RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anti-jihadists vs. Anti-jihadists: Something Else at Work
by Julia Gorin

When the scholar and author Srdja Trifkovic was turned back at the Vancouver airport on Feb. 24 — after a Bosnian-Muslim organization called The Institute for Research of Genocide in Canada alerted authorities that a “genocide denier” was within their borders — Greater Islam and its useful idiots saw an opportunity, and pounced. 

The name “Trifkovic” rang a bell in the head of a young writer named Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, who quickly recalled that anti-jihadist Robert Spencer had written supportively of him and his work in the past. Hearing that Trifkovic didn’t buy into the Srebrenica Genocide, al-Tamimi saw a path to killing two birds with one stone. And went digging for dirt.

Soon enough, he found something, or as close to something as one can find on Dr. Trifkovic. What he found was a symposium that Trifkovic had participated in last year on a paleocon website called Alt Right, responding to the question: Is the traditionalist, paleoconservative Right anti-Semitic, as is popularly perceived? The moderator of the panel was a Jewish paleocon named Eugene Girin. Joining Trifkovic was Paul Gottfried, also a Jewish paleocon, and the third panelist was well-known anti-Semitic paleocon Taki Theodoracopulos.

Reading the following paragraphs in the Trifkovic essay, al-Tamimi thought he’d caught the man red-handed in the act of Jew-hating:

All unfortunately true (though one would have preferred the phrase “disproportionately Jewish” to “specifically Jewish” vis-à-vis the kinds of movements my people tend to originate and support). While virgin eyes (mainstream readers and anyone not experienced in sorting out the intricacies and boundaries of what is and isn’t OK to say about Jews) will read the paragraphs as “anti-Semitic,” the views expressed aren’t unlike what I and any number of other Jewish conservatives have written in an effort to tame the Jewish predisposition toward cynicism about, and dismantling of, the traditional values of, yes, white-established societies. Values that every color and creed have been invited to share and benefit from, and which Trifkovic’s article continues to invite Jews to uphold — if one reads the paragraphs that al-Tamimi did not focus on:

That is the harsh, coldly objective intellectual rigor I’ve come to expect from Dr. Trifkovic, who sees no winners here: ‘YES, those on the traditionalist Right are anti-Semitic. YES, they have reason to be. But NO, they shouldn’t be — and here’s why they need to get over their Jew-grudges.’ The article is a call for the traditionalist, often anti-Semitic paleocon Right to recognize Jews as allies against the forces of barbarity. It’s the likes of Theodoracopulos and readers who think as he does that Trifkovic’s article was admonishing, along with Jews. 

It’s not reading that would be palatable to the mainstream, but conservative readers — including Jewish conservatives — are known to have a slightly higher tolerance for truth, even when Jews don’t come out smelling like roses. Indeed, there was actually very little there to seize on.

Trifkovic concerns himself with Jewish and Israeli survival. That’s more than can be said of other paleocons, too many of whom — not unlike too many liberals — have convinced themselves that Jews are the problem with jihad, and let the Muslims off the hook, often defending them. Unhindered by such biased mental blocks, Trifkovic does not have it in for Israel, as his maligned symposium contribution and a lifetime of work make clear. That’s in contrast to Buchananites, for example — Buchanan being someone who gets invited onto mainstream outlets including “The Daily Show” and who is published by Creators Syndicate.

Indeed, Trifkovic perceives a recipe for Israeli and Jewish survival better than most Jews do. He also warns of a threat that’s quite under-appreciated by Jews as they try to nestle up to other minorities, who reject the idea of Jews belonging in the same endangered category (as the Jon Stewart-Rick Sanchez fight demonstrated). And who, separately, have no affinity for Israel.

However, armed with the “damning” paragraphs, al-Tamimi saw an opportunity to take down one of the lone dissenters on the untouchable, unquestionable, sacralized, staged atrocity known as Srebrenica. But first he forwarded Trifkovic’s comments to Robert Spencer and asked if he endorsed Trifkovic’s statements, prompting him to repudiate them publicly. 

