jared Israel (who has a conflict of interest, defended Milosovic) has interesting points on this type of dissidence that you can find here
http://emperors-clothes.com/yr/chomsky.htm
Goodbye? – Not so fast, Lochearn
Questioning the Srebrenica massacre? Not Jared Israel’s take on Chomsky.
—
From http://tenc.net/yr/chomsky.htm
Democracy Now, which interviewed Chomsky, is listened to by many thousands of people who might have opposed the NATO bombing had Chomsky, the supposed anti-imperialist, not told them, ‘NATO is wrong to be bombing those Serbian monsters.’ Who is going to get up early in the morning to defend monsters? And even as Chomsky was using the public’s perception that he is a super-duper-anti-imperialist to promote NATO’s justification for its murderous bombing, he was exchanging emails with young people in Serbia expressing sorrow for the bombings.
You know, they say that during the Spanish Inquisition, the inquisitors comforted their victims as they died. Have things really changed?
—
Of course Chomsky is a gatekeeper because he hasn’t done the rudimentary research that thousands of others have managed to do to establish that 9/11 was an inside conspiracy easily worked out from the fact that physical laws prevent 200-ton airliners from melting into 500,000 ton steel frame skyscrapers which means automatically that those buildings did not collapse from fire and also means automatically that 265 people did not die in planes.
Disinformation agents and gatekeepers who are not exactly consciously disinformation agents can provide a large amount of truth. It’s not necessarily about lying – often what they do is not actively lie much at all but distract you with one truth while diverting you from another important truth or they simply refuse to recognise obvious truths – this is ridiculously common. That people conduct interesting interviews does not preclude them from being disinformation agents or gatekeepers.
There is an “Either/Or” mentality here that the MSM loves to encourage whereby every figure is portrayed as EITHER “good/trustworthy/completely honest” OR “one of them/gatekeeper/disinfo agent”. Any genuinely perceptive thinker will realise that there are not only all sorts of motives that go through a single figure (some honest, some not so) but that various genuine disinfo figures will always mix up truth and falsehood for the sake of confusing the issue, discrediting the truth by mixing with lies and falsely validating lies by association with the truth. Thus all outlets should be examined and their content sifted.
Thanks for the excellent report Max. I very much need to revisit this whole subject after reading Chris Hedges’s flawed but important book “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.” That book was written just before Chris left/was pushed out of the NYT and it shows.
As for MH, I had his his measure when he penned his pro USAID, pro White Helmets article.
Yes, as Ed Curtin thoroughly examined, Hedges’ roots in the MSM occasionally shows and I would say particularly in regard to his coverage of the Yugoslav wars. He may have criticized the NATO intervention and the KLA but he took both sides by repeating a lot of the false claims that Republika Srpska was taking orders from Milosevic which even the pro-NATO ICTY later found to be untrue. As for Murtaza Hussain, he and Robert Mackey in particular are among the reasons for the Intercept’s decline in quality.
Acknowledged.
One footnote to Max Parry’s excellent article (which he may know already) is that some time in the first decade of this century, a group of Venezuelan university students sponsored by US government agencies went to Serbia to receive training in regime change strategy and tactics from the Otpor! people. One of these students may have been Juan Guaido (lately accused of hanging out with members of Colombian drug gangs). Pierre Omidyar’s baleful influence continues elsewhere.
Yes, a really good comprehensive write up. Can’t see anything I wouldnt agree with. The coverage of the Yugoslav war in the West bore very little resemblance to the facts on the ground, which has largely since come out. And I guess the author of the Intercept article uses these outdated false premises to speculate wrongly again of a link to mass shootings in US. As Parry says the US is an insecure nation that thinks violence resolves everything. If it was a human being it would be locked up for the protection of everyone else.
A good point that I admittedly neglected to mention. Germany’s role was instrumental in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia after its incorporation into NATO.
meant this to be a reply to ‘Antonym’s comment
Yes, Max, as soon as I heard that Germany supported a Croation breakaway I guessed it would destabilize YugoSlavia. At the time, which was long before NATZO invaded, I thought Germany made this dangerous move for sentimental reasons, because Croatia had been under Austria and Haydn was born in Croatia. The decades after Srebrenica have uncovered what lay largely hidden at the time, that the EU$A is an Official Crime Syndicate and its strong arm thugs are members of NATZO.
Indeed. I have often said that Yugoslavia didn’t quite have the same level of outside interference and planning from the start. I feel that Western ‘plans’ generally evolved as the conflict progressed from Croatia to Bosnia. By the time Kosovo started I think the full Western regime change model complete with bare- faced lying was in action – used to devastating effect in later Middle East conflicts.
Yes, Germany and the Vatican recognised Croatia very prematurely. Perhaps Germany wanted to split Yugoslavia up into weaker states and the Vatican had some nostalgia for the days of forced religious conversion in 1940s Croatia. But I don’t think there is enough evidence that there was a grand plan by the West at the stage Croatia went its separate way. There was a definite slant to the reporting but the media view I remember was ‘don’t get involved in Yugoslavia’. That view changed during Bosnia imo – perhaps because the Bosnian Serbs were challenging NATO’s increasing meddling.
Good write up. Lets not forget Helmut Kohl’s nefarious influence vs. Serbia then, using EU pressure. This was just after Germany’s Reunification in 1990.
Srebenica’s defense was left recklessly weak by NATO.