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Faith-Based Analysis in Canada
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
CounterPunch - Aug 22, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/herman08222006.html
Faith-Based Analysis:
Michael Ignatieff on Israeli Self-Defense and Serb Ethnic Cleansing
By EDWARD S. HERMAN
Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian MP and contender for a top leadership
position in the Liberal Party, was slow in responding to the Israeli war on
Lebanon. He told the Canadian media on August 1st that "I've been following
it minutely from the beginning and watching it unfold and figuring out when
was the time when a statement would be important and relevant." (Linda
Diebel, "Rae criticizes liberal rival for delay," Toronto Star, August 2,
2006). He considered it necessary to give Israel enough time "to send
Hezbollah a very clear message" that kidnapping soldiers and firing rockets
on Israel will not be tolerated. Of course, Israel was killing mainly
civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure while sending this
message, and there was the question of whether the world shouldn't be
sending Israel the message that aggression and the commission of war crimes
under the pretense of "self defense" is not permissible, but like George
Bush and Condoleezza Rice, for Ignatieff the Israeli message was crucial,
not any Lebanese civilian casualties or Israeli law violations.
Michael Ignatieff is a skilled trimmer, who has adjusted his principles and
thoughts to the demands of the U.S. and Canadian power elite, and advanced
accordingly--from academia to preferred commentator on human rights and
other political issues in the U.S. mainstream media, and on to becoming a
member of the Canadian parliament. He was for some years Carr Professor of
Human Rights at Harvard University, and for several years was a regular
contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He has always found that what
the United States has been doing in the international arena is
good--well-intentioned, necessary for international well-being, and
inevitable, though occasionally flawed in execution. He was a strong
supporter of the U.S. wars in Yugoslavia, objecting mainly to the
sluggishness in the application of force. He approved the
invasion-occupation of Iraq and has supported the use of torture in the
abstract as well as specifically in the Bush administration's so-called
"war on terror," and as noted he has recently been very understanding of
Israel's need to defend itself against the threats of Hezbollah and its
other enemies.
One would have thought it might be problematical for a professor of human
rights to vigorously support two wars (Kosovo, Iraq) carried out in
violation of the UN Charter and hence "supreme crimes" in the view of the
judges at Nuremberg. These two wars of aggression also resulted in serial
war crimes, such as the regular bombing of civilian sites and the use of
illegal weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm, phosphorus and depleted
uranium, that should have been anathema to a devotee of human rights. But
these matters didn't bother Ignatieff, who was troubled only by the lag in
initiation of NATO violence in the Balkans and the ineffectiveness and
mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq. Similarly, Israel's long-term
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and massive
human rights violations in the process, have not troubled him in the least,
although he is bothered by the failure to bring "stability" and the absence
of a quiet occupation and dispossession process.
He gets away with this support for supreme crimes and systematic violations
of human rights because he does this only as regards crimes and abuses
carried out by the United States and its allies and clients. He is quite
passionate about the crimes or alleged crimes of target states such as
Yugoslavia and Saddam's Iraq. As this bias parallels and therefore supports
official positions, he is treated well by the Western elite and their
instruments such as Harvard University and the New York Times. He can make
egregious errors and unverifiable and dubious claims, accept official
claims as unquestionably true, and apply double standards across the board,
without cost. Treating him well means not only giving him support and
access, it also means letting him get away with intellectual murder.
