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I count myself a liberal, and favour freedom of choice on social issues from abortion to fox hunting. But I support a total ban on smoking in enclosed public places. I try to separate the issues of principle from my dislike of being near cigarette smoke, and the crucial issue seems to me the rights of employees in restaurants, pubs and clubs. I wrote this comment about it a few months ago.
I’m sorry to return to a subject that I’ve already dealt with and that might appear a little parochial. It does raise an important issue beyond the personality involved or his politics, however. With this post, I want to place a marker of that importance with a few additional observations, and then leave the matter.
It would be fair to say that Neil Clark is a writer known more for the distinctiveness of his standpoint than of his prose. He is an occasional contributor to quite a wide spread of publications (wider than I have written for, at least), usually to insist that Slobodan Milosevic is a wronged party - a ‘prisoner of conscience’, in fact. It is, on the face of it, remarkable to find a convinced, as opposed to deliberately perverse, advocate of the proposition that Milosevic is on trial at the Hague for what he believes rather than what he has done. I know, at second hand, a little of the dilemmas of editors of the opinion pages in seeking to generate readers’ interest, and can understand why Mr Clark’s contributions would appeal in some circumstances.
Mr Clark has on several occasions advanced his opinions on foreign policy, and the Balkans in particular, by asserting a wartime link between the late Bosnian President Alia Izetbegovic (who would then have been in his teens) and the SS. I have cited three instances of that claim: in The Guardian, The New Statesman and, most recent, The Daily Telegraph (the last, as it happens, in a review of my book).
As I explained yesterday, a historian of the Balkans, Marko Attila Hoare, was unable to locate the source for that claim in primary material or the scholarly literature. I have found Clark’s source, however, in a different place altogether: the output of an obscure US organisation, called the International Strategic Studies Association, that in 2003 accused the UN principal deputy high representative in Bosnia Herzegovina of “forc[ing] Bosnian Serb elected officials to sign a fraudulent document accepting the official version of events in Srebrenica”.
I submitted that Clark had claimed “the Institute of Strategic Studies Organisation” as his source – in which case, as the International Institute for Strategic Studies is an authoritative organisation in security policy, his readers or listeners would have been impressed. The IISS, however, has not made such a claim, or at least not to my knowledge or Clark's. I suspect Clark was just unfamiliar with the territory, with the gulf between an organisation such as the IISS and the ones whose publications he follows, and with the significance of his confusion.
My friends at Harry’s Place and others have since asked Clark directly whether my identification of his claimed and actual sources is correct. As I understand it, he prefers not to answer. That is his prerogative, but I know the answer, and Clark knows that I know. Nothing is more important in recent historical disputes over the Bosnian war than doing justice and honour to its victims. But the provenance of Clark’s assertions as published in leading British newspapers, and what he has claimed about that provenance, are not trivial matters.
The BBC reports:
Liberal Democrat leadership hopeful Simon Hughes has said the race is "wide open" after a poll of party supporters indicated he has taken a healthy lead. Bookies had almost ruled out the party president's chances after admissions he misled voters about his sexuality. Economics spokesman Chris Huhne became favourite to pip veteran acting leader Sir Menzies Campbell to the post. But a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times newspaper puts Mr Hughes on 34%, Sir Menzies on 21% and Mr Huhne on 13%.
I don't have an insight into the thinking among Liberal Democrat supporters or party members, or the likely outcome of the leadership election. But I certainly hope Simon Hughes wins.
It is dispiriting and even demeaning to write a post like this, and I’ve put it off for some time.
I know from friends and relatives who are to some degree in the public eye that, particularly with the universal use of email, attracting cranks can be a serious problem. I am not in the public eye and am merely a blogger, so had no expectation that something like this would happen to me, or at least not beyond the usual batch of angry letter-writers. Since I engaged in a public controversy with Noam Chomsky, however, this does seem to have happened. Over the last few months I have been inundated with spoof messages – not threatening, just bizarre – from a US reader going under what is plainly an assumed name. I won’t give him the satisfaction of naming him (or rather, stating his assumed name), but I fear I cannot now avoid giving him the satisfaction of disclosing, through this post, that his efforts have had some disruptive effect.
