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Jewish World Review March 19, 2008 / 12 Adar II 5768 Republican Jewish Coalition must pull its endorsement of Chicago Congressional candidate By Julia Gorin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Unbeknown to the Republican Jewish Coalition, which stands against jihad, terrorism and bigotry, a Chicago candidate for Congress, a Jewish Republican for whom they are the second-largest contributor is enabling jihad terror and alienating a group that has stood on the front lines against it while being its most brutalized victims in the Balkans.
Using the "Barack Hussein Obama" template, a news release from Chicago District 8 candidate Steve Greenberg recently referred to his Democratic opponent, incumbent U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL), as "Melissa Luburich Bean," sneeringly stressing her Serbian maiden name. Comically, the release blasted Bean for not standing with the Bush/Clinton administration in supporting the illegal creation of the terrorism-won, threats-against-the-West-achieved, narco-mafia state of Kosovo. He also criticized Bean's backing by pro-Serbian organizations (as opposed to the standard backing by the al-Qaeda-trained Kosovo Liberation Army that backs the rest of Congress via groups like the National Albanian American Council, a top fundraiser to the campaign of future U.S. president John McCain).
Greenberg's Feb. 27th statement was titled "Melissa Bean places the interests of radical foreign nations above Freedom and Democracy," and read:
Bean's support for anti-American Serbian fundamentalists runs even deeper; she has taken over $24,000 from members of the Serbian Unity [Congress] which "strongly denounces Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence as well as America's subsequent recognition of it." Bean even sent a letter to President George W. Bush urging him to not recognize Kosovo as an independent nation.
Melissa Bean chose to side with oppression and anti-American fundamentalists, instead of freedom and independence…She must denounce the Serbian violence against Americans at our embassy. She must stand on the side of freedom and withdraw her sponsorship of controversial H. Res. 445 which does not support the American policy of recognition for Kosovo. Finally she should return all money sent to her by the Serbian Unity [Congress]."
By projecting words such as "radical", "foreign", "fundamentalist", "criminal" and "anti-American" onto the side he has no fear of because it has never threatened America, tough guy Greenberg is engaging in a 1999 replay of the way our leaders thumped their chests at a Christian straw man to appease the trigger-happy Albanian side in the conflict. It helps camouflage the American cowering that guides our Balkan policies, which we are imposing because our new Albanian masters are imposing it on us. He pretends to shudder at "Serbian fundamentalism" and thinks his constituents should as well, when in fact among Albanians, Bosnians, Croatians and Serbs, only Serbs have never perpetrated terrorism against Americans. If this is the future of the once hawkish Republican Party, then our future is the same as Serbia's present, and we can look forward to eventually saying good-bye to chunks of our own territory. Anyone who doesn't want to see Kosovo turn into "a weak state susceptible to radical Islamist influence from outside the region, with the support from some Albanians," as John Bolton summed it up, or "a way station toward an anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Christian 'Eurabia…if allowed to consolidate," as James Jatras explained, would support 445. In short, anyone who opposes this Munich Pact redux, a surrender in which America shines the way, would support 445.
Yet the illegal detachment by rule of might-makes-right (ala the Elian Gonzales seizure without due process) "seems to be something that Mr. Greenberg advocates so vociferously that he feels any and all dissent…should be silenced, or else labeled 'Serb fundamentalist'", writes Melana Pejakovich of Serbblog, Rush Limbaugh's go-to source during the Fort Dix news. "If that's the case," she continues, "then Mr. Greenberg will also need to shut up prominent Republican[s] like John Bolton and Lawrence Eagleburger, who also thought that recognizing 'Kosovo independence' was a terrible idea! But maybe Bolton & Eagleburger are closet 'anti-American Serb fundamentalists' too, Mr. Greenberg?"
Aptly enough, a popular Chicago political blog named Arch Pundit titled a recent post "Do Steve Greenberg's Loyalties [Lie] with Israel over the US?", which read, "That's the kind of bull—-t line you find all of the time about Jewish candidates at White Supremacist and Anti-Semitic sites...I think we'd all be appalled by such a line. And we get such a line from the Greenberg campaign…Disagreeing with Bean over policy on Serbia is fine and I'm frankly closer to Greenberg on this very narrow issue. However, trying to slur her ethnically is beyond the pale."