Ignatieff came into prominence during the Balkan wars, where he joined
forces with a number of other liberal intellectuals and journalists who
took on the cause of Alija Izetbegovic--author of the Islamic Declaration
and close ally of Osama bin Laden--and the Bosnian Muslims, and pressed
strongly for military intervention on their behalf.[1] Ignatieff's position
also aligned him with the Clinton administration, and he established "close
relations" with Richard Holbrooke, General Wesley Clark and former Yugoslav
Tribunal chief prosecutor Louise Arbour.[2] These close links with officials
with an axe to grind might be thought to compromise a journalist and human
rights activist, but it doesn't work that way in the United States--as with
"embedded" journalists, such links enhance a reporter's authority. It is
only in enemy states that official connections and embedding compromise
journalistic integrity, as by assumption our officials don't lie and
manipulate, and/or the linkages do not cause journalists to lose their
critical capacity, whereas elsewhere governments lie and embedded
journalists become propaganda agents of the state.[3]
One revealing illustration of Ignatieff's integration into the propaganda
apparatus of the war-making establishment was his November 2, 1999 op-ed
column in the New York Times on "Counting Bodies in Kosovo." By the time
Ignatieff wrote this piece, the wilder claims of the State Department that
100,000 or even 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had been killed by the Serbs had
collapsed in the wake of the very modest results of the intense forensic
searches that followed the NATO takeover of Kosovo after June 10, 1999. The
new claim made by Carla Del Ponte, the Yugoslav Tribunal's prosecutor (who
had succeeded Louise Arbour), was that 11,334 Kosovo Albanians had been
killed. According to Ignatieff, whether all the 11,334 bodies will be found
"depends on whether the Serb military and police removed them." Possible
error or inflation by the Tribunal and its sources was ruled out for no
reason but deep bias.
Del Ponte had been vetted by Madeleine Albright before taking her position,
the Tribunal had been organized and largely staffed and funded by the NATO
powers, and it consistently served as a PR-judicial arm of NATO.[4] The
Tribunal's investigator, who recommended dismissing any charges of war
crimes against NATO without a formal investigation, stated that he had been
satisfied with NATO press releases as an information source on the
motivations and results of NATO actions.[5] Del Ponte followed his
recommendation, implicitly accepting this use of evidence, and expressing
satisfation that there was "no deliberate targeting of civilians or
unlawful military targets by NATO" (presumably the targeting of the Chinese
Embassy and the Serb broadcasting facility, among hundreds of other
non-military targets, was lawful). Only an unscholarly partisan would take
her number as definitive (and only a partisan newspaper would invite
Ignatieff to write on the subject and subsequently bring him on board as a
regular). Eventually only some 4,000 bodies were recovered in Kosovo after
the NATO takeover, by no means all or even a majority Bosnian Muslim
civilians, and 2,398 remain listed by the Red Cross as missing, yielding a
total--6,398--substantially below the 11,334, a difference never commented
on by Ignatieff or the New York Times.[6]
During the Kosovo conflict Ignatieff offered a stream of claims and
interpretations that make an enlightening contrast with his apologetics for
Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and structured racism. Commenting on
an incident in which the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) murdered six Serb
teenagers, Ignatieff wrote that this was "doubtless a KLA provocation,
intended to goad the Serbs into overreaction and then to trigger
international intervention. Yet it is worth asking why the KLA strategists
could be absolutely certain the Serbs would react as they did [he is
referring to the "Racak massacre" of January 15, 1999]. The reason is
simple...only in Serbia is racial contempt an official ideology."[7]
We may note first that for Ignatieff the KLA killings were only a
"provocation," not a murderous act to be severely condemned. Note also that
although there is compelling evidence that the Racak incident was arranged
into a "massacre" following a furious battle, and is therefore of extremely
dubious authenticity, Ignatieff takes it as unquestionably valid.[8] On the
certainty of the Serb reaction, killings such as those carried out by the
KLA produce similar responses in civil conflicts everywhere, so that
Ignatieff's blaming it on Serb racism is nonsensical for that reason alone.
But it also flies in the face of Serb tolerance of Albanians in Belgrade,
along with Roma--in contrast with Kosovo Albanian intolerance of both in
NATO-occupied Kosovo.
