Tel-Chai Nation

A writer to the Jerusalem Post pointed out a serious distortion in their coverage of the Wiesenthal Center's current project:

Your news story “Simon Wiesenthal Center to launch lastditch effort to capture Nazis in Serbia” (December 30) fails to mention that Serbian Jewry was murdered during the Holocaust by the Croatian Ustashe, a fascist movement that was allied with Hitler and aided the Axis powers in their occupation of Yugoslavia.

This omission is significant because it leaves the reader with the false impression that Serbs were behind the slaughter of the country’s Jews. It was in fact the Croatian Ustashe, headed by Ante Pavelic, that masterminded and carried out the genocide.

Pavelic, who was chosen by Hitler, vowed to cleanse the country of Serbs and Jews. He passed anti-Semitic racial laws, ordered the torching of Serb towns and churches, and forced 200,000 Serbs to convert to Catholicism.

The Ustashe also operated the death camp of Jasenovac, known as “the Auschwitz of the Balkans,” and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and tens of thousands of Jews.

Serbs and Jews died together at the hands of Croatian fascists during the dark period of World War II. This shared horror, forged in blood, is what underlines the close relations that exist nowadays between Serbs and Jews.

It's certainly disgraceful that the Post would fudge this up. Many mainstream press sources are already guilty of scapegoating Serbs as attacking Bosnian Muslims, when it was the other way around, and even the Post is not innocent here.

Labels: anti-semitism, Europe, germany