The method of Chomsky and his acolytes seems to be: select an action taken by the West - whether in Kosovo, Rwanda, or Libya (or in this case, belatedly in Bosnia and Herzegovina) - invert the role of perpetrator and victim, and form a conclusion which lays the blame for every atrocity at the door of Western intervention or a Western ally in the region. If this means downplaying attrocities committed by those opposed to Western forces, then so be it.
Nov 13, 2005 - The reporter obviously had a definite agenda: to focus the defamation exercise on my alleged denial of the Srebrenica massacre. any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes. That alone ends the story. I will skip the rest, which also collapses quickly.
Dec 5, 2015 - 5 posts - 3 authorsI cannot stomach how Chomsky, along with Tariq Ali and others, defended ... ….during the Bosnian war the “massacre” at Srebrenica was ...
May 21, 2012 - Do you accept the accounts it contains of the Rwandan genocide and the massacre ofSrebrenica? If not, in what respects do you reject them?
Institute for Islamic...
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-srebrenica-massacre-was-a-gigantic.../5321388Jul 13, 2018 - He's also the author of several books, namely “Manufacturing Consent” which he wrote with Noam Chomsky and “The Srebrenica Massacre: ...
book published by Edward Herman and David Peterson called The Politics of Genocide, which claims Serb forces "incontestably had not killed any but 'Bosnian Muslim men of military age'" carries a foreword by Chomsky and an endorsement by Australian journalist John Pilger.
...Five years after that infamous photograph, a now defunct British far-left magazine known as LM (formerly Living Marxism) ran an article defending the concentration camp by one Thomas Deichmann. The article, headlined "The picture that fooled the world," claimed that reporters from the British ITN TV news company had deliberately misrepresented the image of Alic, stating that the concentration camp was a "collection center for refugees" who were free to leave "if they wished."
The reporters involved in the fraudulent LM article refused to back down, and they were defended by high profile individuals such as celebrated left-wing academic Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky reiterated the claim: "It was a refugee ...
nobody should be expecting any retractions or apologies from Chomsky or Pilger, men for whom genocide denial has become a point of pride.
Today, Chomsky, Pilger and a slew of other notable left-wing academics, journalists and bloggers are applying this same war-crimes revisionism to the war in Syria.
chemical weapons attacks in Syria, the OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism, found the Assad regime culpable for the sarin gas massacre in Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 2017.
.. the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories have flourished – and, no surprise at all, they emanate from the same old places.
Two of the most widespread and thoroughly debunked theories were spread by MIT professor Ted Postol and Pulitzer Prize winning [russia propagandist] journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh relies on testimony from one unnamed source that cites the existence of a mysterious rebel munitions depot that Hersh was unable to provide a location for... conspiracy theories were promoted, propagated and publicly defended by (all Russia propagandists) The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, Ken Klippenstein, Max Blumenthal and Gareth Porter.
Prominent left-wing journalist George Monbiot tweeted: "Part of the problem is that a kind of cult has developed around Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which cannot believe they could ever be wrong, and produces ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to justify their mistakes."
It is never acceptable to continue to propagate and endorse these things after they have been proven to be falsehoods. That is the point at which bad reporting becomes war crimes denial, and in the case of Srebrenica, outright genocide revisionism.
After decades of instances of this nature from Chomsky, how is he still seen as a credible voice in the media, and why is he still tapped as an expert in anything remotely touching war crimes?
Bosnia's 'Genocide Deniers' Challenged - The New York Times
https://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/.../bosnias-genocide-deniers-challenge...
May 16, 2012 - “Srebrenica is one of the best-documented atrocities in modern history,” ... The late Mr. Hitchins sparred with Noam Chomsky over his claims that the ... wars,” said Mr. Herman, who edited the book “The Srebrenica Massacre.
Response: We're not genocide deniers. We just want to uncover the ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/.../not-genocide-deniers-uncover-truth
Jul 19, 2011 - Monbiot quotes disparagingly from the foreword to The Srebrenica Massacre: "It claims that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are 'an ...
Genocide in Bosnia: Noam Chomsky and the Srebrenica Massacre
genocideinbosnia.blogspot.com/2006/.../noam-chomsky-and-srebrenica-massacre.htm...
Jan 18, 2006 - In his interview for Bosnian TV1 last night Chomsky was asked to offer his opinion on theSrebrenica massacre. More specifically, he was asked ...