The contrast with Ignatieff's treatment of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon is
also dramatic and revealing. With the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier
in Gaza and at least two other Israeli soldiers in still-disputed
circumstances around the Israel-Lebanon border on July 12, minimal
consistency with his treatment of the Serbs should cause him to regard
these as "provocations" that induced an Israeli "overreaction," and he
should condemn this overreaction, which in Gaza and Lebanon has been far
more deadly and murderous than the Serbs' alleged overreaction at Racak. He
might explain this overreaction and this willingness to kill large numbers
of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on the "simple" ground that "only in
Israel is racial contempt an official ideology." Of course he does not do
this, although the case that can be made for racial contempt as an official
ideology in Israel is vastly greater than the evidence for Serbian racism.[9]
For Ignatieff, Israel's legitimate "security needs" justify the Lebanon
response (and he evades discussing the reinvasion and attack on civilians
and humanitarian crisis in Gaza). Didn't Yugoslavia's legitimate security
needs justify Racak and other actions of the Serbs, with NATO threatening
an attack--that soon materialized--and working in coordination with the
KLA? There is of course no hint at this in Ignatieff--his frame of
reference is always that of his side (NATO), and the enemy is always wrong
and has no right of self defense.
Ignatieff was enraged at the Serb expulsions in Kosovo during the bombing
war, claiming that "Milosevic decided to solve an `internal problem' by
exporting an entire nation to his impoverished neighbors," and he also
described it as a "most meticulous deportation of a civilian population"
and "a final solution of the Kosovo problem."[10] One would hardly realize
from these effusions that Yugoslavia was under military attack by NATO,
forced to defend itself in a situation where the KLA and NATO were working
in close coordination; that proportionately more [ethnic] Serbs fled the
bombing war in Kosovo than [ethnic] Albanians; that there was nothing
"meticulous" about the flight, induced by the KLA and bombing as well as
Serb actions, and that there is no reason whatever to think that Milosevic
viewed this as a "final solution," another dishonest piece of rhetoric that
conflates Nazi industrial murder with a war-induced flight of civilians.
Again, the contrast with Ignatieff's treatment of the forced exit of a
million Lebanese by the Israelis is dramatic. Here Israel is justified in
"sending a message" to Hezbollah reflecting Israel's right to defend
itself. Yugoslavia had no right to send a message to the KLA and NATO
powers in the process of defending itself, although NATO's war threatened
its survival, whereas Israel had only suffered minor losses in a border
skirmish with a force that did not threaten its existence. Ignatieff has
not even expressed sympathy with the million Lebanese displaced to "send a
message" to Hezbollah; and he will clearly not speak of this as a
"meticulous" ethnic cleansing and "final solution" via an "export" of
Lebanese civilians. Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross (among others)
have repeatedly declared the Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian
infrastructure to be war crimes,[11] but Ignatieff has not said a word about
anything wrong with Israel's attacks on civilians or the use of illegal and
anti-civilian weaponry like cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and he has
never hinted that these frequent and ruthless attacks on Arab civilians
could be because of Israel's racist ideology, although the evidence for
such attitudes in Israel is massive (which it is not in Belgrade).
In short, we are dealing here with gross political bias and gross
apologetics for aggression, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Add to this
the fact that Ignatieff has swallowed Bush's claim to be striving to "bring
freedom everywhere," an ideological premise that allows him to rationalize
anything the Bush administration does externally because it is in a noble
cause--based solely on the fact that Bush says that that is his aim (see
his "Who Are Americans To Think That Freedom Is Theirs To Spread?," New
York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005; and my analysis of this apologetics
landmark: Herman, "Michael Ignatieff's Pseudo-Hegelian Apologetics for
Imperialism," October, 2005).
Facts no longer matter for Ignatieff; they are trumped by proclaimed aims
and values, but only for the side he favors and that produce benefits--to
Ignatieff and some of the elites that underwrite his work. Clearly this is
a man worthy of a human rights chair at Harvard, a special place in the
Paper of Record, and a bright political future in our close and reliable
ally Canada.
