When the scholar and author Srdja Trifkovic was turned back at the Vancouver airport on February 24, Greater Islam and its useful idiots saw an opportunity, and pounced. The name “Trifkovic” rang a bell in the head of one Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who quickly recalled that anti-jihadist Robert Spencer had written supportively of him and his work in the past. Hearing that Trifkovic didn’t buy into the Srebrenica Genocide, al-Tamimi saw a path to killing two birds with one stone. And went digging for dirt.
Soon enough, he found something, or as close to something as one can find on Dr. Trifkovic. What he found was a symposium [1] that Trifkovic had participated in last year on a paleocon website called Alt Right, responding to the question: Is the traditionalist, paleoconservative Right anti-Semitic, as is popularly perceived? The moderator of the panel was a Jewish paleocon named Eugene Girin [2]. Joining Trifkovic was Paul Gottfried, also a Jewish paleocon, and the third panelist was well-known anti-Semitic paleocon Taki Theodoracopulos.
Reading the following paragraphs in the Trifkovic essay, al-Tamimi thought he’d caught the man red-handed in the act of Jew-hating:
It is true, however, that the traditional Right is inevitably antipathetic to certain modes of thought and feeling, to a peculiar Weltanschauung and the resulting forms of public and intra-communal discourse, which are quite properly perceived as specifically Jewish. Historically, Talmudic Judaism's insistence on the Jews' racial uniqueness -- emphasized by the ritual and dietary laws of Talmudic Judaism and on its view of Christians as idolaters -- has ensured that a Jew steeped in his own tradition could not view traditional European or American conservatism with sympathy. His tradition was a form of elaborate survival mechanism based on the zero-sum view of a world divided into "us" and "them." The Gentile was "the Other" ab initio and for ever. In addition, since the late 1800's the Jews have had a disproportionate impact on a host of intellectual trends and political movements which have fundamentally altered the civilization of Europe and its overseas offspring in a manner deeply detrimental to the family, nation, culture, racial solidarity, social coherence, tradition, morality and faith. Spontaneously or deliberately, those ideas and movements -- Marxism (including neoconservatism as the bastard child of Trotskyism), Freudianism, Frankfurt School cultural criticism, Boasian anthropology, etc. -- have eroded "the West" to the point where its demographic and cultural survival is uncertain. The erosion is continuing, allegedly in the name of propositional principles and universal values, and it is pursued with escalating ferocity.
All unfortunately true (though one would have preferred the phrase “disproportionately Jewish” to “specifically Jewish” vis-à-vis the kinds of movements my people tend to originate and support). While virgin eyes (mainstream readers and anyone not experienced in sorting out the intricacies and boundaries of what is and isn’t OK to say about Jews) will read the paragraphs as “anti-Semitic,” the views expressed aren’t unlike what I and any number of other Jewish conservatives have written in an effort to tame the Jewish predisposition toward cynicism about, and dismantling of, the traditional values of, yes, white-established societies. Values that every color and creed have been invited to share and benefit from, and which Trifkovic’s article continues to invite Jews to uphold -- if one reads the paragraphs that al-Tamimi did not focus on:
In our own time, however, the process of erosion has reached the stage where it is to be expected that increasing numbers of Jews -- those who love their own people more than they loath what the traditional Right loves -- will realize that, in the long term, their only viable survival strategy is to support the principles and objectives of the traditional Right. To put it bluntly, the survival of the West, which is recognizably Christian in spirit and European in genes, is "objectively" becoming the optimal survival strategy for the Jewish community as a whole, Israel included. (I've known several Jews who understand, notably my late friend Sir Alfred Sherman.) In the postmodern mélange of races, cultures and cults still desired by the likes of Abraham Foxman, the narrative of victimhood and its associated claims will carry little weight with the brown, black, and yellow multitudes blissfully devoid of European self-loathing, guilt and shame. The results may easily exceed in ferocity and magnitude the events of 1942-45. It is essential for the Jews to grasp that the survival of European gentile identity and institutions is a sine qua non of their own survival. It is desirable for the traditional Right to overcome its instinctive impulses, historically justified as they are, and to consider this possibility and its implications.