Having gotten one rift going, al-Tamimi now turned on Spencer, and wrote an article “exposing” Trifkovic’s guilt — and Spencer’s guilt by association. Using, of course, the next anti-jihad-minded platform to do it: American Thinker. Where various writers over the years, including the editor, have cited the author with esteem.

Precisely what al-Tamimi wanted to see an end to. “Trifkovic, author of the book Sword of the Prophet,” al-Tamimi wrote, is often upheld as a serious scholar with a genuine interest in promoting the cause of human rights in the face of jihadist ideology. For instance, he was interviewed in the documentary Islam: What the West Needs to Know….”

He certainly was. I was at a screening that took place in January 2006 amid Muslim threats, at the Renaissance Film Festival in Los Angeles, where Jews made up probably half of the recently tuned-in anti-jihadist audience. Even before the obscure-sounding name “Srdja Trifkovic” appeared under the talking head manifesting onto the screen, I was taken aback when the theater erupted into cheers and applause as if a rock star had walked into the room. It was almost as unexpected as the section in the film that showed a map of the domino-like progression of the Balkans falling to Islam: Bosnia… Kosovo…Macedonia… — that is, the “pseudo historic” concept of a Balkan jihad which al-Tamimi presumes to admonish both Spencer and Trifkovic against.

His article appeared to be constructively advising the counter-jihad movement to be more mindful of its allies and associations. But, as JihadWatch.org comment poster “Cornelius” asked: “Why Robert? Why Jihad Watch? Why not use a more appropriately valid and sinister example than [un]-moderated comments? Why not just issue the generic warning without trying to diminish an ally in the anti-Jihad like Robert Spencer? In short, why pick a fight with [a] friend?”

No sooner did the March 5 piece run than there was a news alert to it that morning by the never-sleeping anti-anti-jihadists of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, who saw that the next window of opportunity to divide and conquer the anti-jihad movement had been pried open.

What’s happening here is transparent. As Trifkovic was being pilloried by the Canadian PC machine, an attack came from an unexpected, heretofore mostly friendly, direction — about a tangential matter. And then another attack from another friendly place. Jihad Watch and American Thinker were utilized and targeted by what appears to be, if not a coordinated campaign, a very symbiotic one, which also almost pitted the two sites against each other.

Readers of both Jihad Watch and American Thinker — never easily fooled — “smelled a skunk in the woodpile,” as one put it. “Morton Doodslag” elaborated:

And so one turns her attention toward al-Tamimi. Do we for a moment believe the man is really so worried about negative attitudes toward Jews? Or might he be using the anti-Semitism card to help protect the carefully guarded “truth” of a genocide occurring at Srebrenica — the very factoid that sparked his interest in Trifkovic in the first place. Consider the dual purpose being served: creating a wedge in the anti-jihad movement, and targeting anti-jihad elements that have expressed some doubt about the unquestionable. 

“Spencer makes no attempt to distance himself from Trifkovic’s pseudo-historical views concerning the Bosnian War,” al-Tamimi wrote in an update on his blog, continuing on the theme that faults Spencer for noticing jihad and its successful propaganda (“imagined propaganda arm”) in the Balkans.

Indeed, the whole affair — starting with Trifkovic’s deportation at the prompting of an “Institute for Research of Genocide in Canada” — is replete with ironies and hypocrisies. Which usually means agendas.

We’ll skip pointing out the obvious decoy value of accusing an anti-jihadist of anti-Semitism in a way that benefits the predominately Jew-hating Muslim world (which often enough includes Bosniaks). Not just any anti-jihadist, but one with whom I traveled to Israel in 2007 and who a year earlier had been the keynote speaker at Yad Vashem in a symposium on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia. A dangerously high level of prominence indeed for someone who discovered that the “8,000 Muslim men and boys” mantra isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A few more glaring ironies:

In addition to claiming to represent “more than 50,000 Canadians of Bosnian origin” — despite 28,000 of those being Serbs and Croats — IRGC director Emir Ramic sits on the editorial board of a Sarajevo-based Muslim magazine titled Korak (“Step”). Korak, published by the veterans’ association of the Bosnian-Muslim Army, runs articles titled “Israel is a Terrorist Regime” and “Basic Principles of the Law of War in Islam.” The latter asserts that “Jihad is a just and legitimate fight against aggression and a struggle in protection of human rights and freedoms.”

