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Friday, November 6, 2009

Not if you care about what went on in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990's. Journalist Ed Vulliamy has a powerful open letter addressed to Amnesty UK regarding the outrage he feels concerning the invitation extended to Chomsky to address the group in Belfast. Vulliamy is no right-winger, as you'll sense from some of the things he says in his letter (with which we do not agree). For those of you wondering if AI was any better than HRW these days, here's a snip of the piece. They've all gone far-left and away from a true freedom and Human Rights agenda. Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International:

...In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Chomsky paid me the kind compliment of calling me a good journalist, but added that on this occasion (the camps) I had "got it wrong". Got what wrong?!?! Got wrong what we saw that day, August 5th 1992 (I didn't see him there)? Got wrong the hundreds of thousands of families left bereaved, deported and scattered asunder? Got wrong the hundreds of testimonies I have gathered on murderous brutality? Got wrong the thousands whom I meet when I return to the commemorations? If I am making all this up, what are all the human remains found in mass graves around the camps and so painstakingly re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons?

These people pretend neutrality over Bosnia, but are actually apologists for the Milosevic/Karadzic/Mladic plan, only too pathetic to admit it. And the one thing they never consider from their armchairs is the ghastly, searing, devastating impact of their game on the survivors and the bereaved. The pain they cause is immeasurable. This, along with the historical record, is my main concern. It is one thing to survive the camps, to lose one's family and friends - quite another to be told by a bunch of academics with a didactic agenda in support of the pogrom that those camps never existed. The LM/Novo/Chomsky argument that the story of the camps was somehow fake has been used in countless (unsuccessful) attempts to defend mass murderers in The Hague.

For decades I have lived under the impression that Amnesty International was opposed to everything these people stand for, and existed to defend exactly the kind of people who lost their lives, family and friends in the camps and at Srebrenica three years later, a massacre on which Chomsky has also cast doubt. I have clearly been deluded about Amnesty. For Amnesty International, of all people, to honour this man is to tear up whatever credibility they have estimably and admirably won over the decades, and to reduce all they say hitherto to didactic nonsense...

[h/t: Kerry]

Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Should Amnesty International Be Inviting Noam Chomsky to Speak?.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.solomonia.com/cgi-bin/mt4/mt-renamedtb.cgi/17027

At Stanford. I'm not surprised by some of the names on the sponsorship list of the performance, but the Red Cross and Amnesty International jumped out (and you thought it was only Amnesty UK). The announcement on the Stanford site... Read More

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