A Beam In Their Eye

Last Thursday evening, February 24, Canadian authorities denied entry to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic and prevented him from giving a scheduled lecture at UBC.

Claiming credit was the ecstatic Emir Ramic, of the aptly named "Institute for [the Research of] Genocide" (read their URL to understand the irony). Ramic's Institute doesn't actually research genocide as such; it is only interested in one specific "genocide" - the one alleged to have taken place in Srebrenica, in July 1995. The Institute denounces as "genocide deniers" anyone who dares discuss the facts of Srebrenica, rather than blindly accepting the myth they are pushing.

By insisting on qualifying those events as genocide, they are stretching the definition of the term to the point of absurdity, and effectively engaging in denial of the actual genocides, from the Turkish mass murder of Armenians in WW1 (which inspired Hitler to believe he could act with impunity) to the Croat butchery of Serbs in WW2, and the Nazi genocide of Jews, Slavs and Roma in the death camps of eastern Europe. In fact, the most aggressively outspoken proponent of the "Srebrenica genocide" thesis is also the outspoken denier of Croat Ustasha atrocities.

People in glass houses really oughtn't throw stones for a living. It turns out that Ramic is on the editorial board of a Bosnian Muslim war veterans' magazine, Korak - and the magazine's editor-in-chief is on the board of Ramic's Institute - which routinely publishes militant jihad propaganda. And in his spare time, Ramic also engages in libelous attacks on honorable Canadian soldiers. This, then, is the sort of person the Canadian government takes its cues from, when it comes to deciding who may and who may not enter the country?

Earlier today, the Edmonton Journal published a particularly facetious attack on Dr. Trifkovic by one Srdja Pavlovic, lecturer at the University of Alberta. Asserting that "denying genocide" should not be called freedom of speech, Pavlovic claims that "One should, of course, have the right to one's own opinion but not the right to one's own facts."

That's a brave thing to say for one whose sole claim to historical scholarship is a vile pamphlet equating the Serbs with Nazis.

Pavlovic also has the gall to claim that:

"Trifkovic and his supporters do not want to have a dialogue. As any nationalist would do, they see their version of the past as true and valid, and demand that others believe it, too. While calling for a dialogue they shout at their critics, rather than talk to them and then have the audacity to call such shouting the expression of the freedom of speech."

The hypocrisy is simply stunning. This is precisely what a legion of professional Srebrenica advocates, and Pavlovic himself, are doing - yet he accuses Trifkovic of it!

Proponents of the claim that Srebrenica was a genocide have engaged in much more than "shouting" : character assassination, libel, defamation, lawfare and now outright repression. They never even bother to present any actual facts in support of their claim, preferring instead to cite ICTY verdicts - a situation anyone acquainted with logic ought to recognize as the fallacy of Appeal to Authority.

That certain parties in Bosnia have by this point resorted to bringing up Srebrenica for the purpose of jockeying for political power indicates that they really don't give a damn about the people who lived and died there.

If they truly believed their claim was the objective truth, as they so shrilly insist, they would not be so afraid to debate it, or subject it to cross-examination. How dare those who have repeatedly shown they don't accept anything but unconditional obedience talk about discussion and debate?

All of this suggests that Srebrenica was declared a "genocide" for that very reason - to silence any discussion of the Bosnian War with the charge of "genocide denial."

Any society that allows them to do this cannot truly call itself free.