Crank messages don't trouble me, as they can be ignored, deleted and treated as spam. It has come to my attention, however, that my correspondent, tiring of never receiving a reply from me, has been writing to public figures and academics, including Professor Chomsky, claiming to be my friend, confidant and representative. In at least one case, he has sent an email claiming to be me (unfortunately for him, he was writing to Andrew Sullivan, who knows me well enough to have realised the scam immediately and to have sent him a spirited letter back).
Whether my stalker believes he is doing Professor Chomsky – who is obviously entirely blameless, and a victim, in this – a favour is not clear. In the case of some of the academics, I’ve written a short note apologising for the waste of their time and explaining that the vexatious correspondent is nothing to do with me. Though I always say no reply is necessary, some have graciously responded with reassurance that the man is so obviously a lunatic that it was obvious our connection was highly dubious at best. But understandably not everyone will do more than glance at the opening sentences of an absurd email, and over the weekend it became clear that one well known public intellectual had taken my stalker’s message at face value. I am embarrassed by this, and amazed that anyone would think it worth sowing such confusion.
Unfortunately there’s not a lot I can do about it, except put up this warning on my blog, aware that I am giving my stalker the attention he craves and apprehensive that it might encourage him or others. If you come across anyone claiming to be acting on my behalf, particularly but not only in the matter of my exchange with Professor Chomsky, please don’t believe him. I have many friends, but none of them would write to complete strangers to proclaim this. And, outside strictly professional matters, I certainly have no representatives.
There can be, and I hope are, few readers with nothing better to do next Tuesday evening than listen to me. But if you're at that loose an end, you could turn to BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves programme at 9.30pm, where I shall be among the guests debating two new films, Good Night, And Good Luck and Syriana. The first film, directed by George Clooney, "details the real-life confrontations between legendary television journalist Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy" (Murrow by the way is not legendary: he really did exist, and I've seen the tapes); the second, directed by Stephen Gaghan, is "a political thriller that unfolds against the intrigue of the global oil industry".
Both come from the stable of Participant Productions, which declares:
Participant believes in the power of media to create great social change. Our goal is to deliver compelling entertainment that will inspire audiences to get involved in the issues that affect us all.
I reserve till then my judgement of this compelling entertainment, and the extent to which it will inspire me to get involved in the issues that affect us all.
UPDATE: The broadcast will also be available for download from the programme's web site for up to a week after the programme.
UPDATE II: I am informed by email that Nightwaves is available only for streamed listening, and is not "downloadable" in the normal sense. My thanks for the correction.
This is not an enthralling post, but, while we're on the subject of non-credible sources on the Balkan wars, it seems the proper time to conclude an issue that I've been looking into for a little while. I state it as factually and dispassionately as I can in the hope that it will be a useful point of future reference for assessing a particular claim.
Irrelevantly, the claim appears in a Telegraph review of Douglas Murray's book Neoconservatism and my Anti-Totalitarianism. The reviewer is Neil Clark, an occasional contributor to The Spectator and one or two other UK publications. (Clark also writes regularly to me and, I understand, a few other columnists of similar views on foreign policy, usually in the form of a challenge to say or do something; I regret that I am not assiduous in replying.) He writes:
Similarly, while lambasting the "amoral quietism" of the Major government in its non-intervention policy in Bosnia, Kamm fails to remind readers that the Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic - whose separatist cause neo-conservatives enthusiastically championed - not only wrote that "the most important lesson from the Koran is the impossibility of any connection between Islamic and non-Islamic systems", but also recruited for an SS division in the Second World War.
It's true that this claim about Izetbegovic was known to me when I wrote my book, as I've come across it several times before. The oddity is that in each case the author has been the same: Neil Clark. There are sightings, for example, in articles for The New Statesman - "Izetbegovic, a man who had not only served in an SS-sponsored organisation in the Second World War but actually recruited for it" - and The Guardian - "... even if you served in an SS unit (like the neoconservatives' favourite Islamist, the late Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic)... ". Being of inquisitive cast of mind, I finally asked the Cambridge historian Marko Attila Hoare if he knew the source of Clark's claim. Marko sent me a full answer, which I have abbreviated (and any consequent errors in it are mine).
