Issue #10/65, May 20 - June 3, 1999 
| In This Issue |
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| Lebed Interview |
| Good Clean Fun, Chez Lebed |
| Roundeye! |
| Negro Comix |
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Continued from previous page
Question #4: How Holocaust-y Is Kosovo?
Nothing is more sacred to mainstream Jewish-American organizations than the sanctity of the Holocaust. Anytime people have tried to question the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they have been branded crypto-Nazis. Since the war began, NATO allies have made repeated allusions and barely-qualified comparisons between the Serbs and the Nazis, and yet, despite the lack of even satellite photos suggesting anything more than average atrocity-figures for an ethnic war, there has hardly been a peep of protest from America's Jewish community about the comparisons.
We started by calling the most powerful Jewish-American organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League, and spoke to Public Relations Department head Susan Heller.
Exile: What is the ADL's position on how members of the Clinton Administration are comparing Kosovo to the Holocaust?
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| According to the ADL's Susan Heller, images like this of "people moving" are reminiscent..." |
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| ...the Holocaust |
Exile: But he has compared it to the Holocaust.
ADL: He has not compared it to the Holocaust. I read a quote from him the other day, that's not what he said.
Exile: Are you angry that people are saying he's comparing it to the Holocaust?
ADL: No, because we know that the president knows better. It's a terrible ordeal and that it's reminiscent of the Holocaust, but he's not comparing it to the Holocaust. There's a nuance there that's an important nuance.
Exile: So you mean so long as he qualifies the comparison with "alike" or "similar" or something like that, the ADL is all right with that?
ADL: Our position is that this is not the Holocaust but it's reminiscent of, the images are the same...
Exile: The images are the same?
ADL: There are many images that are the same.
Exile: Such as?
ADL: People being put on trucks, people being moved, people, uh, looking displaced.
Exile: But those things you listed to me just now are happening in several places around the world. There are several wars and inter-ethnic wars going on right now that are reminiscent of the Holocaust. Doesn't that sort of cheapen the Holocaust?
ADL: No--we said "Images of", but it's very different here. This isn't the Final Solution here, this isn't the Nazis. What Milosevic wants to do is move people out of their homes.
Exile: Right, but in the Holocaust, Hitler didn't want to move Jews out of their homes, he wanted to exterminate them as a race.
ADL: That's right, that's why it's not the Holocaust, but the images are reminiscent. People feel very strongly about what they see. "Ethnic cleansing" is a very strong term. That's how it started out in Germany.
Exile: Actually, it didn't start out as ethnic cleansing--
ADL: Look, I don't want to debate it with you. If you want a position, I'll be very happy to share with you our position. I'll fax it to you.
Exile: I have a quote here from Defense Secretary William Cohen talking about the NATO bombing of the refugees in Korisa on Sunday. He said, "For the Serbs to lament publicly about the deaths of those refugees is almost tantamount to Adolf Eichmann complaining about the Allied bombing of the Crematoriums." Don't you think that's a pretty offensive comparison?
ADL: I can only tell you that we, across the board--and I'll have to look at this statement in context--for the most part, we are supportive of this administration, we are supportive of the NATO action, and we haven't had any problem with reference [that] this is a Holocaust. If you give me your telephone number I'll call you back with a response to this because I have to look at it.
Exile: Another question. In Germany there were similar allusions being made to the Holocaust by senior ministers until on April 22nd, when a group of Auschwitz survivors put a full-page ad in the Frankfurter Rundschau accusing the government of perpetuating a new "Auschwitz Lie". After that, the German government backed off and has pretty much ceased making any allusions to the Holocaust.
ADL: All right, I'll have to get back to you on this, okay?
Exile: All right, I-
ADL: Bye! (Hangs up)
She never got back to us. In fact, she split town the next day for a one week vacation.
Next, we spoke to Harvey Berk, Director of Communications for the somewhat more moderate Jewish-American organization B'nai B'rith, at his Washington, D.C. office.