Endnotes:
1. For a general account, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Morality's
Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders," in David Chandler, Ed.,
Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 196-216 (as posted to ZNet, August 30,
2005). The New Humanitarians have been members of a network of like-minded
people, often friends, who have worked in coordination with government
officials and government-linked thinktanks, bonding and hobnobbing among
themselves in Sarajevo or at international conferences and being fed
information by U.S. and, in the 1990s, Bosnian Muslim officials. Sometimes,
they worked together in establishment operations such as the Independent
International Commission on Kosovo (Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone,
Michael Ignatieff, Mary Kaldor, Martha Minow), the International Crisis
Group (William Shawcross), the American Academy in Berlin (Paul Hockenos),
George Soros' Open Society Institute (Aryeh Neier), and offshoots of these
and similar institutions. The first three groups have been heavily funded
by NATO governments, and have had on their boards numerous NATO government
officials, past and present.
In a nice illustration of what C. Wright Mills might have called the
"social composition of the higher circles" of New Humanitarianism, Timothy
Garton Ash wrote back in 1999: "When I arrive in the late evening...[at
Hotel Tuzla,]...I step into the lift, press the button for the second
floor, and at once subside, powerless, into the cellar. The reception
committee in the bar consists of Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and
David Rieff. When I join them, Sontag is just saying to Michael Ignatieff,
'I can't believe that this is your first time here." And he adds that on
the very next day, after arriving at an event hosted by the Bosnian Muslim
leadership of Tuzla, Mary Kaldor welcomed the group, and the British
actress Julie Christie read a poem in homage to Sarajevo, "glowing
white...as a translucent china cup." Ash, History of the Present: Essays,
Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (New York: Random House,
1999), p.147.
2. The quoted words were used by David Rieff to describe and laud his ally
Ignatieff's connections with the West's political and military leadership,
in "Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond," Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2000.
3. Back at the time of the controversy that followed the May 1981 shooting
of Pope Paul II by a Turkish fascist, the mainstream U.S. media relied
heavily on the expert Paul Henze, rarely pointing out--and never suggesting
any problem based on--lhis 30-year employment as a CIA propaganda
specialist and his having been head of the CIA station in Turkey.
4. For a compelling analysis, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away
With Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 132-46.
5. Ibid., pp. 188-191.
6. "Statement to the Press by Carla del Ponte" (FH/P.I.S./550-e), Carla del
Ponte, ICTY, December 20, 2000, par. 16; "Kosovo: ICRC deplores slow
progress of working group on missing persons," ICRC News, March 9, 2006.
7. Michael Ignatieff, "Only in truth can Serbia find peace: There is racism
everywhere in Europe, but only in Serbia is racial contempt an official
ideology," Calgary Herald, June 26, 1999.
8. On questions about Racak, see Mandel, pp. 72-80, 170-73; see also the
devastating testimonies of Judge Danica Marenkovic, forensic expert
Professor Slavisa Dobricain, Col. Bogoljub Janicevic, and Col. Milan Kotur,
during the Milosevic defense period, March 23-24, April 8, 13, and 26, and
January 27, 2006. None of this testimony was reported on in the New York
Times.
9. Under the subheading "Root Causes," Israeli analyst Reuven Kaminer says
"It is impossible to oppress an entire people for 40 years and not to
succumb to the ultimate rationalization for such action. Anti-Arab racism
is endemic to Israeli society. This racism is so pervasive that it covers
the political landscape like a cloud and infects all the thinking and the
attitudes of the overwhelming majority of Israelis." ("Who Won and Who Lost
and Why," Portside, August 17, 2006). See also Edward S. Herman, "Ethnic
Cleansing: Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious," ZNet, August 9, 2006.
10. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 86-87, 78-79, 84.
11. See, e.g., Peter Bouckaert and Nadim Houry, Fatal Strikes: Israel's
Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon (Human Rights Watch,
August 3, 2006; and Peter Bouckaert, "For Israel, innocent civilians are
fair game," International Herald Tribune, August 4, 2006.
[Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics,
political economy and the media. Among his books are The Real Terror
Network, Triumph of the Market, and Manufacturing Consent (with Noam
Chomsky).]