Marko could find no direct source. The closest he could get to it was a claim that the Serbian historian Milan Bulajic - a genuine if not entirely objective authority on the Croatian Ustashe - wrote to the journalist David Binder, claiming he had found a transcript of Izetbegovic's 1946 trial, in which the prosecution alleged that Izetbegovic had recruited for the SS during WW2, and Izetbegovic made no attempt to deny it, but merely excused himself on the grounds of his extreme youth.
Marko is careful not to rule out the possibility that this is true, and Bulajic is a credible source, but as things stand, this is merely third-hand hearsay. Marko has not seen Bulajic's letter, or the transcript of Izetbegovic's trial, and it is doubtful that Neil Clark has either. Consider also:
1. Contrary to the pro-Serb nationalist claims, Izetbegovic was tried under the Communist regime not for his wartime activities, but for his post-war agitation against the Communists: he was thus not a war criminal in Yugoslav Communist eyes, and he spent only three years in prison before being released.
2. The 'Young Muslim' group to which Izetbegovic belonged, was not considered by the Communists to be a pro-fascist or quisling group equivalent to the Serb Chetniks or Croat Ustashe, and initially it enjoyed a certain freedom of activity for the first several months of the Communist Yugoslav regime. Many members of the Young Muslims joined the Partisans and fought against the Nazis, Chetniks and Ustashas; some even joined the Communist party. It was only because of their resistance to the Communist dictatorship that they were eventually crushed. Izetbegovic himself was first arrested in September 1945 for his oppositional activities, but released the next day. The Communists did not move against the Young Muslims until 1946; this was linked to Young Muslim political resistance, which itself was provoked by the increasing unwillingness of the regime to accommodate the religious and dietary needs of Muslim students and soldiers.
3. Izetbegovic was only 19 years old when WW2 ended.
Marko did a splendid job in furnishing me with this historical background, but I eventually realised why he had failed to turn up Clark's source. An academic historian combing through a range of primary and scholarly secondary material is unlikely to alight on the type of source that the author of a piece proclaiming Slobodan Milosevic a 'prisoner of conscience' would rely on. But I, on the other hand, have found it.
It transpires that the source is an organisation that Clark names as "the Institute of Strategic Studies Organisation". I wouldn't blame anyone for treating the London-based think-tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies as an authoritative source, as it is widely regarded as the premier NGO in the field of security policy. Unfortunately, Clark gave no publication details or web link, so I had to search for the relevant publication myself in the Institute's output. And I turned up nothing at all. Eventually I realised I must be looking in the wrong place. By the "Institute of Strategic Studies" Clark had meant not the IISS but an organisation with a different name from the one he gave, namely a little-known US group called the International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA). The ISSA's output is not the same type of thing as is published by the impartial and scholarly IISS, and I can only assume that Clark is either unfamiliar with the difference or doesn't realise that it matters. Here, for example, is advice from an ISSA publication on where those responsible for homeland security should be focusing attention:
Significantly, Bosnia-Herzegovina has in place in its UN Embassy in New York a committed Islamist, already tied to major war crimes. Just as it did in the run-up to the September 11, 2001, attacks. The US did not even investigate the links following September 11; the Bosniak leadership is counting on the fact that the US will not now look into the Bosnian link.
There is a widespread non-technical name for this general class of theory about political agency, and I shall not trouble to give it. And it is this organisation that Clark relies on for his assertions about Izetbegovic's historical affiliations. The exact document that Clark invokes is here. Clark also cites one other source for the claim, whom he calls David Pinder. I'm assuming that, again, Clark is merely not strong on names and is referring to the journalist David Binder, who is cited above and whose judgement on the qualities of General Ratko Mladic I quote in the post immediately below this one.
