[BosNet NEWS: GOP Right, Belgrade Lobby, and Neo-Confederacy -- Multiple Connections (by Prof. Michael Sells)
To: bosnet at bosnet.org Subject: BosNet NEWS: GOP Right, Belgrade Lobby, and Neo-Confederacy -- Multiple Connections (by Prof. Michael Sells) From: Vanja Filipovic <vanja at bosnet.org> Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 04:46:21 +1000
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GOP Right, Belgrade Lobby, and Neo-Confederacy -- Multiple Connections
Since March 24, the GOP congressional leadership and especially a group of extreme right-wingers has been calling the NATO operation "Clinton's War" and was openly hoping it would fail and end up in disaster. The House refused to endorse the operation by a 213-213 vote. Reps. Dan Burton, Chris Campbell, and Bob Barr filed a lawsuit attempting to stop U.S. participation cold, a suit that had it won, would have destroyed the NATO effort and led to a complete victory by Milosevic and a final blood bath against Kosovars, along with the destruction of NATO. And despite the principled and knowledgable position of some GOP senators, included John McCain, John Warner, and Richard Lugar, the Senate leadership was continually sniping at the effort and openly chagrined when it succeeded.
Much of this behavior has been attributed to the personalized hatred of Clinton. But there are also ideological affinities between the GOP right and the Belgrade lobby, as well as strong financial and political connections. Much of the opposition has been focused in Texas and Oklahoma. There are now clear links between this opposition and Neo-Confederate groups angry at Hispanic immigration in Texas who see the Yugoslav army and police action against alleged Albanian immigrants as eminently understandable and, they imply, perhaps a model.
Below are a few examples. To trace the WEB, follow the names: Senator Larry Craig, James George Jatras, Yossef Bodansky, The U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, The Serbian Unity Congress, The Rockford Institute and its journal, Chronicles, Pat Buchanan, Serge Trikovic (foreign policy editor of Chronicles), Thomas Fleming and David Hartman, leaders of the Rockford Institute and members of the League of the South, Policy Group of the Republican Party of Texas, The Lord Byron Institute, Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Senator James Inhoff, Representative Helen Chenoweth, The John Birch Society and its journal The New American, Dixienet, Srpska-Mreza, Southern Patriot, the House GOP Task Force on Terrorism.
Please note, this is not a conspiracy. It is just a multiply overlapping set of people and groups with common values and common sensitivities.
For documentation on campaign contributions to Dan Burton from the Belgrade lobby in the U.S. and for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee's ties to sympathizers with the criminal regime in Belgrade, see the war-crimes reports page at http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports.html
On the Senate side:
1) The GOP Senate Policy Committee has taken as its chief advisors for Balkan policy Yossef Bodansky and James Charles Jatras. The WEB site of the policy committee proudly proclaims Bodansky as an effort and cites his long association with the House Task Force on Terrorism. The key person in the link is Senator Larry Craig, third in the GOP senate leadership.
BODANSKY has been a major influence with the Serbian Unity Congress, which has long advocated the expulsion of Kosovars and supported the Karadzic regime during its worst genocidal policies. Bodansky has spoken at their meetings. He has protrayed all Muslims as a terrorist threat and has support the Belgrade regime's policy in Bosnia and in Kosovo with complete zealousness, and attacked Bosnians and Kosovars with the kind of stereotypes emanating directly from Tanjug.
JATRAS was the keynote speaker at the 1998 SUC convention. He has written a number of anti-Muslim hate articles, with medieval stereotypes about Islam as a barbarian product of "heathen Araby," that has nothing to do with Abrahamic religions, the alleged worthlessness and vileness of the Qur'an, and the ever present threat of Muslims, and Islam as a "Gigantic Christian-Killing Machine." These comments were published in The Christian Activist, but were originally given in a speech to the ROCKFORD INSTITUTE. Some of this information was given in the following Washington Post article, but the Post missed the SUC connection and other important connections to White-Supremacist and Neo-Confederate groups in Texas. The Washington Post June 11, 1999, Friday "GOP Aide's Islam Remarks Assailed; Sen. Craig Rejects Call to Fire Foreign Policy Staff Analyst By Caryle Murphy, Washington Post Staff Writer."
JATRAS is an aide to SENATOR LARRY CRAIG of Idaho. After Jatras's bigoted statements on Islam were uncovered and publicized in the Washington Post article, Craig refused to fire him. CRAIG has been another who has sniped at the NATO operation and belittled the importance of helping the Kosovars save themselves from extermination.
