CALL IRAQ BOSNIA AND WE'RE OKAY ACCORDING TO PRESS

Apparently Usama Bin Laden doesn’t understand that when he delivers speeches to the U. S. he strengthens America’s resolve to defeat him. This translates into increased support for Republicans and even more specifically, President Bush. When Usama speaks, the nation doesn’t want to hear a simultaneous surrender chorus from Generals Pelosi and Reid. The Dems lose much appeal on these reminders that we are under siege.

We have been promised a speech by the esteemed leader of Al Qaeda to be delivered on September 11.

Who has forgotten what Usama calls “The invasion of Manhattan?” Apparently, too many. The “invasion of Manhattan” was a bigger invasion than that of Pearl Harbor when Americans were as serious as their leaders about defending her boarders.

Run Politicians, run! Scared to death of reminding Americans of the threats we live under, they run toward certain reelection rather than increased security for their constituents.

But why run scared now? In 1999 the British and American press enthusiastically embraced President Clinton’s invasion of Serbians, a people in an area that never once threatened the U.S. or any of her allies.

Yet when Clinton fabricated an ethnic cleansing of Muslim Albanians by Serbs, not the New York Times, nor the Mirror (UK) or any other major, liberal allied media outlets lifted a finger to investigate the whys or the seriousness of such an illegal and unprovoked action as bombing Serbia. To be sure, the Serbs were not totally innocent, but their actions were small potatoes compared to what was happening on the world stage in 1999.

Let’s review. In the Kosovo Province of Yugoslavia, Muslim Albanians complained of violence from the area known as Serbia. Clinton – needing a legacy – seized the opportunity to tag the disturbance as ethnic cleansing, comparing himself in his autobiography to the hypothetical leader who would listen to Winston Churchill and be the one who would have stopped Hitler before he had a chance to engage in his murderous genocide.

Did anyone in the mainstream media question the action? Actually, virtually everyone of any note in the leftstream media enthusiastically cheered Clinton for stepping in.

In fact, nearly every media account of what was going on in the Balkans omitted the fact that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was murdering Serbian civilians and Albanians with some regularity and brutality in an effort to do what Clinton said the Serbs were doing. The Clinton Administration called the KLA, as recently as 1997, a “terrorist organization.”

But in 1999, when Clinton was worried about a legacy (beyond Monica Lewinsky), these people were suddenly our friends. The KLA was trying to force the Serbs to agree to making Kosovo an independent State or annexing it to neighboring Albania. Terms the Serbs understandably could not accept.

Now Clinton wanted to bomb the Serbs in an effort to embrace the cause of the “terrorist” KLA. Even though the Serbs accepted very trying conditions put forth by NATO in order to keep the peace, the bar was raised to an unacceptable level, by everyone’s measure; so high that the administration admitted it was made artificially high in order to make the Serbs look noncompliant.

The Clinton administration regularly embraced fabricated casualty figures to advance its agenda and gain public acceptance. In one press release, 500,000 Kosovo Albanians had been killed by the Yugoslav army. This is a figure Clinton never bothered to object to in the interest of truth. He went along with several other exaggerated accounts in concert with the American and British liberal press. The real number turned out to be about 4,000 including those killed by NATO and KLA actions.

Another account called the Trepca mines “another Auschwitz” even though later inspections turned up not one body and no evidence of atrocities. Yet Clinton went along because it justified his “cause.” Another so called “atrocity” site was supposed to be found in the city of Ljubenic, where there were supposed to be 350 bodies buried. Seven were found.

Yet Clinton bombed. And he bombed the Serbs some more. He bombed the Serbs despite Congress's rejection of the act. When presented to Congress for a resolution, Congress rejected the idea and refused to authorize Clinton to bomb. Clinton bombed anyway for two more months.

(As I recall, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved an invasion of Iraq.)

Where was the outcry from the press in 1999?! Where was the outcry from the American people? I’ll tell you where the latter was; they were so mislead and misinformed as to what was really going on, the American public, by design of the American and British press, knew little if any of the facts. They were ignorant…blissfully as far as Clinton was concerned.

And Clinton continued to bomb. John Pilger reported in The Guardian that eighteen hospitals and clinics were destroyed. 200 Nurseries, schools, clinics and students’ dormitories were destroyed or damaged together with housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centers, museums, churches and fourteenth century monasteries.

The American media remained in lockstep with the Clinton administration. Historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr. called it “one of the worst cases of yellow journalism in recent memory, in which the Western press almost without exception portrayed the conflict as a simple matter of good against evil.”

Pope John Paul II described it as an “act of diabolical retribution.”

So what happened? After the bombing the KLA began a massive ethnic cleansing campaign of its own against all non-Albanians. More Serbs were killed than Albanians had before the conflict. Serbs were forced from their homes with more than 200,000 fleeing Kosovo. In Kosovo’s capital city of Pristina, 120 Serbs remain out of an original population of 40,000. That’s right, 120! And they live in desperate fear from the Albanian Muslims.

In addition to the Serbs, 100,000 Roma Gypsies were driven out of Kosovo during the KLA’s ethnic cleansing program.

So Clinton wanted to advance the “liberation” of people (the KLA) who engaged in massive ethnic cleaning, leaving in the wake an extremely strong and violent Muslim presence in the region. According to Woods, a UN official described the situation thus: “Kristallnacht is underway in Kosovo. What is happening in Kosovo must unfortunately be described as a program against Serbs.”

Since NATO took control of the province, the few Serbs still living there have watched thousands of their homes looted or destroyed and 150 Christian churches and monasteries destroyed, says Woods.

Mr. Woods goes on to say, “There is the real Clinton legacy in Kosovo.”

I’ll say it as I’ve said it before; other than for ignorance, where was the outrage then and why the outrage now? Why now, after over 3,000 innocent civilians were killed in the “invasion of Manhattan” do the accomplished Generals Pelosi and Reid earn any semblance of credence from the American citizenry? Ignorance, that’s why!

JD.