That is the harsh, coldly objective intellectual rigor I’ve come to expect from Dr. Trifkovic, who sees no winners here: ‘YES, those on the traditionalist Right are anti-Semitic. YES, they have reason to be. But NO, they shouldn’t be -- and here’s why they need to get over their Jew-grudges.’ The article is a call for the traditionalist, often anti-Semitic paleocon Right to recognize Jews as allies against the forces of barbarity. It’s the likes of Theodoracopulos and readers who think as he does that Trifkovic’s article was admonishing, along with Jews.
It's not reading that would be palatable to the mainstream, but conservative readers -- including Jewish conservatives -- are known to have a slightly higher tolerance for truth, even when Jews don’t come out smelling like roses. Indeed, there was actually very little there to seize on.
Trifkovic concerns himself with Jewish and Israeli survival. That's more than can be said of other paleocons, too many of whom -- not unlike too many liberals -- have convinced themselves that Jews are the problem with jihad, and let the Muslims off the hook, often defending them. Unhindered by such biased mental blocks, Trifkovic does not have it in for Israel, as his maligned symposium contribution and a lifetime of work make clear. That’s in contrast to Buchananites, for example -- Buchanan being someone who gets invited onto mainstream outlets including “The Daily Show” and who is published by Creators Syndicate.
Indeed, Trifkovic perceives a recipe for Israeli and Jewish survival better than most Jews do. He also warns of a threat that's quite under-appreciated by Jews as they try to nestle up to other minorities, who reject the idea of Jews belonging in the same endangered category (as the Jon Stewart-Rick Sanchez fight [3] demonstrated). And who, separately, have no affinity for Israel.
However, armed with the “damning” paragraphs, al-Tamimi saw an opportunity to take down one of the lone dissenters on the untouchable, unquestionable, sacralized, staged [4]atrocity [5] known as Srebrenica. But first he forwarded Trifkovic’s comments to Robert Spencer and asked if he endorsed Trifkovic’s statements, prompting him to repudiate them publicly.
Having gotten one rift going, al-Tamimi now turned on Spencer, and wrote an article [6] "exposing" Trifkovic's guilt -- and Spencer's guilt by association. Using, of course, the next anti-jihad-minded platform to do it: American Thinker. Where various writers over the years, including the editor, have cited [7] the author with esteem.
Precisely what al-Tamimi wanted to see an end to. “Trifkovic, author of the book Sword of the Prophet [8]," al-Tamimi wrote, is often upheld as a serious scholar with a genuine interest in promoting the cause of human rights in the face of jihadist ideology. For instance, he was interviewed in the documentary [9] Islam: What the West Needs to Know....”
He certainly was. I was at a screening that took place in January 2006 amid Muslim threats, at the Renaissance Film Festival in Los Angeles, where Jews made up probably half of the recently tuned-in anti-jihadist audience. Even before the obscure-sounding name “Srdja Trifkovic” appeared under the talking head manifesting onto the screen, I was taken aback when the theater erupted into cheers and applause as if a rock star had walked into the room. It was almost as unexpected as the section in the film that showed a map of the domino-like progression of the Balkans falling to Islam: Bosnia… Kosovo…Macedonia… -- that is, the "pseudo historic" concept of a Balkan jihad which al-Tamimi presumes to admonish both Spencer and Trifkovic against.
His article appeared to be constructively advising the counter-jihad movement to be more mindful of its allies and associations. But, as JihadWatch.org comment poster “Cornelius” asked [10]: “Why Robert? Why Jihad Watch? Why not use a more appropriately valid and sinister example than [un]-moderated comments? Why not just issue the generic warning without trying to diminish an ally in the anti-Jihad like Robert Spencer? In short, why pick a fight with [a] friend?”