B'rith: We just passed a resolution today on this subject [of comparing Kosovo to the Holocaust], and what was said was, "Whereas Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo evokes for the Jewish people the nightmare of deportations during the Second World War, [...] and whereas there are unique and important differences between the Nazi Holocaust and the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing [...] we support the campaign of NATO against the regime of Milosevic.
Exile: So you support it?
B'rith: Yeah, we do support that. And we support the non-negotiable positions.
Exile: [Reads Defense Secretary Cohen's Eichmann quote from "Face The Nation"]
B'rith: I think that's a bit overdone. I think that there seems to be--from what we're reading in the newspapers--there seems to be some evidence that indeed Milosevic and his army are using Kosovars as, uh, shields, and we think that's a despicable action. But still, that's a lot different than what Eichmann did with the Jews. And I think it's a bad comparison.
Exile: Is B'nai B'rith worried that comparisons such as that have the effect of cheapening the uniqueness of the Holocaust? I was always taught that the Holocaust wasn't about ethnic cleansing and deportations, but about how one race sought out another race in every country it could and galvanized all of its resources to exterminate that race.
B'rith: Right, that's exactly it, that's the difference there! While I think that some of the motivations may be the same, and while I think that what Milosevic is doing is reprehensible, to compare to what he's been doing to what Hitler tried to do diminishes the importance of what Hitler tried to do. The similarity is that in both cases, the world stood still, at least until now.
Of course, not all Jews subscribe to the kind of pious hypocrisy as the B'nai B'rith and the ADL. Robert Naimon, a research associate at the Preamble Center in Washington D.C., circulated a petition by American Jews calling on the German Greens Party, which holds the balance of power in Germany's government, to oppose the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Exile: What is your position on the Clinton Administration's comparison of this war to the Holocaust?
Naimon: Well, we think it's not true, we think it's a tawdry lie in order to provide any justification that they can come up with for continuing the policy. The more destruction they cause, and the more Americans react to it, the more shrill their own rhetoric becomes.
Exile: [Reads Cohen's quote] Why are Jews letting him get away with that?
Naimon: (laughing) What's funny is that first of all, the Allies didn't bomb the Crematoriums. [...] The unstated but pretty clear implication is that because Milosevic is Adolf Hitler, there cannot be any logical discussion about what we're doing. We just have to bomb and bomb and bomb and bomb and more violence and more violence, and if you try to have any discussions, then you're a Nazi. They want to prevent any rational discussion. This just happened to me--I was on the Fox National News last Sunday and the woman basically called me a Holocaust denier! (laughs)
Exile: Who was the woman?
Naimon: The interviewer from Fox. It just shut down all discussion.
That woman turns out to be Fox National Network News anchorwoman Kathy Wolff. Repeated eXile attempts to get a comment from Wolff on why she accused Naimon on national TV of being a Holocaust denier were stonewalled by her assistant, who took our names, queried for details of the question, and even suggested, in classic bureaucratic style, that we fax our questions to Ms. Wolff. Naimon yesterday was interviewed on National Public Radio about the event, but he told us in a separate phone call that he didn't expect us to be able to penetrate Ms. Wolff's alligator-snapping moat of assistants and publicists whose job it is to protect this top TV journalist from having to answer questions.
As for why the ADL and B'nai B'rith would suddenly jettison their once near-hysterical sensitivity to preserving the sanctity of the Holocaust, Naimon offered an answer that resonates throughout this entire article.
Naimon: These organizations generally have a kind of "be on the side of power" orientation. They like the perception of being powerful, they like to feel that they're in the inside. And so they're going to try to avoid being in conflict with their friends in the Clinton Administration.
Question #5: What Did The Human Shields Themselves Say?
The account of the bombing of the refugees in Korisa was one of the strangest exercises in Orwellian airbrush-journalism we'd ever witnessed. On Friday, May 14th, Reuters Belgrade correspondent Philipa Fletcher reported from the scene of the wreckage and quoted survivors as saying that they were spending the night in the village on their way back home after spending weeks in the forests. On the same day, New York Times Belgrade correspondent Steven Erlanger cited two sources, AFP's Aleksandar Mitic and Reuters's Goran Tomasevic, who both interviewed survivors of the bombing, all of whom seemed to corroborate Fletcher's story that they were returning home after spending weeks in the forests, and that they were bombed as they spent the night in the village.