[PDF]
How the Srebrenica Massacre Redefined US Foreign Policy
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context...
by DN Gibbs -
Cited by 1 -
Related articlesBosnian war and thus prevented the Srebrenica massacre, but this option was ..... 27 An attack on Noam Chomsky's Bosnia views in the Guardian contained so
Edward S. Herman - Wikipedia Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Often associated with Noam Chomsky, Herman is best known for his media .... Herman has written about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in articles such as "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre".
Vietnam[edit]
Herman and Noam Chomsky challenged the veracity of media accounts of
war crimes and repression by the Vietnamese communists, stating that "the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the
North Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry" and "the
NLF-
DRV'bloodbath' at Hue (in
South Vietnam) was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed". Commenting on postwar Vietnam, Chomsky and Herman argued that "[i]n a phenomenon that has few parallels in Western experience, there appear to have been close to zero retribution deaths in postwar Vietnam." This they described as a "miracle of reconciliation and restraint".
[8]In discussing the 1977 Congressional testimony of defecting
SRV official Nguyen Cong Hoan, on the subjects of mass repression and the abrogation of civic and religious freedoms,
[9] Herman and Chomsky pointed to contradictory accounts of post-war Vietnam, concluding that while "some of what Hoan reports is no doubt accurate ... the many visitors and Westerners living in Vietnam who expressly contradict his claims" suggest "Hoan is simply not a reliable commentator."
[10]
Chomsky and Herman authored
Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book which criticised U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and highlighted how mainstream media neglected to cover stories about these activities; the publisher
Warner Modular initially accepted it, and it was published in 1973. However, Warner Modular's parent company,
Warner Communications, disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies to be destroyed.
[11][12]According to Jim Neilson's book
Warring Fictions: Cultural Politics and the Vietnam War Narrative, the publication of
Counter-Revolutionary Violence was stopped by an executive of Warner Publications, William Sarnoff, who thought its discussion of American foreign policy "was a pack of lies, a scurrilous attack on respected Americans, undocumented, a publication unworthy of a serious publisher". Because of a binding contract, copies were passed to another publisher rather than destroyed.
[13]
Cambodia[edit]
The two men later collaborated on works about the media treatment of post-war
Indochina,
Cambodia in particular. Beginning with "Distortions at Fourth Hand", an article published in the American left-wing periodical
The Nation in June 1977, they wrote that while they did not "pretend to know [...] the truth" about what was going on in Cambodia during the
Khmer Rouge regime of
Pol Pot, while reviewing material on the topic then available, "[w]hat filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available". Referring to what they saw as "the extreme unreliablity of refugee reports", they noted: "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account". They concluded by stating that Khmer Rouge Cambodia might be more closely comparable to "France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months" than to
Nazi Germany.
[14][15]
In 1979, Chomsky and Herman revised
Counter-Revolutionary Violence and published it with
South End Press as the two-volume
The Political Economy of Human Rights. In this work they compared U.S. media reactions to the
Cambodian genocide and the
Indonesian occupation of East Timor. They argued that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on that in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy.
[18] Volume II of the book
The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (1979), which appeared after the regime had been deposed, has been described by area specialist
Sophal Ear as "one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution" in which they "perform what amounts to a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an attack on the media".
[19] In their book, Chomsky and Herman wrote that "The record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome" but questioned their scale, which may have been inflated "by a factor of 100". They wrote that the evacuation of Phnom Penh "may actually have saved many lives", that the Khmer Rouge's agricultural policies reportedly produced positive results and there might have been "a significant degree of peasant support for the Khmer Rouge".
[20]
Herman replied to critics in 2001: "Chomsky and I found that the very asking of questions about the numerous fabrications, ideological role, and absence of any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975–1979 was unacceptable, and was treated almost without exception as 'apologetics for Pol Pot'".
[21]
Todd Gitlin, in an email to
The New York Times wrote that for Herman and Chomsky "the suffering of the Cambodians is less important than their need to pin the damage done to Cambodia in the 1970s primarily on the American bombing that preceded the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power".