No sooner did the March 5 piece run than there was a news alert to it that morning by the never-sleeping anti-anti-jihadists of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, who saw that the next window of opportunity to divide and conquer the anti-jihad movement had been pried open.
What’s happening here is transparent. As Trifkovic was being pilloried by the Canadian PC machine, an attack came from an unexpected, heretofore mostly friendly, direction -- about a tangential matter. And then another attack from another friendly place. Jihad Watch and American Thinker were utilized and targeted by what appears to be, if not a coordinated campaign, a very symbiotic one, which also almost pitted the two sites against each other.
Readers of both Jihad Watch and American Thinker -- never easily fooled -- “smelled a skunk in the woodpile,” as one put it. “Morton Doodslag” elaborated [11]:
…Isn't it odd that in both Tamimi's case, and in the case of Charles Johnson, Robert Spencer ends up being the target of their efforts to purge the ranks of anti-Jihad of those whom they consider undesirable and impure?...Who made either man the arbiter? And why their strong impulse to impeach and defame and purify within in the fragile camp of anti-Jihad?...
And so one turns her attention toward al-Tamimi. Do we for a moment believe the man is really so worried about negative attitudes toward Jews? Or might he be using the anti-Semitism card to help protect the carefully guarded "truth" of a genocide occurring at Srebrenica -- the very factoid that sparked his interest in Trifkovic in the first place. Consider the dual purpose being served: creating a wedge in the anti-jihad movement, and targeting anti-jihad elements that have expressed some doubt about the unquestionable.
“Spencer makes no attempt to distance himself from Trifkovic's pseudo-historical views concerning the Bosnian War,” al-Tamimi wrote [12] in an update on his blog, continuing on the theme that faults Spencer for noticing jihad and its successful propaganda (“imagined propaganda arm”) in the Balkans.
Indeed, the whole affair -- starting with Trifkovic’s deportation at the prompting of an “Institute for Research of Genocide in Canada” -- is replete with ironies and hypocrisies. Which usually means agendas.
We’ll skip pointing out the obvious decoy value of accusing an anti-jihadist of anti-Semitism in a way that benefits the predominately Jew-hating Muslim world (which often enough [13]includes [14] Bosniaks). Not just any anti-jihadist, but one with whom I traveled to Israel in 2007 and who a year earlier had been the keynote speaker at Yad Vashem in a symposium on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. A dangerously high level of prominence indeed for someone who discovered that the “8,000 Muslim men and boys” mantra isn’t [15]all [16]it’s [17]cracked up [18] to be. A few more glaring ironies [19]:
In addition to claiming to represent “more than 50,000 Canadians of Bosnian origin” -- despite 28,000 of those being Serbs and Croats -- IRGC director Emir Ramic sits [20] on the editorial board of a Sarajevo-based Muslim magazine titled Korak (“Step”). Korak, published by the veterans’ association of the Bosnian-Muslim Army [21], runs articles titled “Israel is a Terrorist Regime” and “Basic Principles of the Law of War in Islam.” The latter asserts that “Jihad is a just and legitimate fight against aggression and a struggle in protection of human rights and freedoms.”
As Trifkovic himself noted, the magazine -- which publishes Arabic, Bosnian, Iranian and the occasional Jewicidal author -- also carries articles such as:
“WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BLOCKADE OF THE INHABITANTS OF GAZA?”…[Issue] No. 14 [has] Norman Finkelstein’s [22] THE BLOODSHED IN GAZA…“Korak” No. 16 [23] (2009): PALESTINE AND AL-QUDS AS THE SYMBOL OF ALL MUSLIMS OF THE WORLD….Ramic’s magazine wholeheartedly supports “I’m-proud-to-be-a-holocaust-denier [24]” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Muslim veterans’ organ in its issue No. 15 has an Iranian propaganda diatribe [25], THE FAILURE OF THE ANTI-IRANIAN SCENARIO….For the friends of Israel’s eradication from the map, Emir Ramic’s magazine has a heart-warming article in issue No. 12 [26]: SIXTY YEARS SINCE THE PALESTINIAN CATASTROPHE, by Dr. Džemal Najetovic. The list goes on, predictably, from one issue to another...from one antisemitic and Serb-hating orgasm to another.