As Trifkovic himself noted, the magazine — which publishes Arabic, Bosnian, Iranian and the occasional Jewicidal author — also carries articles such as:

An interesting pair of targets, making the familiar attempt to break the solidarity between Jews and Serbs — Hitler’s and jihad’s original victims — all the more transparent. 

The chief editor of the Islamist magazine, “Asaf Dzanic, is also on the Genocide Institute’s board. Perversely, and where the Institute derives some of its legitimacy, Elie Wiesel has lent his name to the Institute. And still there are more ironies and hypocrisies. As Canadian former ambassador to Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia — James Bissett — pointed out, the “Institute” actively engages in WWII Holocaust minimization and denial, of the already minimized and suppressed story of the Muslim-assisted genocide of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in Croatia — the precursor to the wider European genocide. Ambassador Bissett contrasted the IRGC’s article “Examination of Serbian Deaths in Jasenovac Camp” with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s numbers. Then he advised:

Elie Wiesel has admitted to being less than careful in what he lends his name to. In October 1993 at a talk he gave at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Wiesel became almost “rhapsodic,” as an attendee named Peter described it, when he spoke of walking through Sarajevo with Bosnian-Muslim wartime president Alija Izetbegovic.

Like Tudjman, Izetbegovic was invited to the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, but he declined. Because of how it would look to the Muslim world. 

Which brings us back to Mr. al-Tamimi and his criticism of Robert Spencer for not also distancing himself from “Trifkovic’s” notion of Bosnia as jihad, which al-Tamimi sees as illegitimate revisionism:

As the DarLink comment poster from earlier put it: “If [the] UN says you are guilty then it must be so, never mind all the resolutions against Israel and Goldstone report.” 

Al-Tamimi certainly places much emphasis on, and confidence in, the judgments of an international court which Americans specifically declined to subject their leaders and soldiers to, fearing precisely that the politicized body would function by Orwellian standards. (Indeed, the canaries living the Kafkaesque nightmare include almost every high-level wartime Serbian official, on trial essentially for being a Serbian official during war.) But given his confidence in UN courts, al-Tamimi might take a moment to notice that Milosevic was never found guilty; he was found dead — like at least one other Serb leader at the Hague before him — and that leaves him as an indicted war criminal. No more indicted than Tudjman or Izetbegovic, both of whom passed away waiting for their indictments to come. (These were politically trickier indictments and therefore deliberately dragged out.)

The premise underlying what al-Tamimi — and IRGC et al who are engaging in this simultaneous campaign — are doing is that Izetbegovic was the moderate Muslim and multi-cultural democrat presented by the West (and by Harry’s Place, where al-Tamimi also writes). Enter, the next irony. In addition to authoring the notorious Islamic Declaration advocating Sharia law, Izetbegovic had been a recruiter for the Waffen SS as a member of the Young Muslims (“Mladi Muslimani”), and in 1943 he welcomed to Bosnia the notorious Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Andy Wilcoxson, the most dedicated American follower of the proceedings at the Hague’s ICTY, yesterday provided for Jihad Watch readers the rest of the CV of this man whose forces al-Tamimi assures us were not engaged in jihadist aggression, concluding:

Conspicuously, the long–debunked propaganda of “Greater Serbia” found its way into both the al-Tamimi article and a joint press release the day before from IRGC, the Congress of North American Bosniaks, and Bosnian American Institute for Genocide and Education. Also gracing both works were the usual buzz words — “Karadzic and Mladic” — the only two names (plus Milosevic) that anyone has been allowed to take away from the conflicts — attesting to the tight, recycled narrative and limited scope of permissible interpretation of the Balkan wars. 