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Faith-Based Analysis in Canada
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit
CounterPunch - Aug 22, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/herman08222006.html
Faith-Based Analysis:
Michael Ignatieff on Israeli Self-Defense and Serb Ethnic Cleansing
By EDWARD S. HERMAN
Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian MP and contender for a top leadership
position in the Liberal Party, was slow in responding to the Israeli war on
Lebanon. He told the Canadian media on August 1st that "I've been following
it minutely from the beginning and watching it unfold and figuring out when
was the time when a statement would be important and relevant." (Linda
Diebel, "Rae criticizes liberal rival for delay," Toronto Star, August 2,
2006). He considered it necessary to give Israel enough time "to send
Hezbollah a very clear message" that kidnapping soldiers and firing rockets
on Israel will not be tolerated. Of course, Israel was killing mainly
civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure while sending this
message, and there was the question of whether the world shouldn't be
sending Israel the message that aggression and the commission of war crimes
under the pretense of "self defense" is not permissible, but like George
Bush and Condoleezza Rice, for Ignatieff the Israeli message was crucial,
not any Lebanese civilian casualties or Israeli law violations.
Michael Ignatieff is a skilled trimmer, who has adjusted his principles and
thoughts to the demands of the U.S. and Canadian power elite, and advanced
accordingly--from academia to preferred commentator on human rights and
other political issues in the U.S. mainstream media, and on to becoming a
member of the Canadian parliament. He was for some years Carr Professor of
Human Rights at Harvard University, and for several years was a regular
contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He has always found that what
the United States has been doing in the international arena is
good--well-intentioned, necessary for international well-being, and
inevitable, though occasionally flawed in execution. He was a strong
supporter of the U.S. wars in Yugoslavia, objecting mainly to the
sluggishness in the application of force. He approved the
invasion-occupation of Iraq and has supported the use of torture in the
abstract as well as specifically in the Bush administration's so-called
"war on terror," and as noted he has recently been very understanding of
Israel's need to defend itself against the threats of Hezbollah and its
other enemies.
One would have thought it might be problematical for a professor of human
rights to vigorously support two wars (Kosovo, Iraq) carried out in
violation of the UN Charter and hence "supreme crimes" in the view of the
judges at Nuremberg. These two wars of aggression also resulted in serial
war crimes, such as the regular bombing of civilian sites and the use of
illegal weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm, phosphorus and depleted
uranium, that should have been anathema to a devotee of human rights. But
these matters didn't bother Ignatieff, who was troubled only by the lag in
initiation of NATO violence in the Balkans and the ineffectiveness and
mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq. Similarly, Israel's long-term
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and massive
human rights violations in the process, have not troubled him in the least,
although he is bothered by the failure to bring "stability" and the absence
of a quiet occupation and dispossession process.
He gets away with this support for supreme crimes and systematic violations
of human rights because he does this only as regards crimes and abuses
carried out by the United States and its allies and clients. He is quite
passionate about the crimes or alleged crimes of target states such as
Yugoslavia and Saddam's Iraq. As this bias parallels and therefore supports
official positions, he is treated well by the Western elite and their
instruments such as Harvard University and the New York Times. He can make
egregious errors and unverifiable and dubious claims, accept official
claims as unquestionably true, and apply double standards across the board,
without cost. Treating him well means not only giving him support and
access, it also means letting him get away with intellectual murder.
