Mustafa's Genocide

Mustafa Ceric, head of the Islamic Religious Community in Bosnia, likes to travel around the world and pose as a "moderate" and "tolerant" Muslim. His latest junket was in Paris, where he traveled last week on the invitation of David de Rotschild, to take part in a conference dubbed "Projet Aladin" (the Aladdin Project). Apparently, this was a gathering of some two hundred political and academic personalities from the Islamic world dedicated to promoting Jewish-Muslim dialogue "based upon mutual acquaintance, respect and refusal to deny and diminish Holocaust."

I know this because of a press release posted on an obscure news portal, which also listed the hosts of the event (French ex-president Chirac, German ex-chancellor Schroeder, prince Hassan of Jordan, ex-president of Indonesia Wahid, and UNESCO), and included a statement issued by the participants, clearly aimed at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's constant disputing of the Holocaust.

But the event gave Ceric the opportunity to make the preposterous claim that:

"Muslims and Jews have a joint experience of persecution and genocide in Europe: both were expelled from Spain (Endelus) in the fifteenth century, with the Sephardic Jews finding a safe haven in Sarajevo, which is best witnessed by the Sarajevo Holy Haggadah, and both suffered a genocide in the twentieth century, Jews from the Nazis and Bosnian Muslims from the Serbian aggressors."

The claim that what happened in Bosnia was a genocide absolutely qualifies as "diminishing the Holocaust." A savage ethnic conflict that killed two percent of the country's entire population (including combat casualties) compares to a campaign of mass murder conducted by the Nazis, how exactly? Oh, I forget, the death of "up to 8000" (the actual number is still a mystery!) Muslim fighters in Srebrenica is apparently a "genocide" on par with the Shoah!

There is also a hidden temptation for the Jews in Ceric's claim: Muslims will stop denying the Shoah if the Jews would agree that the Muslims were victims of genocide, too! Preposterous? I think so. But could it happen? Wouldn't be the first time the Jews bought into Muslim propaganda:

We outwitted three big Jewish organizations - B'Nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. We suggested to them to publish an advertisement in the New York Times and to organize demonstrations outside the U.N. This was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the (Muslim) Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.

- James Harff, executive for PR agency Ruder Finn, to French journalist Jacques Merlino, 1993 (source)

One reason this is particularly galling is that the Muslims of Bosnia took part in the Holocaust. During the war, Bosnia was part of the "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH), and Muslims were considered "Croats of Islamic faith." The Ustasha regime ruling the NDH seized the property of Bosnian Jews and sent most of them to death camps like Jasenovac. Many Muslims took part in this infernal endeavor, and were rewarded by the Jews' property. Others answered the call of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and allied with Hitler.

Completing the travesty is that the Ustashas' principal target were the Serbs, of whom they killed hundreds of thousands! Yet the mass murder of Serbs isn't a "genocide," oh no - Srebrenica is!

The Sarajevo Haggadah, which Ceric mentions, had to be hidden during the war from the "tolerant" NDH authorities. Muslims claim they saved it from destruction. Croats say it was a Croat who did it. In any event, the book was saved. But what happened to the Jews?

Few remain in Bosnia today. Most have long ago emigrated to Israel, which Mustafa Ceric's "brothers" in Hamas and Hezbollah desire to destroy. Yet somehow, the fate of the Bosnian Jews and the Muslims' ties to the Nazis and the modern-day jihadists don't seem to matter to ex-politicians and UN bureaucrats. What they care about is being lectured by this "moderate" and "tolerant" mufti about the "joint experience of persecution", while he recycles vile propaganda about the "Serb genocide" and harangues against "Islamophobia."

We should rightly point a questioning finger at the organizers of this travesty for putting another brick into the wall of Eurabia. One could, and should, rightly condemn the Serbian officialdom, which has continued to ignore the genocide during WW2 even though the Communist regime that suppressed any inquiry into it has been gone for two decades now. None of that excuses Ceric for what he said, or what he's been doing for years - but it explains why he's been getting away with it.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," goes the saying that Emperor Bush once famously mangled. When it comes to Bosnia, the Jews have been fooled once already. Now Mustafa Ceric is trying to fool them again.