I was struck recently by a comment Oliver Kamm, a columnist
for the London Times, made about the Srebrenica massacre on his blog. He said that
there is “no legitimate debate about the nature of that abominable crime.”
Perhaps we should not read too much into this comment. But
if taken literally it would seem to deem “illegitimate” the debate that must
have taken place during former Yugoslav Army chief Momcilo Perisic’s appeal
process against his conviction for war crimes, a process that led to him last
week being acquitted of all charges, including that of aiding and abetting war
crimes in Srebrenica. Surely the exact truth about the Srebrenica massacre can only be determined by debating aspects of that crime, such as the extent and nature of Belgrade's involvement in it.
Anyway, Mr Kamm’s blog post also referred to a piece he
wrote last year for the Jewish Chronicle newspaper that discussed the Srebrenica
massacre and a famous libel trial concerning the camps run by the
Bosnian Serbs in 1992. An article in the magazine LM in 1997 accused two
British reporters of misrepresenting conditions at the Trnopolje camp. The
journalists successfully sued LM in 2000 for a large sum of money and the magazine soon
went out of business.
As Mr Kamm relates: “while LM went out of business under the
costs of its calumnious lies, several of its staff have since attained media
prominence. Mick Hume, its editor, was for some years a Times columnist.”
It is not clear whether he thinks it is a bad thing that LM’s
staff did not have their careers ended by the libel case, but the same cannot
be said of the following comment by Nick Cohen, a journalist writing in
Standpoint magazine about Ed Vulliamy’s book The War is Dead: Long Live the War:
“Claire Fox of the RCP [the Revolutionary Communist Party,
the group behind LM] has gone on to become a panellist on BBC Radio 4's Moral
Maze. The BBC lets her get away with this: nobody questions the morality of
whitewashing the worst crimes Europe has seen since Stalin.”
Celebrating LM’s loss of this libel case and subsequent
demise is one thing, but to suggest that anyone who worked for the magazine
should be shunned from any kind of media prominence is quite another. This does not seem to me the attitude of a person willing to give views different to his own a fair hearing.
5 comments:
Here's a fun fact:
In 2005 Kamm, David Aaronovitch and Francis Wheen (with the support of Nick Cohen) filed a complaint to the Guardian over its apology to Chomsky over the misrepresenting of his views on the Srebrenica Massacre. Barely two months after their complaint was rejected in 2006, David Aaronovitch approvingly cited Gen. Lewis Mackenzie as a source in a pro-Israel piece on the Israel-Lebanon war. Mackenzie was condemned by Kamm as a genocide denier following the dismissal of his complaint. Since they make a lot out of people's associations, Aaronovitch and by association Kamm, are damned by Aaronovitch's own pen for the very thing they had accused Chomsky of!
As a side note, Cohen and Aaronovitch are fond of minimising body counts in relation to Iraq, while Kamm is also a an enthusiast for the bombings Dresden and Japan in WWII, so clearly he has no trouble in killing huge amounts of civilians for political gain. Just remember that when they are moral grandstanding.
Rory said: "Celebrating LM’s loss of this libel case and subsequent demise is one thing, but to suggest that anyone who worked for the magazine should be shunned from any kind of media prominence is quite another. This does not seem to me the attitude of a person willing to give views different to his own a fair hearing."
Question for Rory:
Are you saying that we should not lump all fascists who served in the Nazi army during World War II into the same basket?
Ah yes, the LM libel case. That's the one where court found there was no proof the ITN reporters intended to misrepresent the facts, or to draw analogies to concentration camps. So the ruling the ITN crew had not been intentionally deceitful (which it obviously was), has since been, over and over again, (intentionally) misrepresented as if the court had ruled no deception (intentional or accidental) had taken place (which the court actually had never said, and anyway wouldn't be competent to) and that the ITN's report had therefore been truthful, as well as made in good faith (which it also wasn't).
Mick Hume on the case:
"There was the moment when ITN reporter Ian Williams, asked about the accuracy of a 1992 newspaper article he had written about Trnopolje camp, came up with the Clintonesque reply that 'I was not knowingly not telling the truth'."
Interestingly, in this post - or anywhere in his blog -, Rory Gallivan does not use the term Genocide in connection with Srebrenica. He appears to be siding with deniers by pushing that their views to be heard.
But before we label him as denier, let him respond. Perhaps he doesn't think that 8,000 Jewish men and boys who were gunned down in the fall of 1942 were victims of Genocide? Perhaps Rory does not think that 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were victims of Genocide?
Or perhaps I misunderstood his comments?
Just to be clear regarding the libel case. The court found deception had occurred but the defense needed to prove it was INTENTIONAL. British libel law, for historical reasons, sets the bar higher on libel cases.
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