Along these lines, Pejakovich — a conservative American supporter of Israel — notes that Greenberg's second-largest campaign contributor is the Republican Jewish Coalition and writes, "How would Mr. Greenberg feel, if without evidence, I categoriz[ed] his benefactors, the RJC, as "a bunch of wild-eyed, right-wing Zionists, bent on sacrificing America to save Israel, and Mr. Greenberg as their willing accomplice, by taking money from them? Doesn't matter if it is or isn't true — that is precisely the kind of calumny that Mr. Greenberg slapped onto the Serb Unity Congress with no proof — just to create an enemy that doesn't exist."
Our 2008 Munich, which started as a Clinton policy but was quietly institutionalized as "American" policy while the Bush administration struggled with more immediate distractions, is not a pro-American policy just because it came full circle under a Republican administration.
Of course, bigger names than Greenberg's have failed to see the irony in besmirching the Serbian nation for America's own sins. Sins not only against the traditionally America-loving Serbs, but against America itself. We flew mujahedin into Bosnia, blamed Serbia for her neighbors' aggressions, and after a decade of crippling economic sanctions, we bombed Serbia again and blamed her for the 800,000 Albanians that NATO bombs and the calculating KLA displaced. Every time, we've blamed Serbia for our own bellicosity. Now we've gone and severed 15 percent of her land in a historic part of the country, all the while without, literally, a day passing in which US officials haven't threatened Serbian leaders in one way or another. And here Greenberg, like any number of government clones including Hillary Clinton at the Austin debate, speaks of Serbian "violence against Americans", purposely conflating the 100 rioters whom the media fixated on with the 200,000 peaceful protesters nearby. To buttress the image of the "Serbian brute," he follows the media's lead and, as is our special treatment for Serbs, tars the entire nation for what was done by 100 or so people — who were labeled 'thugs' and cursed by their own and of whom so far 80 have been charged by Serbian authorities. All this with little consideration for how Americans might react if a California secession were unilaterally imposed by an outside nation of unrivaled military force. This "violence against Americans", none of whom were in the building, resulted in exactly one death, a Serbian one. Greenberg's statement is all the more ironic against the backdrop of American violence against Serbs, from subsidizing the KLA's campaign of terror against both non-Albanian and Albanian civilians in Kosovo, to a 78-day bombing campaign targeting civilians, to empowering the fundamentalist Muslim regime of Bosnian wartime president Alija Izetbegovic.
"Are the Serbs angry at America right now?" asks Chicagoan Aleksandra Rebic, a military daughter who lived down the street from one of the 500 WWII U.S. airmen rescued from the Germans by the Serb anti-Nazi guerrilla commander Draza Mihailovic. "You bet," she answers. "Are the Serbs disappointed with America? You bet. Are they justified in feeling the way that they do, both here and abroad? You bet. Do they intend to hurt America? No way. That has never been…the Serbian way."
Indeed, it wasn't Serbian jihadists organizing a massacre on American soldiers at Fort Dix. It was the Serbs' old Albanian enemy. It wasn't a Serb who shot nine Americans in Salt Lake City last year. It was the Serbs' old Bosnian adversary. Yet Mr. Big Man here expects us to shudder at a Serbian last name? And at an underdog Serbian lobby. How stupid does he want Americans to get?
Of course, the irony of calling Serbs fundamentalists when all along they have been on the front lines against Islamic fundamentalism, fighting not just their own enemies but ours, has been lost on wiser men than Greenberg.
Another popular Chicago blog named Capitol Fax weighed in immediately with the following comment — incidentally "speaking as someone who isn't exactly a big fan of Serbia" and mistakenly alleging that the devastation in the region was Serb doing. It addressed Greenberg's charge against the SUC of "anti-Americanism":
Unlike the other ethnic groups in the Balkans — Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians and Albanians — who politically used America for their own purposes, the only thing that the SUC has ever advocated — or that any American Serbs have advocated — has been for the US to stay out of taking sides in Balkan politics, quit playing the ethnicities off of one another, and quit sacrificing America's honor and American lives to please Arab Islamic oil interests. (Those same "Arab oil interests" who also want to use Kosovo independence as a model for an independent Palestine —a fact that you might want to let your RJC benefactors in on, Mr. Greenberg!)