An interesting pair of targets, making the familiar attempt to break the solidarity between Jews and Serbs -- Hitler's and jihad's original victims -- all the more transparent.
The chief editor of the Islamist magazine, “Asaf Dzanic [27], is also on the Genocide Institute’s board. Perversely, and where the Institute derives some of its legitimacy, Elie Wiesel has lent his name to the Institute. And still there are more ironies and hypocrisies. As Canadian former ambassador to Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia -- James Bissett -- pointed out [28], the “Institute” actively engages in WWII Holocaust minimization and denial, of the already minimized and suppressed story [29] of the Muslim-assisted [30] genocide of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in Croatia -- the precursor [31] to the wider European genocide. Ambassador Bissett contrasted the IRGC’s article “Examination of Serbian Deaths in Jasenovac Camp [32]” with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s numbers [33]. Then he advised:
Contrast the “Institute’s” hate-filled ravings with the entry on “Jasenovac” by Menachem Shelach, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1990, p. 739, which says, “Some six hundred thousand people [34] were murdered at Jasenovac.” The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team [35] estimated “that close to 600,000…mostly Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, were murdered at Jasenovac”…[exceeding] anything that happened at Srebrenica in 1995 by not less than thirtyfold. In nature those crimes were unspeakably [36]more [37]gruesome [38].
Elie Wiesel has admitted to being less than careful in what he lends his name to. In October 1993 at a talk he gave at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Wiesel became almost “rhapsodic,” as an attendee named Peter described it, when he spoke of walking through Sarajevo with Bosnian-Muslim wartime president Alija Izetbegovic.
"Imagine a Jew defending Muslims!” he beamed. My thought was "why defend one ethnic group? Why not defend victims, all of them…The event really got interesting [when] Dusanka Krstic then rose to make some points, such as the presence of Croatian [wartime president] Franjo Tudjman at the [1993] inauguration of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and Mr. Wiesel accordingly denounced Croatian President Tudjman because he denies that the holocaust occurred. But the high point of the day came when Mrs. Krstic asked the Nobel Peace Prize Winner why he signed his name to a letter in Wall Street Journal demanding that the USA should bomb the Serbs. Wiesel's words were in effect: "I should not have done that. I never saw the text of the letter. I was traveling when I received a phone call asking me if I would put my signature to this. I asked 'who else is signing? You can put my name to it'." …[A]s one Israeli activist has put it, being a victim does not make you a saint. Although he is a victim, Mr. Wiesel has his victims, too...
Like Tudjman, Izetbegovic was invited to the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, but he declined. Because [39] of how it would look to the Muslim world.
Which brings us back to Mr. al-Tamimi and his criticism of Robert Spencer for not also distancing himself from “Trifkovic’s” notion [40] of Bosnia as [41]jihad [42], which al-Tamimi sees as illegitimate revisionism:
True, [Trifkovic] has condemned Slobodan Milosevic on many occasions, but he defends both Karadzic and Mladic, both of whom have been indicted by the U.N. on sixteen counts of genocide and war crimes...[Trifkovic's] attempts to portray the Bosnian War as a case of Serbs being the victims of supposed jihadist aggression do not constitute legitimate historical revisionism countering an imagined Islamist "propaganda arm" in the Balkans, but rather pseudo-history, pure and simple.
As the DarLink comment poster from earlier put it: “If [the] UN says you are guilty then it must be so, never mind all the resolutions against Israel and Goldstone report.”