"Dostan Rexhaj, 49, told a Serbian journalist working for Reuters: 'We decided to spend the night here. Some time around midnight, they bombed us from their warplanes three times. It was a horror.'" At that time, NATO withheld comment and hinted strongly that the Serbs had shelled the refugees themselves.
The following day, May 15th, NATO began a coordinated effort to paint the refugees as human shield victims. Coincidentally, survivors like the ones
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Reuters left behind the most obvious example of airbrushing out survivors who contradicted the human shield theory, quietly expunging its own reporters' accounts, so we called Graham Stewart, the Foreign Desk Editor for Reuters in London, and asked him about the discrepancy.
Stewart: It may well have been simply that the ones that were used as human shields, maybe they were the ones that were killed and injured. That piece that you're referring to--they passed through the village before, did they?
Exile: The first article by Philipa Fletcher quotes survivors of the bombing and in one sentence she writes: "Survivor Fehmi Ahmeta said the village was packed with some 500 refugees on their way home after hiding in the woods when it was hit by six missiles shortly before midnight."
Stewart: The whole point being, why were they dropped? I would guess, without having been personally involved in the story myself, it could have been that there was only one source with that one woman saying that.
Exile: That's why I asked you about Goran Tomasevic, because in the May 14th New York Times article by Steven Erlanger, both an AFP and Reuters correspondent are used as primary sources in reporting that the refugees said that they were passing through and that they slept in Korisa for the night. None of them indicated that they were being used as human shields. The reason this matters is that I spoke to a director from B'nai B'rith, and he brought up how he'd been reading that the Serbs were using the Korisa refugees as human shields, and B'nai B'rith just reconfirmed its pro-war stance because of articles like that.
Stewart: The position we take is that Reuters doesn't make a judgement on it one way or the other. We report two sides of the story. We report what NATO says, and we report what the Yugoslav government says, and obviously, when we can, we report whatever information we have access to first-hand. We wouldn't make a judgement whether they were human shields or not, so we'd say that NATO said they were human shields, and the Serbs said they weren't.
Exile: But after Philipa Fletcher's story, in those Reuters pieces about the Korisa bombing, NATO was given about ten times the amount of space as opposed to the Yugoslavs in each article--and frankly, what Western reader believes the Yugoslav government? No one.
Stewart: That's not a view we would take. But another thing you have to keep in mind is that NATO has a daily 1-hour televised press conference. They are all the time giving out information. There is very little information available in Belgrade. [...] So it's not surprising therefore that the balance of reporting is more on what comes out of a NATO briefing.
Exile: But you actually had survivors quoted suggesting that they weren't human shields, so wouldn't it be fair to have included a single sentence about that to balance NATO's accusations?
Stewart: Well, you have to consider the production end of it. We did report it, but we are constantly updating, and stuff gets dropped on the way. We wouldn't consciously delete something if we felt it was unbalancing the report. We take great pride in producing a balanced account of events. It may be that that particular sentence is in ten different leads, but eventually, it gets dropped out.
The problem here, of course, is that refugees and bombing survivors aren't going to be issuing statements every two hours. So the lesson is to flood the airwaves with as much information as possible, no matter what the hell you say. It makes the wire services people happy, and at the very least, by the sheer volume of it all, you can literally drown the opposition--and the truth--with nuthin' but press conferences.
Question #6: Since When is it Okay to Rely Exclusively on Government Sources?
Try taking this little test next time you pick up the newspaper. Pick any story about the war and see if there is anyone quoted in it who is not a spokesman for NATO or a NATO-member government. You'll be surprised by the results. In our experience, a good 20-25% of all news reports about the war don't pay even nominal lip service to alternative points of view, and most of the rest content themselves with one or two Serb government or official media quotes as proof of "balance".