[5]
Writings on Srebrenica[edit]
Herman has written about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in articles such as "The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre".[26]Herman writes: "the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least" and "the 'Srebrenica massacre' is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars... the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent".[26] He criticized the validity of the term genocide in the case of Srebrenica, pointing out inconsistencies in the case of organized extermination such as the Bosnian Serb Army's bussing of Muslim women and children out of Srebrenica.[27][28][29] The historian Marko Attila Hoare said that the Srebrenica Research Group was formed "to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened".[30] Michael F. Bérubé has also said the SRG is dedicated to overturning the findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which has officially designated the Srebrenica massacre as being an example of genocide and the United Nations.[31]
The Politics of Genocide[edit]
In
The Politics of Genocide (co-authored by David Peterson, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky, 2010), Herman and Peterson argue that "genocide" has become a politicized notion through analysis of the media and comparative studies of what they title "constructive" and "nefarious" genocides. They argue the
Kosovo War, the
Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the
War in Darfurhave been publicized in the West to advance an economic and intellectual agenda. They contrast media coverage of these events with
Sanctions against Iraq and the
Iraq War, arguing that despite similar casualties to those massacres which receive the label genocide, there was an inverted response when Western powers were directly involved.
By Edward S. Herman and John Robles
(Russprop site) Global Research, July 13, 2018 Voice of Russia and Stop NATO 31 January 2013
Theme: Intelligence, Media Disinformation, US NATO War Agenda
23 Years ago: 11 July 1995, The Srebrenica Massacre
The whole business of the Srebrenica massacre is a gigantic political fraud.
There was a massacre, but it was a responsive vengeance massacre, women and children were not killed.
Renowned author Dr. Edward Herman spoke with John Robles of the Voice of Russia regarding the facts surrounding the Srebrenica Massacre, the pretext for the “humanitarian” invasion of the former Yugoslavia, and takes apart the “official” ; version that has always been promoted by the West.
Dr. Herman reveals that there were in fact multiple massacres at Srebrenica, and that the killing of Bosnian-Muslim soldiers at Srebrenica (the West’s pretext) was in response to the killing of over 2,000 Serb civilians, mostly women and children, at the location.
Robles: My first question is about “The Srebrenica massacre” and the way that the establishment manipulated the media. Can you tell us, or give us some insights, on that?
Herman: The Srebrenica massacre, actually I always put it in quote marks, because actually there were lots of massacres in the Srebrenica area, the one before July 1995 there were vast numbers of Serbs killed by Muslim, Bosnian Muslim, forces who went out of Srebrenica.
One estimate is that there were more than 150 Serbs villages that were totally wiped out and one study gives actually gives the names of 2,383 Serb civilians who were killed between 1992 and July, 1995. So then we’d call that “the first Srebrenica massacre”. Then in July 1995…
Robles: Just to be very clear, these were Serbs, that were being killed.
Herman: Yes! We’re talking about 2,383 Serb civilians killed before July 1995. And the Bosnian Serb Army took over Srebrenica in July, 1995, and there were deaths and executions after that. That’s what’s called in the West “the Srebrenica massacre”, but, in fact, that’s really mainly a political construct.
The numbers executed there were probably in the order of between 500 and 1,000. In other words, less than half of the number of Serbs civilians killed before July, 1995.
And the Western claim is that 8,000 men and boys were executed in the quote Srebrenica massacre, but notice these were men, always men, all men, they were all soldiers, whereas those 2,383 civilians killed included very large numbers of women and children.
Srebrenica: Ratko Mladic’s Sham Trial and Conviction
We’re talking about the execution in the second massacre of essentially army people. And of course they had never proved that there were 7,000 or 8,000, even men and boys killed. The bodies in the graves added up to something like 2,500.
A lot of those bodies were combat deaths. One of the beauties of the Western propaganda system is that all the bodies they found after July, 1995, they count as executed, even though we know very well that a large number were killed in combat.
my own estimate, as I said, is that maybe there were 500 to 1,000 executions. Vengeance executions.
Robles: I’m sorry. How many?
Herman: 500 to 1,000 I would say.
Robles: 500 to 1,000.
Herman: Yes. So there was a significant massacre, but put it in its context!
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This June 23, 2018, image from multiple police cam videos provided by the Minneapolis Police Department shows a chase between Officers Justin Schmidt and Ryan Kelly and suspect Thurman Blevins in Minneapolis. Authorities released the body-camera video Sunday, July 29, 2018, from the two officers in the fatal shooting of Blevins, with the footage showing the man shot from behind after a frenetic foot chase and what appeared to be a gun in his hand.
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