Elaborating on this apparently treasonous concept, military daughter Rebic explains that the people at the SUC "do what they can to educate those who truly have no understanding of issues specific to the Balkans but who are implementing misguided and potentially dangerous policies anyway. Never have they been anti-American. They are anti-ignorance…Bean is of Serbian descent, and perhaps this makes her especially qualified to try to motivate her peers in congress to seek a fair and just resolution for the problem of Kosovo. Too many of her peers, including those now running for the highest office in our land, have not sought a fair and just resolution. Instead, they have actually magnified the problem in the Balkans."
A few months ago I called on American Serbs to sound the warning to their fellow Americans about what our government is doing, saying that it is their responsibility more than anyone else's — based on their intimate familiarity with the violent types we've imported from their region — to steer us away from our current course.
And yet when they do they have to contend with precisely what keeps them silent in the first place — the boisterous, ignorant abuse whose premise is always "But of course you would say that; you're a Serb." In contrast, without trepidation, Albanian, Bosnian and Croatian nationalists on our shores have motivated U.S. sympathy and policy on their behalf, with nary a thought to American interests. Never do we hear slurs hurled at the jihad-supported Albanians, the Nazi-rehabilitating Croatians, or the mujahedin-protecting Bosnians — all of whose agendas we dutifully pursued throughout the 90s into the 2000s, and astoundingly beyond September 11 to the current day.
Yet when the Serbs make an attempt to motivate U.S. policy in a direction that happens to be consistent with both U.S. and Balkan security interests, the heretofore absent red flag questioning ethnic loyalties jolts to attention. Indeed, if Rep. Bean were guided by religious or ethnic loyalties (the way, for example, Albanians, Croatians and Muslims are), she would not be a member of the party under whose leadership America bombed the Serbs back to the dark ages.
If Greenberg isn't more disturbed by the Albanian last names that supported Kosovo independence and Greater Albania, from whom congressional contributions guided our policy in this direction, then Greenberg displays a gratuitous ethnic hatred borne of spinelessness against a real enemy. If it weren't the current vogue, this would disqualify him from a position of national leadership. Here is yet another "Republican" who lacks even the nine-year memory to recall that House Republicans tried to prevent precisely this unfortunate series of events, by voting against Clinton's undeclared war by more than nine to one. Here is yet another Republican who spits on U.S. history, which includes the aforementioned 500 airmen evacuated by Serbs, and the fact that Serbia lost 50% of its male population as an American ally in WWI, and lost proportionately the most people in Europe fighting the Nazis and dying in concentration camps alongside Jews. In two world wars, the Serbs prevented the Germans from getting access to the Adriatic, yet it is their eternal fate to be our villain, sacrificed at the altar of larger geopolitical intrigues.
In the initial press release, a Greenberg spokesman named Brad Goodman wrote about Bean that "she would deny the people of Kosovo, who have suffered the worst sort of government oppression their liberty and independence" — toeing the official doctrine that inverts victim and oppressor, and lacking a sense of irony that what the "Kosovars" now have the liberty and independence to do is conduct their heroin- and sex-trafficking affairs unimpeded, as the gangs who rule that land benefit the most from independence. Serbia isn't the "radical foreign nation" that Greenberg needs to be worried about; it's the one whose birth he applauds.
In his latest anti-Serbian diatribe, Greenberg accuses Bean of "flagrantly working on behalf of foreign interests, against the interests of the United States." He has a very twisted notion of American interests as he blesses the creation, at Christian Europe's expense, of yet another Muslim state on the continent. He joins other American politicians who are openly calling for a heightened Muslim presence in Europe (most prominently Democrats Tom Lantos, Eliot Engel and Nicholas Burns). At the same time, he continues the ubiquitous pandering to the Muslim world by propagating the official line about Srebrenica being a one-way "genocide". The latest is that he accuses Bean of taking contributions from foreign nationals because she held a fundraiser at the house of a Chicago-born woman from a prominent American family, who has raised funds for various causes over the years but who committed the sin of marrying the Serbian consul for Chicago. Apparently, if you marry a Serb, you are no longer considered an American. While holding the fundraiser at the couple's house may not have been the best idea when examined under a political microscope, Greenberg is making it out to be a nefarious conspiracy to infiltrate foreign nationals into the American political system. Serbian campaign contributors aren't al Qaeda. But they sure make for an easier target, don't they?