The worst instances of heavily biased pro-government reporting tend to come from the wire services, where the work of reporters is judged mainly by speed and volume. Brains and a sense of decency are valued less... As a result, you get a lot of stories like the May 18 story by AP staffer Jeffrey Ulbrich, entitled "NATO: Serbs May Be Hiding Evidence." The piece begins as follows:
"BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP)--NATO said Tuesday there is growing evidence that the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic is digging up mass graves and trying to hide the evidence of war crimes against Kosovo Albanians.
"'There are now indications that the Belgrade authorities are taking the international war crimes tribunal seriously,' NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters at alliance headquarters, referring to the U.N. court in The Hague, Netherlands."
The gist of the piece, which is totally unsubstantiated by any evidence other than vague "reports" cited by NATO officials, is that the Serbs are not only massacring people, they're cunningly arranging things so that we'll never find any evidence of their crimes.
This story is clearly NATO's way of covering its ass in case troops invade Kosovo and find no mass graves. A single quote from a single objective independent commentator would probably be enough to blow this insultingly silly story out of the water. But Ulbrich doesn't bother, because newswriting for the AP, like writing for the Pravda of Soviet times, is a science that never requires calling two sources.
Bob Burns of the AP Washington office pulled the same government-sources-only trick the day before, in a story entitled "Ground War Option All But Abandoned." The story asserted that the air campaign was going so well that NATO no longer felt it needed to send in ground troops. The government's conclusion that the air campaign is going "well" was left standing unchallenged by Burns. We asked him why. His answer gives you an idea of what kind of people we have keeping watch over the government these days:
eXile: Why did you only use government sources in this story evaluating the war? Shouldn't someone else make that judgement?
Burns: The government is the only source that knows whether or not the air campaign is going well.
Later, when confronted with the similarities in newsgathering technique between the AP and the Soviet propaganda machine, Burns reacted as though he were the first man in his cave to be shown the mysteries of fire:
eXile: The thing is, I remember when I was in school, studying Russian, we learned that newspapers like Pravda and Izvestia were considered biased and unreliable because they only used government sources. How are you any different?
Burns: [After a pause] Well, I hadn't thought of it that way. But there's nothing I can do. We have people on the ground to get the other side's view. My job is to report from Washington.
eXile: Aren't there people other than government spokesmen in Washington?
Burns: I'm reporting what the government says its reasons are for not using ground troops.
Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, who co-wrote a nearly identical all-government-sources piece on the same day as Burns, was a little less candid on the phone:
eXile: I had one question about the story you co-wrote with Molly Moore yesterday...
Graham: You've really caught me at a bad time. It's late in the day...
eXile: Five minutes, that's all I want. My question is this, you...
Graham: This is really a bad time. I don't have time.
eXile: One question. You've only quoted government sources in this story. Is that standard practice for you?
Graham: It depends on the story. Look, I really have to go. I'm not kidding...
eXile: It depends on the story? How?
Graham: Bye [hangs up].
A reporter who only uses government sources isn't doing his job. If you see one doing it, write to him or call him up to complain. Send him the phone numbers of non-government sources you think might help give his work balance. If that doesn't work, write his editors, and complain to them. If that doesn't work, buy a share in the stock of whatever company he works for, force your way into board meetings, and demand either his dismissal or his transfer to the Nome bureau. And if that doesn't work, stop reading the news entirely. It's the least you can do.
QUESTION #7: How many different versions of the same story can the press swallow?
How sick do you have to be to doubt the existence of the dead bodies you're looking at, but take on faith a succession of implausible governmental lies covering up murder? Sick enough to work for AP or Reuters and be assigned to cover the Kosovo War, that's how sick.
No matter how long they live or how many lies they tell, the dizzy weeks in the wake of NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade will be remembered as these Liars' finest hour. They accepted NATO's crudest excuses with faith that would shame a Mormon. Of course, NATO had been blowing the hell out of all Serbia (and parts of Bulgaria and Macedonia) long before they hit the Embassy, but that was easy for the press corps to indulge. Those people had no connections. But China...that's a big market. Those people count. You drop a missile or three into their bedroom at three a.m. and they get testy, start that tonal yowling of theirs in front of the cameras, holding up bloodsoaked blankets which are rather hard to explain away as Serb propaganda.