JATRAS has spoken and written for the ROCKFORD INSTITUTE, a Christian Right foundation. The Rockford Institute's agenda includes an attack on immigration from non-white and non-Christian countries, and includes articles by Rockford Institute member Tom Fleming on the parallel between Texas an inundated with hispanics and Kosovo as inundated with alleged illegal Albanian immigrants.
Ed Sebesta, who helped break the story of GOP Rep. BOB BARR's links to the White Supremacist group the Coalition of Conservative Christians or CCC (to which Senator Lott gave a keynote address as well), has shown that the Rockford Institute is tied into DixieNET and The League of the South, a Confederacy-advocate group.
The Foreign Policy Editor of CHRONICLES, the Journal of the Rockford Institute is SERGE (Srdja) TRIFKOVIC. Trifkovic recently appeared on CNN as an expert on the Balkans.
The Chronicles WEB page on Kosovo includes every possible Belgrade position, from the claim that the horrific atrocities at Racak were a hoax, to the claim that Albanians in Kosovo were fleeing NATO bombs, that the Bosnian Muslims slaughtered themselves, etc.
Key leaders of the Rockford Institute are its chairman, DAVID HARTMAN who is also Chairman and CEO of Hartland Bank in Austin and Dr. THOMAS FLEMING, who is President of the Institute and Editor of Chronicles.
Fleming is also a member and writer for the LEAGUE OF THE SOUTH, an organization committed to Confederate causes, with a host of confederate flags and paraphenalia for sale. Here is a recent statement from the League of the South:
""League of the South Political Commentators
condemn NATO Intervention in Yugoslavia
Find out why your tax dollars are being squandered in an immoral and ill-advised act of aggression against Yugoslavia in a must-read op-ed piece in Chronicles magazine by Dr Fleming and Dr Srdja Trifokovic. Dr Tom Fleming is a national board member of the League of the South and Editor-in-Chief of Chronicles, while Dr Trifokovic is a frequent contributor to Chronicles.
Both Tom Fleming and Srdja Trifkovic are available for radio, television, and print
media interviews. In the past few days, Tom has appeared on WLS (Chicago), Wisconsin
Public Radio, Chuck Harder's network show, the Catholic Family Radio Network, among others,
while Srdja has appeared on CNN and WLS (among others). If you know of anyone who would be interested in interviewing either of them, please call Chris Check collect at (815) 964-5811"""
The League of the South can be found through its web site, DixieNet. In the same page cited just above, Thomas Fleming gives a long harangue against the NATO operation for "attacking a sovereign, Christian, European nation that we are not at war with." At the end of the posting, a link is given to Oklahoma Senator JAMES INHOFE's web site on Kosovo. Inhofe has been the most consistent and most virulent oppenent of the NATO operation.
Both INHOFE and Rep. HELEN CHENOWETH are featured in the current, June 14, 1999 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN, the Journal of the John Birch Society. Chenoweth claims that helping the Muslim Kosovars will lead to Islamic terrorism in Europe--almost as if her words had been given to her by the Butcher of Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic, himself. Of course, if Chenoweth and the GOP right had their way, and a million Kosovar refugees were left to rot in refugee camps without being allowed to return to Kosovo, then in two or three generations they certainly would become militant. That is the geopolitical reason they need to go home. It is abandoning them that would lead to radicalization, not helping them. The vast majority of Kosovars, like the Bosnian Muslims, are tolerant, open people who wish to be part of Europe, the continent on which they and their families have lived for centuries, and who wish to be integrated into Europe. For the John Birch Society's journal and its Inhofe and Chenoweth articles, see http://www.thenewamerican.com/
In her John Birch Society Journal article, Chenoweth also boasts of having made another anti-Muslim hate article from the John Bircher NEW AMERICAN available to her colleagues in Congress.
Back to the energetic Thomas Fleming. Fleming is also on the staff of the Lord Byron Institute (along with Trifkovich, Alfred Sherman, and RONALD HATCHET), an institute set up to counter "anti-Serb propaganda" and which has supported the genocidal regimes in Pale (the Bosnian Serb Republic of Radovan Karadzic) and Belgrade through all the atrocities.
To find more about the Rockford Institute and its long-running anti-Muslim and anti-Hispanic themes, check out the website at:
This webpage is http://rockfordinstitute.org/about-tri.html
DAVID HARTMAN, The Chairman of the Rockford Institute, is a former Texas Republican Candidate for Treasurer in 1994 who lost to losing to Marha Whitehead.
