The Serbs Are Victims of Propaganda

The Serbs are not angels, but neither are they devils. They are also the victims of a massive anti-Serbian propaganda campaign.

Starting with the civil wars, Serbs have been blamed for things they never did, while atrocities by Croats and Muslims were ignored. What the Serbs were and are up against are powerful American public relations firms, Western intelligence agencies and biased or incompetent Western reporters.

Maybe you recall a famous picture of an emaciated man standing behind a barbed-wire fence. This was reported as a Muslim being starved in a Serb concentration camp. In fact, the man was a Serb who had been arrested by the Serbs for looting, and he was not emaciated from lack of food but from suffering with advanced tuberculosis.

Yohanan Ramati, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense, wrote of the campaign against the Serbs: "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concern. It recalls Hitler's propaganda against the Allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and, when inconvenient, disregarded. The selectivity in reporting and comment is far too blatant to be accidental. "

Ramati quotes from an interview given on French Two television by James Harff of Finn & Rudder, the public relations firm representing the Muslims. He boasts that the firm's greatest achievement was to get American Jews on the side of Muslims by peddling the concentration camp story published by a New York newspaper. This business of death camps, by the way, was later proven to be a hoax.

But here is a good lesson in how the real world works behind the scenes. Finn & Rudder didn't commit the hoax. It simply took the published story to three major Jewish organizations with a suggestion that they run ads condemning it. The PR guy says that once the Jewish organizations came in on the side of the Muslims, it was easy to equate the Serbs with the Nazis.

Some of the hoaxes perpetrated on Americans include the so-called bread line massacre, the alleged destruction of Dubrovnik, a funeral shown on television of a girl said to be a Muslim victim who was instead a Serb child killed by the Muslims, and, of course, the mass rape hoax, which has cropped up again in Kosovo.

Original allegations in the past of 60, 000 rapes boiled down, after a UN investigation, to 126 alleged victims. Certainly in civil wars women will get rped, but the mass, organized rape story was a pure hoax.

This kind of stuff is still going on because the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia rests on a foundation of lies. I've seen claims by Western journalists that "thousands of refugees have all told the same story. " Use common sense. Do you really think the handful of Western journalists over there have questioned thousands of people? If so, why do they keep using the same video of the same people so often?

And how many of these Western journalists speak Albanian or Serbo-Croatian? My guess is none. That means they have to rely on translators who are probably being furnished by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The refugee can be saying one thing and the translator another, and the reporter will be none the wiser. That happened in Vietnam, where translators sometimes turned out to be Vietcong intelligence agents.

Just remember: NATO is breaking international law, and the United States has no business being involved in the internal affairs of Yugloslavia. One day, we may elect a government that won't lie to us so much.