I have in this post endeavoured to make no value judgement on the sources I have located, or on the manner of Clark's appeal to them, but merely stated what they are. The next time Clark makes this claim without attribution in The Guardian , The New Statesman or somewhere else, you may wish to recall its provenance.
Last month I quoted approvingly a letter to The Guardian by the Labour MP Siôn Simon, who shared my views of General Sir Michael Rose. In response I received a message from a reader, Branka Josilo-Perry, who had written fruitlessly to The Guardian protesting at Simon's letter. I said that as the newspaper hadn't printed Josilo-Perry's letter, then I would publish it on this site along with her criticism of me. So here it is:
Please forward my comment to Sion Simon.Sir, It is a sign of our times when you take the word of a journalist over the word of the UN commander on the ground in Bosnia. It is very worrying that you feel comfortable with repeating what the journalists, who were by and large within the vicinity of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, during the duration of the civil war in Bosnia and Hercegovina, have presented as the truth. There is more than enough evidence to show that Michael Rose was and is right in both instances. It would be helpful if you researched before presenting unvalidated opinions. If the press and media were even-handed the truth would have come out long ago. I would be happy to discuss the evidence with you. Sincerely, Branka Josilo-Perry
Josilo-Perry prefaced this letter with explanatory comments addressed to me:
This was my letter to the Guardian and Sion Simon. Needless you say, unsurprisingly, neither was my letter printed in the Guardian nor was there any response from Mr. Simon. If you make these claims you must have evidence to support it. You find it very easy to call people dictators, accuse them of crimes without anything more than journalistic evidence, at best hearsay, which would not stand up anywhere else except the Kangaroo Court, in the Hague. If you have any concrete evidence please come out with it. It is a fact that Martin Bell was wounded on the balcony of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. Read Peter Brock it will be enlightening, if you let it.
In answer to the question that will be forming in the minds of many readers, I've published this letter because I receive a bafflingly large volume of similar stuff, and I consider this example illuminates the whole. I've assured Josilo-Perry that there is no need for us to "discuss the evidence", as the conviction that Milosevic's indictment is based on mere journalistic hearsay is self-explanatory. I also have read Peter Brock, a name that will be unfamiliar to almost everyone and deserves to remain that way. I wrote about Brock last month, as his new book had been reviewed by Ed Herman, Chomsky's sometime co-author. I noted that Brock's earlier contributions to the analysis of Balkan war reporting had been a professional and intellectual disgrace. As it happens, Brock wrote to me about my post, copying the letter to Herman; he said darkly that he "knew my type". The rest of Brock's comments, rather oddly, comprised imprecations against his nemesis, New Republic writer Charles Lane (whom I had cited in my post).
I'm delighted to recommend to Josilo-Perry and to others of more sanitary opinions Charles Lane's demolition of Brock from a dozen years ago. For me, the whole issue of journalism in war is summed up in one brief paragraph:
This concept of even-handedness is of questionable value in dealing with the starkest moral drama in Europe since 1945. On June 8 Foreign Policy sponsored a debate between [NYT journalist David] Binder and Brock on one side and Edward Vulliamy of London's Observer and me on the other. The most chilling moment came when Binder praised The New York Times's use fifty years ago of a Nazi news dispatch about D-Day. This, he contended, was a model of balanced reporting. Where is the Serbian agency Tanjug quoted today? he demanded.
Where indeed? Binder is in fact a master of unintentionally revealing comments, as he demonstrated in a letter to the New York Review of Books a year later in an exchange with the writer Robert Block:
Allow me to say also that, having spent much more time around Mladic and his colleagues than Mr. Block, I strongly wish to disassociate myself from his assessment of the general as a crazed killer. Until compelling evidence to the contrary surfaces, I will continue to view Mladic as a superb professional, an opinion voiced by senior American, British, French and Canadian military officers who have met him or followed his career and who are better qualified to judge him than either Block or I.
This was six months after the massacre at Srebrenica, for which General Ratko Mladic is under indictment for genocide.