It was a true crisis of faith for AP and Reuters. To commemorate this heroic, Stalingrad-like defense of lies and murder, the eXile offers you a stage-by-stage recap of the wire services' fallback positions:
Stage One (May 7): "What Embassy bombing?" In the initial reports, the wire services refused to believe that the bombing had happened at all. Even after the Chinese, the Serbs, and the UN Secretary General had seen the footage of bleeding, sobbing Chinese journalists, AP and Reuters waited like good dogs to hear what NATO would say. AP reporter Veselin Toshkov cited a half-dozen governments' expression of outrage, then concluded, apparently with a straight face, that NATO had not yet admitted that the bombing had taken place at all. The odd thing is that Toshkov's story is datelined "Belgrade." A taxi ride would've settled the matter for most of us. If there's a smoking ruin with Asians stumbling out of it with bleeding heads, then yes, there probably was a bombing. But Toshkov stayed put, waiting for Jamie Shea to put some longdistance spin on the rubble.
Stage Two "We Didn't Do It on Purpose!" At last, the wire-service reporters found a taxi and confirmed the existence of the giant craters, smoking ruins, and bleeding Asiatics. Turning to their Master with brimming eyes, they got the news: NATO was officially sorry. Toshkov again, dated May 8: "NATO said it did not intentionally target the Chinese Embassy." Further, it "....regrets any damage to the embassy or injuries to Chinese diplomatic personnel." (In that order, apparently.)
But the really stylin' thing: the wireservice K9 Korps KEPT ON DENYING IT HAD HAPPENED! From the same story: "Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon (Monica's old Boss) would not confirm that a NATO missile went awry." "Went awry"! Isn't that wonderful? The even more bucolic "went astray" was almost as popular in AP and Reuters stories of NATO carnage. And Bacon manages not only to slip in this tender verb-phrase but then DENIES ("would not confirm") it! Ah, the magic of the subjunctive! Wallace Stevens woulda been proud.
Stage Three: "We Got the Address Wrong" Bacon's fat was sizzlin' over those superheated ruins. Too many video clips of sobbing Chinese. He started looking for a new lie. It was easy: the bomb had been meant for some nearby legitimate target. They had to squirm to come up with a good target, since, as one of the inconveniently still-living Chinese diplomats said, "[NATO] can see this is a completely residential area." Other factors about the embassy's design make it hard to find excuses for NATO: "The [embassy] stands in its own grounds," away from other structures; and it has had no other occupants: "The embassy was purpose-built for the Chinese three years ago."
Undaunted, in a May 8 story, a team of Washington Post reporters invented some plausible targets in this "completely residential area." Here's their portrait of the Embassy's neighborhood: "The embassy is in New Belgrade, a modern district that includes some government buildings, including the Yugoslav Federal Building, which houses the Prime Minister's offices." Aha! Government buildings!
While the Washington Post was sketching in "some government buildings," the AP's Teshkov was told that the target was "...[a] building across the street from the embassy." Teshkov reported this without giving in to the temptation to LOOK ACROSS THE STREET. He would never embarrass NATO by telling his readers what he saw, if he looked at all.
Stage Four: "Welcome to the Hotel Yugoslavia." NATO disinformation agents clearly started touting the hapless Hotel Yugoslavia as the real target of the embassy bombs. It was hardly "across the street" from the embassy; in fact, a May 8 Reuters story located it "400 meters from the embassy." The most dazzling example of credulity was the New York Times's Steven Lee Myers. Here's how Myers covered the embassy bomb in a May 8 story: "NATO forces...struck and badly damaged the Chinese embassy during an attack that...battered targets at the very heart of...Milosevic's power....NATO...offered no explanation for how NATO could have hit the embassy, [but] NATO did target the Hotel Yugoslavia, which is close by." (That is, roughly half a kilometer.)
Other candidates are named in some accounts, notably the BK TV Building, half a kilometer from the embassy but "the only logical target in the area" according to a Reuters source.
