Character Assassination, Part 2

Back in 2009, I first took notice of the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog," and later outed it as the outfit behind the propaganda project called "Palluxo." They responded with a vicious campaign of character assassination, using link farms and fake feeds to Google-bomb my name.

Their favorite "official academic", Marko Attilla Hoare chimed in, mocking me as a "romantic nationalist" (thank you for the compliment! - and no, I won't link to his blog, either). On his own blog, Hoare says that "some or all" of the labels used to describe him: "neoconservative, Trotskyite and Croat nationalist and a supporter of Islamism and Western imperialism", depending on definition, "may be accurate."
[edited for clarity: the labels are invoked by Hoare to describe himself, not me]

In March 2010, they tried again, declaring an essay I had written here to be an incendiary comment I'd left on SGB (as if!). I documented the lie.

Last year, the Congress of North American Bosniaks and something calling itself "Institute for Genocide Research" lobbied in Ottawa to get a Canadian parliamentary resolution recognizing the "Srebrenica genocide." I wrote against such a foolish decision, but it ended up passing on the sly in September. In December, the "Institute" re-published a libelous attack against Major-General (ret.) Lewis MacKenzie, accusing him of raping Muslim women during the war in Bosnia. And just last week, they launched an effort to prevent Srdja Trifkovic from speaking at UBC in Vancouver (British Columbia). For more about that sordid affair, I recommend the essay by Ambassador James Bissett, over at the Lord Byron Foundation.

Today, I got word that TV1, a TV station in Bosnia, ran a "news report" about my alleged "genocide denial" right after the headline news on the crisis in Libya. They used my clips from RT interviews, and images of my articles, but their accusations against me were taken straight from Hoare and the SGB. That leaves no doubt in my mind who was behind this character assassination. (TV1 is a relatively new station; set up last year by "Sanela Diane Jenkins" of the Ganic affair fame.)

Now, if it were just another attempt to libel and slander me, I'd be perfectly happy to denounce it here and expose its authors as liars and scoundrels. America still legally guarantees freedom of speech, and we're on equal footing here. However, the attackers were merely using me to get at my family, which still lives in Bosnia. My mother is an official of the Social Democratic Party, and currently chairs the parliament of Canton Sarajevo. It is the SDP, and my mother, that are the real targets of this smearbund.

Let me repeat here: They went after my family.

Think about this for a second. Even if my mother and I share the same politics (which we do not), how would she be responsible in the slightest for what I think or do, having lived nearly half my life halfway across the world? What sort of Dark Age values motivate TV1, that they impugn my mother's politics because of what a grown son of hers thinks or does?

They went after my family.

They didn't go after me, on the (still, relatively) level and fair playing field of the USA, where free speech is still in the Constitution and there are still certain rules of conduct and debate. They ran a hit piece on me on a TV channel in Bosnia, without ever calling for comment, without offering me any recourse or opportunity for rebuttal. If they take issue with things I've said or done, they ought to take that up with me. Instead, they went after my family.

Particularly disgusting is the fact that this is part of an intra-Muslim political conflict, between the SDP (whose membership is mostly Muslim) and former governing Muslim parties, or those that aspire to govern but - unlike the SDP - never got enough of those pesky votes in those pesky democratic elections. Yet who is the target of the anti-SDP campaign? An ethnic Serb.

Well, my American readers, this is the kind of Bosnia your government created and has nurtured for the past 15 years. This is the kind of "freedom of speech" that exists there, the kind of "tolerance" and "multiethnicity" and "democracy." I hope you're proud of it.

As for the smearbund, I have a simple message:

You went after my family. I will end you.