Jihad Watch: The Rape of Serbian Women

by Stella L. Jatras
(Letter to Phyllis Chesler of Chesler Chronicles)

Dear Phyllis,

I apologize for the length of my letter, but there is so much to be covered on this subject in order to do it justice.

In your commentary of 28 July entitled, “Is Marital Rape a Crime in America or Is It a Muslim Religious Right?,” Chesler Chronicles, you wrote: “In this regard, rape was declared a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. [ICTY] I was tentatively supposed to testify about Rape Trauma Syndrome in the case in The Hague, but there was no funding to either protect or relocate the women who were prepared to testify, and thus, these trials were canceled.”

My concern is the distorted application of the rape declaration by the ICTY. Anything from the ICTY, a bought and paid for tool of the western powers, can only be seen in light of the objectives of those powers, especially Washington. A major objective — which was achieved — was to make the Muslims the victims in Bosnia and Serbs the villains. Paradoxically, that contrived victimization is itself a weapon in depicting any concerns about Islam here — including victimization of women, not as helping protect human rights, but as a propaganda tool to justify discrimination, racism, etc.

In that context, the accusations of mass rape – and specifically of “Serb rape camps,” which were never shown to have existed anywhere — was part of a calculated campaign of depicting Muslims-white-hats and Serbs-black-hats. I draw your attention to a letter written by Herb Brin of Heritage Southwest Jewish Press to President Clinton on 14 April 1994: “When I visited the Serbian front a year ago, I learned to my dismay that the rape story was a total concoction. In wars, rapes occur–but in the hundreds of thousands and as a means of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing?’ This was incredible and false.” Certainly rapes are committed in wartime, even worse in communal wars. There is no evidence that Bosnia was any worse (or better) than anywhere else where comparable conflicts have taken place. Tragically, the crime of the actual rapes that occurred was compounded by the use of false accusations of rape as a propaganda weapon, which is what the west and the Muslims did. Such false accusations both paste a damning accusation on the party not guilty of the wrongdoing, while devaluing the horror of actual rapes committed.

The fact that the ICTY declares rape a crime against humanity — a fact obvious to any normal person, ICTY or no ICTY — should not be given much weight, given the source. In fact, it serves to devalue the problem of rape during wartime because the ICTY shamefully used what should have been a principled legal finding as a blatant political propaganda weapon.

There is no question that even one rape is unspeakable, but with all due respect, I would like to present the other side of the story regarding the rapes that occurred in Bosnia, specifically the rape of Serbian women which were deemed to be insignificant by the media and by The Hague…

Unnoticed by the media was the submission on December 18, 1992, of the length report #S24491 by the UN Security Council to the General Assembly. The report included depositions by Serb rape victims.[emphasis mine]

Read it all at Jihad Watch!

What has been done about this?

Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Some years ago, when it proved impossible to substantiate any of the rape-camp allegations against the Serbs, those stories simply vanished from the newspapers, magazines, and television screens, with no apologies and no retractions. The upshot is that the Serbs, including these Serb rape victims, are off the world’s radar screen. Susan Sontag, Christiane Amanpour, and many other journalistic and political whores built (or revived) their careers on Serb-bashing during the 1990s and early 2000s. Not a single one of them was ever called to account for the damage done by the lies they told. Thus far, none of these journalists have been a big enough person to sacrifice his or her career by repenting of those lies, telling the truth, and demanding justice for victimized Serbs.

It’s all too common for people who don’t have all the facts about an accusation to insist that “When there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Bzzzzt, wrong! Even smoke can be fake, as any special-effects artist can tell you.

Another mistake is to split the difference by assuming that the truth must be somewhere in the middle; for example, by claiming that all sides in a war have committed atrocities. Here again, that is not necessarily so, and so long as there is no proof that one side committed atrocities, then it behooves you to assume that they did not.

It is time to form (or reinforce) the habit of automatically doubting the nonsense spewed by government officials, journalists, or anybody else who has widespread access to the media. False accusations are everywhere, and so are people who serve as vectors for false accusations by uncritically repeating them. Just about every evildoer tries to evade punishment by pinning his or her own misdeeds on someone else. More ambitious evildoers can fabricate wrongdoing on the part of their opponents, and then use the media to manipulate others to do their fighting for them. In the case of the war against the Serbs, the jihadis and their allies fooled America and Europe into taking the wrong side in that conflict and fighting most of their battles for them. The same Muslim enemies who were active against the Serbs in the Balkans are now using the same tactics against Israel and the US.

Don’t fall for it!