Ignatieff came into prominence during the Balkan wars, where he joined
forces with a number of other liberal intellectuals and journalists who
took on the cause of Alija Izetbegovic--author of the Islamic Declaration
and close ally of Osama bin Laden--and the Bosnian Muslims, and pressed
strongly for military intervention on their behalf.[1] Ignatieff's position
also aligned him with the Clinton administration, and he established "close
relations" with Richard Holbrooke, General Wesley Clark and former Yugoslav
Tribunal chief prosecutor Louise Arbour.[2] These close links with officials
with an axe to grind might be thought to compromise a journalist and human
rights activist, but it doesn't work that way in the United States--as with
"embedded" journalists, such links enhance a reporter's authority. It is
only in enemy states that official connections and embedding compromise
journalistic integrity, as by assumption our officials don't lie and
manipulate, and/or the linkages do not cause journalists to lose their
critical capacity, whereas elsewhere governments lie and embedded
journalists become propaganda agents of the state.[3]
One revealing illustration of Ignatieff's integration into the propaganda
apparatus of the war-making establishment was his November 2, 1999 op-ed
column in the New York Times on "Counting Bodies in Kosovo." By the time
Ignatieff wrote this piece, the wilder claims of the State Department that
100,000 or even 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had been killed by the Serbs had
collapsed in the wake of the very modest results of the intense forensic
searches that followed the NATO takeover of Kosovo after June 10, 1999. The
new claim made by Carla Del Ponte, the Yugoslav Tribunal's prosecutor (who
had succeeded Louise Arbour), was that 11,334 Kosovo Albanians had been
killed. According to Ignatieff, whether all the 11,334 bodies will be found
"depends on whether the Serb military and police removed them." Possible
error or inflation by the Tribunal and its sources was ruled out for no
reason but deep bias.
Del Ponte had been vetted by Madeleine Albright before taking her position,
the Tribunal had been organized and largely staffed and funded by the NATO
powers, and it consistently served as a PR-judicial arm of NATO.[4] The
Tribunal's investigator, who recommended dismissing any charges of war
crimes against NATO without a formal investigation, stated that he had been
satisfied with NATO press releases as an information source on the
motivations and results of NATO actions.[5] Del Ponte followed his
recommendation, implicitly accepting this use of evidence, and expressing
satisfation that there was "no deliberate targeting of civilians or
unlawful military targets by NATO" (presumably the targeting of the Chinese
Embassy and the Serb broadcasting facility, among hundreds of other
non-military targets, was lawful). Only an unscholarly partisan would take
her number as definitive (and only a partisan newspaper would invite
Ignatieff to write on the subject and subsequently bring him on board as a
regular). Eventually only some 4,000 bodies were recovered in Kosovo after
the NATO takeover, by no means all or even a majority Bosnian Muslim
civilians, and 2,398 remain listed by the Red Cross as missing, yielding a
total--6,398--substantially below the 11,334, a difference never commented
on by Ignatieff or the New York Times.[6]
During the Kosovo conflict Ignatieff offered a stream of claims and
interpretations that make an enlightening contrast with his apologetics for
Israeli aggression, ethnic cleansing and structured racism. Commenting on
an incident in which the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) murdered six Serb
teenagers, Ignatieff wrote that this was "doubtless a KLA provocation,
intended to goad the Serbs into overreaction and then to trigger
international intervention. Yet it is worth asking why the KLA strategists
could be absolutely certain the Serbs would react as they did [he is
referring to the "Racak massacre" of January 15, 1999]. The reason is
simple...only in Serbia is racial contempt an official ideology."[7]
We may note first that for Ignatieff the KLA killings were only a
"provocation," not a murderous act to be severely condemned. Note also that
although there is compelling evidence that the Racak incident was arranged
into a "massacre" following a furious battle, and is therefore of extremely
dubious authenticity, Ignatieff takes it as unquestionably valid.[8] On the
certainty of the Serb reaction, killings such as those carried out by the
KLA produce similar responses in civil conflicts everywhere, so that
Ignatieff's blaming it on Serb racism is nonsensical for that reason alone.
But it also flies in the face of Serb tolerance of Albanians in Belgrade,
along with Roma--in contrast with Kosovo Albanian intolerance of both in
NATO-occupied Kosovo.