Finally NATO took its loyal, credulous journalists off the hook by naming the intended target--a dark horse never mentioned in the wire-service accounts: the Federal Directory for the Supply and Procurement in Belgrade. Though it never displaces wire-service sentimental favorites like the Hotel Yugoslavia, this Federal Directory, variously called a "depot," "warehouse," and "directorate" in AP and Reuters stories, takes the lead as scapegoat target.
Final Stage: "We Did It--and We'll Do It Again!" The last stage in NATO's shell game with the dead Chinese was a shrug of indifference turning to martial pride. On May 8, hours after he had tried to deny, then displace, the attack, Ken Bacon, one of the original nice guys, announced that "There is no such thing as clean combat." He "stressed in response to questions that...Milosevic was responsible for the air war in the first place."
So: there it is, in five easy stages.
1. We never bombed your stupid embassy;
2. Sorry!
3. We were aiming at some kinda building across the street.
4. Except not across the street; more like 500 meters away.
5. Ah, fuck it! Yeah, we bombed it, we're proud, and we'll do it again if we want to!
--And at every stage in this spiritual evolution, our free press was there. Nodding its head like the Taco Bell dog in the back of the lowrider car, swallowing absurdities and stepping over corpses with perfect indifference.
You'd think that would be the end of the story. We killed some Chinese. Explained it away. Then concluded that it is our moral prerogative to do so, and continue doing so, if that's what it takes to win this allegedly "just" war of ours. All in all, simply another real-life lesson in what this new NATO doctrine will mean for the world. That is, NATO is now the sole arbiter of right and wrong. And if we have to murder some non-whites in order to ensure that all those evil people get what's coming to them, then so be it.
The next couple days were fairly repetitive. Lots of televised roundtable debates with mainstream ideologues such as George Will ganging up on the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, who managed only to keep repeating the same official statement that there must be an investigation of the bombing and the guilty must be punished. Frankly, despite the moral high ground to which he ought to have been entitled on the subject, the Ambassador came off looking like exactly what he is--a diplomat, a creature of politics, and every bit as hypocritical and inhuman as the American talking heads seated on either side of him. Which probably made it all the more easy for the average American to dismiss what he had to say--and by extension, the Embassy bombing itself--as meaningless political posturing.
By this point Peter Jennings or whichever network anchortwit was moderating the discussion would get bored with the subject and take the opportunity to ask these Leading Lights of American Political Thought what they thought about the recent ruling in the Jenny Jones case whereby several million dollars in damages had been awarded in the aftermath of a daytime talk show gone wrong. And amazingly, the talking heads would jump right in without even batting an eyelash, obviously relishing the idea of a rather more frivolous discussion.
So it went for the next couple days. Until the Presidential Forum on Youth Violence, which had taken on added significance in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre a couple weeks earlier. But prior to launching into all those age-old "Youth in Crisis" platitudes, Clinton interjected "yet another" (as most of the major US networks characterized it) public apology for the mistaken Chinese Embassy bombing. The third, as it turned out. For some reason, this really seemed to tick the reporters off, and they rushed to Clinton's defense, all but coming out to ask why those nasty Chinese wouldn't just let well enough alone. We apologized, so get over it! Presumably, the press couldn't wait to hear more of that talk about how video games and TV violence are poisoning the minds of our children.
This was around the 10th of May, three days after the bombing. Is three public apologies for killing innocent civilians by mistake in three days excessive? Unfair? Apparently, it is.
But even this wasn't enough for some folks. Like New York Times windbag William Safire, for example. In a May 17 essay on the op-ed page entitled "Cut the Apologies," Safire is ready to draw a line in the sand. Incidentally, Clinton is now up to a whopping five apologies and the Chinese President has finally "deigned" to accept a telephone expression of regret from "the Great Apologizer," as Safire playfully refers to Bill.
"But it is America that is owed an apology. After an accident of war, we have been falsely accused of killing Chinese with malice aforethought. That is a great insult, compounded by the calculated trashing of our embassy..."
Yeah, that's it. Blame the victim.
It seems impossible, but given the crude responses and utter surprise expressed by most of our interviewees, we have to wonder whether or not the rules of polite debate in America have made that place way too safe for the assholes that be.
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