tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post4080515552532285742..comments2024-03-01T08:19:54.547+00:00Comments on BobFromBrockley: From Bob's archive: When the LRB whitewashed Europe's shame over Bosniabobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15439386754907203808noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-35799993716505859492016-03-25T21:57:55.560+00:002016-03-25T21:57:55.560+00:00You say,
"this seems to me an example of an...You say, <br /><br />"this seems to me an example of an anti-Zionist so deeply enmeshed in hostility towards Israel's leaders that any criticism will stick"<br />in response to this: <br /><br />"That Sharon and some of his settler friends were virtually the only politicians in the West (other than Serbia’s Slavic supporters) who opposed military measures to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo was not an accident."<br /><br />You then get into lots of detail about how it was Rabin not Sharon who was in power in Israel during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Ok fine, but why didn't this "anti-Zionist so deeply enmeshed in hostility towards Israel's leaders" say it was Rabin who supported Serbia's ethnic cleansing in Bosnia if he could say anything at all? Rabin wasn't exactly an angel.<br /><br />As it happens, I wasn't directly aware of Israel or any of its leaders supporting Serbia during the 1990s but I remembered Christopher Hitchens speaking at a meeting about how Sharon decried the return of refugees to Kosovo as a "bad precedent". I posted the transcript of the meeting on my own blog, but like the enmeshed anti-Zionist you quote, the transcript is on the LRB website: http://www.lrb.co.uk/2002/05/15/war-on-terror-writers/the-war-on-terrorism-is-there-an-alternative.<br /><br />Here's Hitchens:<br /><i>CH. Well there’s another potential symbiosis to add to that, which is that as people will remember, the Kosovo intervention was specifically designed to take the Kosovo refugees who’d been kicked into Macedonia and Albania and take them home, return them to the territory from which they had been expelled. And in the course of that operation, which I supported, and some were neutral about, General Sharon gave a very impressive and interesting interview in which he said he thought it was an extremely bad precedent. If you start taking refugees home to where they claim to have been born and were living, where would it all end. So Sharon okay.</i><br /><br />If Siegman had have confined himself to criticising Sharon on Kosovo and not Bosnia he would have been exactly right but he mentioned Bosnia too and I don't know if that was right or not any more than you do but it's certainly not such a stretch to assume that Sharon had the same take on both. (BTW, I now know the internet is plastered with stuff on Sharon re Kosovo)<br /><br />Also, when I tried to find the Hitchens thing by googling some words like, Sharon, refugees, Serbia, top of the results was a wikipedia entry titled, Israel–Serbia relations, [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Serbia_relations#Alleged_Israeli_weapons_amongst_Serbs_in_Bosnia ] where the possibility of Israel actually arming Serbia in or before 1995 is discussed, though it isn't clear if Israeli weapons were supplied by a third party or by Israel.<br /><br />All in all this looks like another example of your own obsession with defending Israel getting the better of you.levi9909https://www.blogger.com/profile/10553481056544494411noreply@blogger.com