Against this background, the least tawdry of Josilo-Perry's assertions is the "fact" - culled from who knows what piece of pro-Milosevic propaganda - that BBC reporter Martin Bell was wounded while on the balcony of the Holiday Inn at Sarajevo. This all happened a long time ago, but a few readers may recall the television footage of this incident, which clearly took place on open ground. My suspicion that Josilo-Perry is as much a native of Serbia as I am an international pole-vaulter is aroused by the information that the Holiday Inn at Sarajevo has no balconies.
Enough of this. Whenever I receive this type of correspondence, I feel like taking a cold shower.
UPDATE: I had an idea this would happen. My correspondent's indefatigible pro-Milosevic support group has within just a few hours sleuthed out the fact that the sinister Martin Bell dictates what I write on this subject, and has spammed me and its supporters with an article (which I won't link to, but you can find it) entitled 'The Racak “massacre” hoax'.
I would advise them not to make it worse for themselves, but I fear the advice would be wasted.
(My apologies to Josilo-Perry for the inexcusable discourtesy of having twice indvertently transposed her sex in the original version of this post.)
Noam Chomsky's latest thoughts on US foreign policy have been posted on his weblog. They deal with the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, and they are beyond bizarre. Go see. Chomsky begins (ellipsis and square brackets in original):
...[T]he invasion was not undertaken to overthrow the Taliban. That was an afterthought, added after three weeks of bombing. The second, and far more important reason [for the invasion], is that the invasion was undertaken with the recognition that it might drive literally millions of people to starvation and death, which makes it a major war crime.
He goes on to assert inelegantly:
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, evaluation of choices has to at least compare invasion with permitting internal popular overthrow of a hated regime.
The last time - literally the last time - "internal popular overthrow" of Saddam Hussein's regime was attempted was in the wake of the first Gulf War. For various reasons that seemed plausible at the time, yet proved horrifying misguided - notably the belief that Saddam's regime would prove as fragile as the East European Communist regimes that had lately been swept away, and the determination to adhere to the letter of UN Security Council resolutions that had authorised Saddam's expulsion from Kuwait but not his overthrow - the US did not intervene to assist revolt against Saddam. The outcome was the slaughter by Saddam's regime of an estimated 20,000 Kurds in the North and between 30,000 and 60,000 Shi'ah in the South. The notion that we should have eschewed military intervention in Iraq and trusted to, let alone explicitly urged once more, an internal uprising is one of the most irresponsible suggestions I've yet heard in the entire debate over Iraq.
But consider the first passage quoted above, and an apt comment by one of Chomsky's readers (the second published comment below the post):
Chomsky writes: "The second, and far more important reason [for the invasion], is that the invasion was undertaken with the recognition that it might drive literally millions of people to starvation and death, which makes it a major war crime."This sentence is either incoherent (on one interpretation) or else an outrageous lie. The ambiguity turns on what Chomsky means by "reason". If Chomsky means "motive" or "purpose", then he is alleging that the very motivation and purpose of the invasion was not to overthrow the Taliban or disrupt Al-Qa'ida (i.e. it was not Colin Powell's stated objective "to rip up" the al-Qa'ida terror network of training camps, lethal laboratories, etc.) but rather to "drive literally millions of people to starvation and death". That would be consistent with Chomsky's claims elsewhere that successive U.S. administrations have a morality no better than that of the Nazis, so maybe he really thinks genocide was the intended PURPOSE of the invasion.
On Friday evening I posted a link to Chomsky's comments and also to these critical remarks. Of course, Chomsky's critic is right, and saved me the trouble of going into a long argument on the subject. I also noted that Chomsky's post appeared to be a transcription of oral comments, given the interpolations. But on reading Chomsky's post again a short while later, I wondered whether those bracketed comments might have altered the sense of Chomsky's remarks. I'm unable to tell from this post alone, but with that uncertainty, I took down my comment temporarily pending further information. Chomsky has published no clarification or amendment of his remarks, though, so we must assume - as he has complete editorial control of his own weblog - that he's happy with them as they stand. I am thus posting this comment to alert my readers again to his remarkable argument, though with the caveat that Chomsky may possibly - and prudently - come round to saying that his argument has been distorted by his own editor. In that case, I would take his word for it. There is quite enough material from Chomsky that is unambiguous and on the record - most particularly his use of source material - to discredit him as it is.