Al-Tamimi certainly places much emphasis on, and confidence in, the judgments of an international court which Americans specifically declined to subject their leaders and soldiers to, fearing precisely that the politicized body would function by Orwellian standards. (Indeed, the canaries living the Kafkaesque nightmare include almost every high-level wartime Serbian official, on trial essentially [43]for [44]being [45] a Serbian official during war.) But given his confidence in UN courts, al-Tamimi might take a moment to notice that Milosevic was never found guilty; he was found dead [46] -- like at least one other Serb leader at the Hague before him -- and that leaves him as an indicted war criminal. No more indicted than Tudjman or Izetbegovic, both of whom passed away waiting for their indictments to come. (These were politically trickier indictments and therefore deliberately dragged out.)
The premise underlying what al-Tamimi -- and IRGC et al who are engaging in this simultaneous campaign -- are doing is that Izetbegovic was the moderate Muslim and multi-cultural democrat presented by the West (and by Harry’s Place, where al-Tamimi also writes). Enter, the next irony. In addition to authoring the notorious Islamic Declaration [47] advocating Sharia law, Izetbegovic had been a recruiter for the Waffen SS as a member of the Young Muslims ("Mladi Muslimani"), and in 1943 [48] he welcomed to Bosnia the notorious Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.
Andy Wilcoxson, the most dedicated American follower of the proceedings at the Hague’s ICTY, yesterday provided [49] for Jihad Watch readers the rest of the CV of this man whose forces al-Tamimi assures us were not engaged in jihadist aggression, concluding:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who is responsible for the Bosnian war. Was it the outspoken jihadists [Izetbegovic and his future defense minister Hasan Cengic] who were jailed in the 1980s for trying to incite an Islamic revolution, and who spent the years leading up to the war establishing Islamist paramilitary groups, or was it Radovan Karadzic, a doctor, who spent the years leading up to the war practicing psychiatry and writing mediocre poetry? …The “Greater Serbia” conspiracy alleged by Mr. al-Tamimi is precisely the kind of Muslim propaganda that he dismisses as “imaginary” in his article…Even if the Bosnian Serbs had secretly been fighting for a “Greater Serbia,” they would have needed the cooperation of Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian government in Belgrade -- which was not forthcoming.
Conspicuously, the long [50]-debunked [51]propaganda [52] of “Greater Serbia [53]” found its way into both the al-Tamimi article and a joint press release [54] the day before from IRGC, the Congress of North American Bosniaks, and Bosnian American Institute for Genocide and Education. Also gracing both works were the usual buzz words -- “Karadzic and Mladic” -- the only two names (plus Milosevic) that anyone has been allowed to take away from the conflicts -- attesting to the tight, recycled narrative and limited scope of permissible interpretation of the Balkan wars.
The “pseudo-history” is the one being sleeplessly guarded, including by Mr. al-Tamimi whether he knows it or not. In fact, because what happened at Srebrenica (which no one is too sure about) did not jibe with any official definition of genocide, the all-authoritative Hague which these folks obsessively cite (and which defies all known forensic sciences in its ability to determine manner of death from a single bone fragment) had to widen [55] the very definition [56] of the word to make the crime fit the punishment. In an open letter to Canada’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, author Diana Johnstone -- incidentally, not an ally in the anti-jihad movement (she doesn’t notice any threat of a Muslim takeover) -- wrote:
On Srebrenica, the facts are partly established, partly disputed, and partly unknown. This is because material evidence is by no means as clear and comprehensive as the general public has been led to believe...[The ICTY], largely financed and staffed by the NATO countries which took the Muslim side in the Bosnian civil wars, found a way to describe Srebrenica as “genocide” by redefining the term...The ICTY verdict has subtly deceived the general public, while providing a justification of NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia against the Serbs, stigmatized as responsible for “genocide”. This stigmatization of Serbs as “genocidal”…can be seen as amounting to incitement to racial hatred....The “Bosniak” lobby takes advantage of widespread ignorance and confusion…to delegitimatize the Serbian entity, Republika Srpska, in Bosnia-Herzegovina…and create a centralized Bosnia-Herzegovina that would be under full control of the Muslim party, since Muslims are assumed to enjoy a narrow demographic majority…[I]t is deeply hypocritical for the West to demand that Serbs must be the only Westerners to welcome Muslim rule over their own historic territory.
