In the Balkans, Holocaust manipulation launches ‘Transracialism’

“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.” - A. I. Solzhenitsyn

One could say that my (now deleted) op-ed in the Jerusalem Post: This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now, was a huge ‘hit’ across the former Yugoslavia.

To date, it has generated thousands of comments, over 50 online and/or print stories, a mass of TV or YouTube commentaries, 3 subsequent responses to the Jerusalem Post and (allegedly) at least one diplomatic complaint.

And not to mention the dozens - and counting - of death threats I’ve received, all over a small opinion article about a place few had ever heard of up until now.                                                                                                   

As Yad Vashem says on its website: “Many thousands were murdered at the Jasenovac concentration and extermination camp. The majority were Serbs, but others were murdered in the camp as well, including Jews, Roma and Croats deemed as opponents of the Ustaša regime....”.

This is correct, as was my original premise that some random place with a death toll of 4, 10 or even if it was 40,000 mostly non-Jews should and could never be compared to Auschwitz for the purposes of political point scoring. Never. Ever. Period. 

The issues with Jasenovac stem from the 1980s when the former Yugoslavia rebranded it as the Auschwitz of the Balkans and had it ‘grafted’ onto Holocaust history despite the fact as Yad Vashem noted, most of the victims were not Jews.

Added to that was the post-war physical evidence from that country’s own War Crimes Commission that was not even close to the astronomical figures used today that can range anywhere from 1,700 all the way up to 1.7 million depending on who you talk to.

This has led to a fetishization (by the Right) and an obfuscation (by the Left) that could also have serious and long-lasting implications for the overall history of the Holocaust.

It has also revealed the curious phenomenon of Serbs identitying as Jews, but more on that later.

As I noted in my original article, those behind this promotion of Jasenovac are able to provide very little physically ‘verifiable data’, even admitting that any forensic excavations were at best, superficial and that their own victim numbers were nothing more than ‘extrapolations’, sometimes up to 70-times that of the forensic data.

In other words, their claim is that most of the data ‘proving’ the Jasenovac death toll is in the documentation (i.e. databases).

But even this documentational data seems not in order.

Earlier this year, the world's largest technical professional organisation, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a scientific paper that compared the demographic spread of a number of wartime concentration camps to that of their host country’s populations. It found that all the camps results matched their host country’s demographics.

All except for one that is - Jasenovac. 

The research found that via the use of what is called the ‘Total Variation Outlier Recognizer’ method, that most - or some 89 percent of Jasenovac’s figures were wholly unreliable. 

Therefore, the same people who admit there is not much physical evidence and that it’s all about the documentational data, now have lost even the use of that myth.

This was also underlined by the US Holocaust Museum which said that the integrity of most of the documentation concerning Jasenovac was ‘highly problematic’ - or in other words, unable to be used for verification purposes.

While I have never said that I know what the real Jasenovac death toll is and only what Yugoslavia could physically prove, any comparisons to Auschwitz whose figures were not extrapolated 70-fold but were real must be regarded as being null and void and show that Jasenovac has no equal anywhere on the planet - at least not that I’m aware of.

Contrast this with the actions of Jewish historians who in 1989 lowered the Auschwitz-Birkenau death toll from 4 million to under 2 million to ensure historical accuracy.

So, in the end, we are talking about a place that EVERYONE agrees has very little physical evidence to show, has had most of its documentation shown as being unverifiable and can only quote victim numbers derived from quasi-scientific ‘extrapolations’ provided by a motley crew of ex-communist apparatchiks, opportunists and grifters.

This fact was more than proven by some of the responses to my op-ed from these very same ‘experts’, responses that quite honestly verged on the non-sensical and showed how fragile their lies really are.

And if you question their nonsense, then these same ‘experts’ will turn to their friends in the media and launch attacks and accusations of ‘revisionism’ of the Jewish Holocaust.

In a nutshell, their outrageous claim is, if you question the veracity of a place where mainly Serbs were the victims, then you must be a ‘Holocaust denier’!

This is because when it comes to the history of the Holocaust in the Balkans, Serbs have for some time now identified as Jews in a politicised and racialised version of transgenderism, or if you like, ‘transracialism’.

As Serbian writer Vuk Draskovic proclaimed in 1985: "Serbs are the thirteenth, lost and the most ill-fated tribe of Israel".

Now, if that makes no sense at all, well that was EXACTLY one of the main points of my original article.

As the University of Haifa’s Professor Lea David put it: “From 2005, Holocaust discourse in Serbia was directed by the Jasenovac Committee, so as to keep Holocaust education within the bounds of Serbian memory. …the Jasenovac committee immediately made ties with Yad Vashem, who did not realise what Holocaust memorialization would be made to serve in Serbia. The Serbian political elite then hijacked the images and symbols of the Holocaust in order to equate Serbian victims with Jewish victims and promote Serbian righteous victimhood as enduring throughout the 1990s wars. In this way, the Holocaust serves as a screen-memory, used to repress another aspect of history which the Serbian political elite does not wish to be seen.”

So much like example of the history of Jasenovac, this Serbian desire to ‘transracialise’ by identifying as Jews for political purposes also has no equal anywhere else on this planet that I am aware of.

That I am forced to remind everyone - including the editor of the Jerusalem Post - that it is despicable to literally ‘recycle’ some of the many millions of Jewish (and other) victims of the Holocaust for use in Balkan inter-ethnic squabbles shocks and saddens me greatly.

The visceral over-reaction to my article can only be interpreted as a vindication of my initial premise and seems deliberately calibrated to mask the lies of those who have ‘transracialised’ themselves - not only are they hijacking the memory of the Holocaust, but also the broader Jewish racial identity as well, all for their own political ends.

So, while the abuse and death threats directed at me over the past weeks have subsided, thanks to the moral cowardice of the Jerusalem Post and many others, it seems the controversy over Jasenovac is set to continue.