The “pseudo-history” is the one being sleeplessly guarded, including by Mr. al-Tamimi whether he knows it or not. In fact, because what happened at Srebrenica (which no one is too sure about) did not jibe with any official definition of genocide, the all-authoritative Hague which these folks obsessively cite (and which defies all known forensic sciences in its ability to determine manner of death from a single bone fragment) had to widen the very definition of the word to make the crime fit the punishment. In an open letter to Canada’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, author Diana Johnstone — incidentally, not an ally in the anti-jihad movement (she doesn’t notice any threat of a Muslim takeover) — wrote:

Johnstone recognized the “amazing decision [to deport Trifkovic as] all the more scandalous in that it was taken ad hoc in response to the hate campaign by self-declared representatives of one Bosnian ethnic group carrying out a vendetta against another Bosnian ethnic group.” Why did Canadian authorities suddenly deem Trifkovic “inadmissible” despite his having been there a number of times including as an expert witness for the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa? For the same reason that world courts and governments — the latter being hounded to pass “Srebrenica Resolutions” and set up official remembrance days for Muslim soldiers — tell us that there was a Srebrenica Genocide: Because the Muslims told them to. 

Consider the efficiency with which the ‘genocide’ designation has been achieved. Note how much speedier, with less trouble and controversy, the Srebrenica “genocide” came to be than the much older and bigger Armenian Genocide. (Meanwhile, as Ambassador Bissett pointed out, “I am not aware of the ‘Institute’ seeking to ban or castigate as ‘genocide deniers’ those Turkish government officials…who are adamant that what happened to the Armenians is NOT a genocide.”) And what about the Greeks and Assyrians? (See “Three Genocides, One Perpetrator.”) Never mind about the WWII liquidation of one-third of Croatia’s Serbs — virtually unknown, much less officially designated as anything.

What is the common denominator here? The elite guardianship, and the fevered — and very successful — rush to collect proclamations, resolutions, rulings, compulsory days of remembrance (internationally and locally) is for exactly ONE “genocide,” and of the smallest scale. Just as oddly, it is the alleged perpetrators of this particular “genocide” who can’t kick the label, which is used as a sledgehammer against them in pursuance of, and as a cover for, Islamo-Western geopolitical ends. In what amounts to the biggest false confession in history, the effort has even achieved an admission of guilt from the alleged perpetrators, if only to stop the whipping.

There is something political, and something desperate, going on here. Why is it so crucial for Muslims to have their desperately sought genocide? Enter the final irony of this convoluted, sleight-of-hand situation — from Trifkovic’s deportation, to his being ‘found out’ as an anti-Semite, to “tarring” Spencer with said “anti-Semite,” to criticism of Spencer for not disavowing the latter’s Balkan “pseudo-history”: In addition to the geopolitical purpose that “the massacre” was needed for at the time (an international intervention), there is a far bigger goal. Muslims see the Jews as deriving much of their influence, moral authority, and sympathy from the Holocaust. To compete, they must secure their own. That they are achieving it in between committing genocides themselves (Sudan, Turkey, Kosovo, WWII Croatia-Bosnia, 1990s Bosnia) is a testament to their prowess, and to the West’s stupidity and servility.

In other words, the charge of anti-Semitism is being used to protect a concoction whose key purpose is to remove what Muslims see as the Jewish advantage. Jews being the prime target of whom to turn the world against before swallowing up the rest of it. In the process, another benefit is achieved: With 8,000 (sic) Muslim soldiers sharing the same category, the Holocaust is diminished. As are the real genocides that Muslims carry out.

Don’t fall for it. Being a genocide denier is not as bad as being a genocide fabricator, a relentless effort that takes on many forms and disguises to make it harder to recognize, camouflaging itself against seemingly unrelated or tangential incidents. That is what has happened here.

I say to the Muslim world that we anti-jihadists — whether we get along with one another or not and regardless of any potential bad apples that our movement like all movements will draw and can’t always police — we will not be fooled. Once and for all: My genocide is bigger than yours. So nanny-nanny-boo-boo.

Such are the levels we are lowered to by the Seventh Century elements in our midst.