He is also Director, POLICY GROUP, REPUBLICAN PARTY OF TEXAS His Web site is at: http://www.tppf.org/assualt/author.htm
He is a major figure in THE LEAGUE OF THE SOUTH and DixieNET
See the League of the South webpage on 3/30/99 at http://www.dixienet.org Here is an excerpt from its statement:
>"If there is any lesson to be taken from this sad and tragic war it is this
>one: it is perilous to allow one's ancestral lands to be occupied by a
>foreign and alien people. Kosovo was once inhabited only by Serbs. Today it
>is 90% inhabited by ethnic Albanians of the Moslem faith. Such an enormous
>demographic transformation virtually insured that one day the Albanian
>Kosovars would want to secede. (This is a lesson that Texans should pay
heed
>to, lest they one day find out that they are going to lose the Alamo and
the
>southern portion of the Lone Star State to hispanic seperatists who've been
>allowed to become a majority in what was once a predominately Anglo-Celtic
>State.)
Meanwhile, back at the SUC annual convention, before James George Jatras, senior policy analyst for Senator Larry Craig, gave an "electrifying" speech to the group, the SUC honored his parents, STELLA L. JATRAS, and GEORGE JATRAS for their contributions. Stella Jatras has posted messages on the Srpska-Mreza bulletin board. Among her messages was a long attack on U.S. Airforce Captain Scott O'Brady who was shot down and rescued in Bosnia as a buffoon with implications that the entire incident was phony. She also stated that if O'Brady had been caught by the Bosnian Muslims, they would have killed him.
On the House side, REPRESENTATIVE DAN BURTON is the all time champion in Congress in taking contributions from the Serbian Unity Congress, a group that openly demanded the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians in its 1991,1992,1993,and 1994 resolutions. Rep. RANDY DUKE CUNNINGHAM, another vitriolic critics of the NATO operation and Kosovar Albanians as well, also received SUC contributions. After 1994, the SUC began channeling its contributions through individuals so that they would be more difficult to trace.
The GOP HOUSE TASK FORCE ON TERRORISM has put out much of the Yossef Bodansky anti-Muslim Belgrade propaganda. The problem is that none of the GOP members of the task force will either acknowledge Bodansky or deny the connection. He was originally connected to one of the House Impeachment managers from Florida (Rep. McCollum), but other information connects him to the late Sonny Bono who may have financed his theories about the world-wide Islamic terrorist threat and how Bosnians and Kosovars are its instruments.
For information on the SUC contributions see the Balkans war-crimes reports
page at http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports.edu I will be
updating the page with complete documentation for the information above.
My thanks to Ed Sebesta for calling my attention to some of these links.
Ed Sebesta has a page on the Texas Republic organization and other Texas
right-wing anti-immigrationist,Neo-Confederate organizations.
>http://www.mindspring.com/~newtknight/Rockford.htm
>
>========================
>
>QUOTE FROM AD FOR "CHRONICLES" IN THE BACK OUTSIDE MAILING COVER OF THE
>"SOUTHERN PATRIOT."
>
>"Chronicles is the only national magazine whose editors are all League
>members: Thomas Fleming, Theodore Pappas, Scott Richert, and Chilton
>Williamson, Jr. That's why every month in our pages, you'll find articles
by
>League Board members like Michael Hill, Jack Kershaw, Grady McWhiney, and
>Clyde Wilson; reviews of the latest pro-South books; and features like "The
>Good Kennedy's," a profile of Southern patriots James and Ronald Kennedy"
>
>You've watched Tom Fleming fire up the crowds at League Meetings. Now you
>can take advantage of this special offer to subscribe to his magazine. For
>only $19.00 ...."
>
>
Finally, here is just one recent event at the Rockford Institute. Wish you all could have been there! It featured Fleming along with Trifkovic, who is listed as a former advisor of BILJANA PLAVSIC. Biljana Plavsic is one of the leaders of the "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia from 1992-1995. In 1994 she announced that it was impossible to negotiate with Muslims because the "genetic material" that converted to Islam in the fiftteenth century and after was "deformed" and that with each successive generation, the genes of Muslims became more deformed until now they lack basic capacity of human reason:
""""Rockford Institute Local Lectures presents:
A Panel Discussion and Buffet Reception
"The End of the American
Century"
featuring
Thomas Fleming
President, The Rockford Institute
"Make War, Not Love: The America of Albright and Reno"
Christopher Check
Executive Vice President, The Rockford Institute
"Ready for What?: America's Modern Military"
And special guest
Srdja Trifkovic
Foreign Affairs Editor, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture
Executive Director of the Lord Byron Foundation
for Balkan Studies
Former BBC World Service Journalist and U.S. News and World Report Correspondent from Southeast Europe
Former Advisor to Crown Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic and President BILJANA PLAVSIC, Republic of Srpska
"Defending the WestŠ Against Itself"
Thursday, 24 June 5:30 P.M.
Reserve a space by calling Aaron Wolf at The Rockford Institute (815) 964-581."""" _________________
Michael Sells
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