Which brings us back to Greenberg's own last name. For a Jew, particularly at this advanced stage of jihad, to not have down the basic historical facts — which would make obvious the rationality of opposing an independent Kosovo — typifies the self-destructive American-Jewish shallowness that many Israelis, fortunately, do not suffer from, explaining why they haven't recognized an independent Kosovo (at least not until the U.S. threatens to cut off some funding, of course).
Here's a piece of that history which anyone with the last name Greenberg embarrasses himself to not know. As I wrote recently:
…Why [did] even the last 15 Jews in Kosovo's capital [have] to clear out, with just the clothes on their backs, when the KLA stormed their homes in 1999?…Indeed, in the destruction and desecration of Orthodox churches, monasteries and cemeteries that has continued apace since NATO gifted Kosovo to the Albanians, the Jewish cemetery that adjoins the Serbian one in the village of Velika Hoca has also been vandalized, according to the book Hiding Genocide in Kosovo.
…Jewish good will has been co-opted by a nationalist movement which in WWII formed the fascist Balli Kombetar organization — still active in Kosovo today…[in] a new state whose founders were partly trained by the son of the Nazi Luftwaffe general in charge of Hitler's 1941 bombing of Belgrade…[and which today is returning] to Albania's Hitler-delineated borders [for Greater Albania]…"under the same [flag]," as a recent letter in the Financial Times pointed out.
Republicans, especially the Jewish Republicans of the RJC, can do better than Greenberg. The RJC should withdraw any further funding and endorsement from Chicago District 8 congressional candidate Steve Greenberg until he makes a public apology for his bigoted and deadly ignorance — to Bean and to the Serbian community he slandered, many of whom voted for him in the primaries but won't be supporting him in the general election despite the Serbian tendency toward the Republican side of the aisle. For now, with his home page still flaunting his ignorance with the original anti-Serb memo highlighted at the top, Greenberg is an embarrassment to both the Republican Party and to Jews whose memories are not so shallow.
"I'm proud of my parents and of my extended Serbian family," continues Rebic, "[for] becoming law-abiding, English speaking, hard working people of integrity with a deeply felt loyalty to their new home. It is from my Serbian parents that I learned to appreciate just how great this country America was, and still is, no matter what."
And that's another key difference between Serbs and the Albanians and Bosnians we imported. While no doubt most members of the latter two groups are also loyal to America, one will find more exceptions to this rule among their ranks, starting of course with the Bosnian jihadist of Utah, and the Albanian ones of Fort Dix. There is also the aspect of culture: Serbs adapt to ours; they don't demand that Americans adjust to theirs, the way other immigrant groups increasingly do. (See Albanian blood feuds coming to UK.) Nor has Serbian pro-Americanism been predicated on America doing their tribe's bidding. To give Mr. Greenberg a fuller sense of the people whose name he sneers at is an unpublished letter by author and historian Bill Dorich:
…
In 1905, Rade Grba, a young Serbian-American from the south side of Chicago was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by the US for his heroic actions in the Navy. There are 8 Serbian Congressional Medals of Honor recipients. The first person in history to receive 2 Congressional Medals, Lou Cukelja, was a Serb who also received the highest decoration given by France, Belgium and Serbia. There are thousands of Serbian Purple Heart recipients. Serbian-Americans can be proud of the youngest Two-Star general in the American army, Rudy Ostovich III and Two-Star General Mel Vojvodich. Ed Radkovich headed Air Force Intelligence in Europe and Brigadier General George Karamarkovic the US Marine Corp. The U.S. military also included Admiral Stevan Mandarich and Col. Mitchell Page. The NASA space program is replete with Serbian engineers and scientists. Thirteen top executives in the space program are Serbs. Mike Vucelic received the Freedom Award from President Johnson for his work in the Apollo program.
That, in a rare phenomenon, two non-Serb websites (plus Chicago Tribune blogger Eric Zorn) recognized anti-Serbism for the ethnic bigotry that it is — a bigotry that has engulfed the United States against a people that has never been anything but a loyal friend and ally of America — is a rare and refreshing extension of fair play to Serbs, who generally are exempted from any considerations afforded to humanity, from whose ranks they are generally excluded. As rudimentary as it is, this is progress. Hopefully it will be enough to make Chicago Democrats and Republicans alike keep an ignoramus with the last name Greenberg out of public office.
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JWR contributor Julia Gorin is a widely published op-ed writer and comedian who blogs at www.JuliaGorin.com. Comment on by clicking here.
© 2008, Julia Gorin. |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