The contrast with Ignatieff's treatment of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon is
also dramatic and revealing. With the June 25 capture of an Israeli soldier
in Gaza and at least two other Israeli soldiers in still-disputed
circumstances around the Israel-Lebanon border on July 12, minimal
consistency with his treatment of the Serbs should cause him to regard
these as "provocations" that induced an Israeli "overreaction," and he
should condemn this overreaction, which in Gaza and Lebanon has been far
more deadly and murderous than the Serbs' alleged overreaction at Racak. He
might explain this overreaction and this willingness to kill large numbers
of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians on the "simple" ground that "only in
Israel is racial contempt an official ideology." Of course he does not do
this, although the case that can be made for racial contempt as an official
ideology in Israel is vastly greater than the evidence for Serbian racism.[9]
For Ignatieff, Israel's legitimate "security needs" justify the Lebanon
response (and he evades discussing the reinvasion and attack on civilians
and humanitarian crisis in Gaza). Didn't Yugoslavia's legitimate security
needs justify Racak and other actions of the Serbs, with NATO threatening
an attack--that soon materialized--and working in coordination with the
KLA? There is of course no hint at this in Ignatieff--his frame of
reference is always that of his side (NATO), and the enemy is always wrong
and has no right of self defense.
Ignatieff was enraged at the Serb expulsions in Kosovo during the bombing
war, claiming that "Milosevic decided to solve an `internal problem' by
exporting an entire nation to his impoverished neighbors," and he also
described it as a "most meticulous deportation of a civilian population"
and "a final solution of the Kosovo problem."[10] One would hardly realize
from these effusions that Yugoslavia was under military attack by NATO,
forced to defend itself in a situation where the KLA and NATO were working
in close coordination; that proportionately more [ethnic] Serbs fled the
bombing war in Kosovo than [ethnic] Albanians; that there was nothing
"meticulous" about the flight, induced by the KLA and bombing as well as
Serb actions, and that there is no reason whatever to think that Milosevic
viewed this as a "final solution," another dishonest piece of rhetoric that
conflates Nazi industrial murder with a war-induced flight of civilians.
Again, the contrast with Ignatieff's treatment of the forced exit of a
million Lebanese by the Israelis is dramatic. Here Israel is justified in
"sending a message" to Hezbollah reflecting Israel's right to defend
itself. Yugoslavia had no right to send a message to the KLA and NATO
powers in the process of defending itself, although NATO's war threatened
its survival, whereas Israel had only suffered minor losses in a border
skirmish with a force that did not threaten its existence. Ignatieff has
not even expressed sympathy with the million Lebanese displaced to "send a
message" to Hezbollah; and he will clearly not speak of this as a
"meticulous" ethnic cleansing and "final solution" via an "export" of
Lebanese civilians. Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross (among others)
have repeatedly declared the Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian
infrastructure to be war crimes,[11] but Ignatieff has not said a word about
anything wrong with Israel's attacks on civilians or the use of illegal and
anti-civilian weaponry like cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and he has
never hinted that these frequent and ruthless attacks on Arab civilians
could be because of Israel's racist ideology, although the evidence for
such attitudes in Israel is massive (which it is not in Belgrade).
In short, we are dealing here with gross political bias and gross
apologetics for aggression, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. Add to this
the fact that Ignatieff has swallowed Bush's claim to be striving to "bring
freedom everywhere," an ideological premise that allows him to rationalize
anything the Bush administration does externally because it is in a noble
cause--based solely on the fact that Bush says that that is his aim (see
his "Who Are Americans To Think That Freedom Is Theirs To Spread?," New
York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005; and my analysis of this apologetics
landmark: Herman, "Michael Ignatieff's Pseudo-Hegelian Apologetics for
Imperialism," October, 2005).
Facts no longer matter for Ignatieff; they are trumped by proclaimed aims
and values, but only for the side he favors and that produce benefits--to
Ignatieff and some of the elites that underwrite his work. Clearly this is
a man worthy of a human rights chair at Harvard, a special place in the
Paper of Record, and a bright political future in our close and reliable
ally Canada.