Johnstone recognized the "amazing decision [to deport Trifkovic as] all the more scandalous in that it was taken ad hoc in response to the hate campaign by self-declared representatives of one Bosnian ethnic group carrying out a vendetta against another Bosnian ethnic group." Why did Canadian authorities suddenly deem Trifkovic “inadmissible” despite his having been there a number of times including as an expert witness [57] for the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa? For the same reason that world courts and governments [58] -- the latter being hounded [45] to pass “Srebrenica Resolutions” and set up official remembrance days for Muslim soldiers -- tell us that there was a Srebrenica Genocide: Because the Muslims told them to.
Consider the efficiency with which the ‘genocide’ designation has been achieved. Note how much speedier, with less trouble and controversy, the Srebrenica “genocide” came to be than the much older and bigger Armenian Genocide. (Meanwhile, as Ambassador Bissett pointed out, “I am not aware of the ‘Institute’ seeking to ban or castigate as ‘genocide deniers’ those Turkish government officials...who are adamant that what happened to the Armenians is NOT a genocide.”) And what about the Greeks and Assyrians? (See “Three Genocides, One Perpetrator [59].”) Never mind about the WWII liquidation of one-third of Croatia’s Serbs -- virtually unknown, much less officially designated as anything.
What is the common denominator here? The elite guardianship, and the fevered -- and very successful -- rush to collect proclamations, resolutions, rulings, compulsory days of remembrance (internationally and locally) is for exactly ONE “genocide,” and of the smallest scale. Just as oddly, it is the alleged perpetrators of this particular “genocide” who can’t kick the label, which is used as a sledgehammer against them in pursuance of, and as a cover for, Islamo-Western geopolitical ends. In what amounts to the biggest false [60]confession [61] in history, the effort has even achieved an admission of guilt from the alleged perpetrators, if only to stop the whipping.
There is something political [62], and something desperate, going on here. Why is it so crucial for Muslims to have their desperately [63]sought [64] genocide? Enter the final irony of this convoluted, sleight-of-hand situation -- from Trifkovic’s deportation, to his being ‘found out’ as an anti-Semite, to “tarring” Spencer with said “anti-Semite,” to criticism of Spencer for not disavowing the latter’s Balkan “pseudo-history”: In addition to the geopolitical purpose [65] that “the massacre” was needed for at the time (an international intervention), there is a far bigger goal. Muslims see the Jews as deriving much of their influence, moral authority, and sympathy from the Holocaust. To compete [66], they must secure [45] their own. That they are achieving it in between committing genocides themselves (Sudan, Turkey, Kosovo, WWII Croatia-Bosnia, 1990s Bosnia) is a testament to their prowess, and to the West’s stupidity and servility.
In other words, the charge of anti-Semitism is being used to protect a concoction [67] whose key purpose is to remove what Muslims see as the Jewish advantage. Jews being the prime target of whom to turn the world against before swallowing up the rest of it. In the process, another benefit is achieved: With 8,000 (sic) Muslim soldiers sharing the same category, the Holocaust is diminished [68]. As are the real genocides that Muslims carry out.
Don’t fall for it. Being a genocide denier is not as bad as being a genocide fabricator, a relentless effort that takes on many forms and disguises to make it harder to recognize, camouflaging itself against seemingly unrelated or tangential incidents. That is what has happened here.
I say to the Muslim world that we anti-jihadists -- whether we get along with one another or not and regardless of any potential bad apples that our movement like all movements will draw and can’t always police -- we will not be fooled. Once and for all: My genocide is bigger than yours. So nanny-nanny-boo-boo.
Such are the levels we are lowered to by the Seventh Century elements in our midst.