UPDATE: There is still no correction to the Chomsky blog post, and I'm fairly sure there should be one, so I have written to ZNet magazine to point out that it appears to have maligned the famous dissident through an errant interpolation. I shall let you know of any response. Chomsky does have a history of making some rather startling assertions about US foreign policy, of which the 'silent genocide' accusation about policy in Afghanistan is one well-known example. But in this case I have concluded that he cannot have meant what his editors have attributed to him, and I have done him an injustice by being slow to realise this.
UPDATE II: Another commenter on Chomsky's blog has confimed that the interpolation is false, quoting the original reply that Chomsky gave in a ZNet forum, and suggesting: "In light of the understandable confusion this has generated, it would probably be a good idea to amend the original post to clarify this." That would explain it. ZNet is certainly at fault in its rendering of Chomsky's reply, as am I in having initially taken that rendering seriously.
Charles Krauthammer writes in today's Washington Post:
As much of the Islamic world erupts in a studied frenzy over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, there are voices of reason being heard on both sides. Some Islamic leaders and organizations, while endorsing the demonstrators' sense of grievance and sharing their outrage, speak out against using violence as a vehicle of expression. Their Western counterparts -- intellectuals, including most of the major newspapers in the United States -- are similarly balanced: While, of course, endorsing the principle of free expression, they criticize the Danish newspaper for abusing that right by publishing offensive cartoons, and they declare themselves opposed, in the name of religious sensitivity, to doing the same.God save us from the voices of reason.
I cannot here avoid the idle formulation of a score of million bloggers: read the whole thing.
Krauthammer's superb op-ed says everything that needs to be said about the cartoons and the response to them. The issue is no longer one of "sensitivity", as it might have been when the cartoons were first published, but of solidarity with those whose right to speak, draw and write is threatened by mob violence and murderous bigotry. I recalled in an earlier post that in the Salman Rushdie affair 17 years ago, continental European media and politicians had shown greater resolution than their counterparts in the UK and the US. The same is true now. Immense credit goes to the European newspapers that have republished the cartoons, in solidarity with the threatened Danes.
This article appears in The Times tomorrow.
EVEN TO an atheist, there is much to be said for antidisestablishmentarianism. The Church of England may be a constitutional oddity in a democratic age, but Primates such as William Temple and Michael Ramsey have contributed much wisdom to the nation’s political affairs.
Part of that wisdom has lain in heeding the observation of one of the best recent Anglican ethicists, the late Canon Ronald Preston: “It is impossible to conceive of any particular moral or Christian responsibility in politics . . . without involving ourselves in technical problems which are rarely simple and clear.”
All changed this week. Surveying a conflict that is neither simple nor clear, and that has defied diplomatic resolution for decades, the General Synod voted to sell the Church’s investments in companies whose products are used by Israel in the occupied territories. This policy will contribute nothing to a peace settlement, and have no impact on the companies’ share prices. Its sole lasting significance may lie in the lack of seriousness with which the Church’s pronouncements are received in future.
The model for the divestment campaign is the financial pressure exerted on apartheid South Africa. It is a pernicious precedent, for it implies a parallel between constitutionally mandated racial discrimination and a conflict of nationalisms. Both sets of national claims in the Holy Land are legitimate; both must coexist in any lasting territorial settlement.
The tragedy is that those competing claims might already have been accommodated, at Camp David in 2000, when the offer of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital was rejected by Yassir Arafat in favour of a renewed campaign of violence.
Fifty years ago the great Protestant social thinker Reinhold Niebuhr acknowledged that a biblical right to the territory of Palestine had “evaporated some thousands of years ago”, but argued for a historically grounded Christian obligation to the Jewish state.
The modern Church of England believes by contrast in penalising a state that faces enduring anti-Semitic campaigns of delegitimation, and whose civilians till recently contended with continual suicide bombings. The Church’s witness to our nation is not dead, but you might be better off seeking moral guidance from the next person you pass in the street.
