Michael Berube Is Shrill

No, he is not shrill because of the Bush administration--not right now. He is shrill because Noam Chomsky says that those primarily responsible for the Srebenica Massacre are... the Dutch government:

Michael Berube: My friend Danny Postel, senior editor of OpenDemocracy, calls my attention to this recent interview with Noam Chomsky in the New Statesman. Specifically, to this passage:

"Remember, the Milosevic Tribunal began with Kosovo, right in the middle of the US-British bombing in late '99 . . . Now if you take a look at that indictment, with a single exception, every charge was for crimes after the bombing.

"There's a reason for that. The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.

"So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans, but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible--their troops were there--and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick."

OK, this kind of thing really has to stop. Now.

For three reasons: one, because it is a pack of lies, and as a wise man once said, the job of the intellectual is to tell the truth and expose lies.

Two, because the defend-Milosevic crew has been getting more and more outlandish and bizarre every year, and, like unto loony LaRouchies, they have sometimes been discovered messing with legitimate progressive organizations. If real progressives don't speak out on this, it won't be long before we'll be hearing that poor Slobodan cried bitter tears of sorrow when he heard about the massacre of Srbrenica, even though it never really happened in the first place. And, insult upon injury, we'll be hearing about this from so-called "leftists."...