Endnotes:
1. For a general account, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Morality's
Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders," in David Chandler, Ed.,
Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 196-216 (as posted to ZNet, August 30,
2005). The New Humanitarians have been members of a network of like-minded
people, often friends, who have worked in coordination with government
officials and government-linked thinktanks, bonding and hobnobbing among
themselves in Sarajevo or at international conferences and being fed
information by U.S. and, in the 1990s, Bosnian Muslim officials. Sometimes,
they worked together in establishment operations such as the Independent
International Commission on Kosovo (Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone,
Michael Ignatieff, Mary Kaldor, Martha Minow), the International Crisis
Group (William Shawcross), the American Academy in Berlin (Paul Hockenos),
George Soros' Open Society Institute (Aryeh Neier), and offshoots of these
and similar institutions. The first three groups have been heavily funded
by NATO governments, and have had on their boards numerous NATO government
officials, past and present.
In a nice illustration of what C. Wright Mills might have called the
"social composition of the higher circles" of New Humanitarianism, Timothy
Garton Ash wrote back in 1999: "When I arrive in the late evening...[at
Hotel Tuzla,]...I step into the lift, press the button for the second
floor, and at once subside, powerless, into the cellar. The reception
committee in the bar consists of Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and
David Rieff. When I join them, Sontag is just saying to Michael Ignatieff,
'I can't believe that this is your first time here." And he adds that on
the very next day, after arriving at an event hosted by the Bosnian Muslim
leadership of Tuzla, Mary Kaldor welcomed the group, and the British
actress Julie Christie read a poem in homage to Sarajevo, "glowing
white...as a translucent china cup." Ash, History of the Present: Essays,
Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (New York: Random House,
1999), p.147.
2. The quoted words were used by David Rieff to describe and laud his ally
Ignatieff's connections with the West's political and military leadership,
in "Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond," Los Angeles Times, Sept. 3, 2000.
3. Back at the time of the controversy that followed the May 1981 shooting
of Pope Paul II by a Turkish fascist, the mainstream U.S. media relied
heavily on the expert Paul Henze, rarely pointing out--and never suggesting
any problem based on--lhis 30-year employment as a CIA propaganda
specialist and his having been head of the CIA station in Turkey.
4. For a compelling analysis, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away
With Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), pp. 132-46.
5. Ibid., pp. 188-191.
6. "Statement to the Press by Carla del Ponte" (FH/P.I.S./550-e), Carla del
Ponte, ICTY, December 20, 2000, par. 16; "Kosovo: ICRC deplores slow
progress of working group on missing persons," ICRC News, March 9, 2006.
7. Michael Ignatieff, "Only in truth can Serbia find peace: There is racism
everywhere in Europe, but only in Serbia is racial contempt an official
ideology," Calgary Herald, June 26, 1999.
8. On questions about Racak, see Mandel, pp. 72-80, 170-73; see also the
devastating testimonies of Judge Danica Marenkovic, forensic expert
Professor Slavisa Dobricain, Col. Bogoljub Janicevic, and Col. Milan Kotur,
during the Milosevic defense period, March 23-24, April 8, 13, and 26, and
January 27, 2006. None of this testimony was reported on in the New York
Times.
9. Under the subheading "Root Causes," Israeli analyst Reuven Kaminer says
"It is impossible to oppress an entire people for 40 years and not to
succumb to the ultimate rationalization for such action. Anti-Arab racism
is endemic to Israeli society. This racism is so pervasive that it covers
the political landscape like a cloud and infects all the thinking and the
attitudes of the overwhelming majority of Israelis." ("Who Won and Who Lost
and Why," Portside, August 17, 2006). See also Edward S. Herman, "Ethnic
Cleansing: Constructive, Benign, and Nefarious," ZNet, August 9, 2006.
10. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 86-87, 78-79, 84.
11. See, e.g., Peter Bouckaert and Nadim Houry, Fatal Strikes: Israel's
Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon (Human Rights Watch,
August 3, 2006; and Peter Bouckaert, "For Israel, innocent civilians are
fair game," International Herald Tribune, August 4, 2006.
[Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School,
University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics,
political economy and the media. Among his books are The Real Terror
Network, Triumph of the Market, and Manufacturing Consent (with Noam
Chomsky).]
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