==(((Haaretz))): "America, Learn From Bosnia: It Can Happen Here Too"
Twenty-one years after Srebrenica, the same language pre-empting the slaughter of Muslims - as interlopers, as a fifth column, bent on establishing sharia - is now commonplace in the U.S. and U.K.
On July 11, Bosnia and the world will mark the 21st anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica. This will be a day to mourn, but it is also a day to learn.
Over three days in July 1995, Serb forces killed some 8000 men, some as young as twelve and as old as seventy-four. It was perhaps the worst atrocity in a war that was marked by outrageous violence. There are few more appropriate places to host a conversation on anti-Muslim bias. The place where it led to genocide.
I was invited to join the European Islamophobia Summit, to speak at and to attend three days of discussions by experts who considered hate speech, and hate crimes, from across the Western world, with a focus on Europe. Nearly every speaker brought up the consequences of an irredentist Greater Serbia pursued at the expense of Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] liberties — and lives.
Sure enough, you don’t have to look very hard to find evidence of a brutal aggression that, as most Bosniaks will tell you, did not end so much as it was frozen. People who lost friends, family, loved ones. Damage from war time. Cemeteries that seem impossibly, grievously large.
While it’s hard to conceive of the same kind of anti-Muslim violence that struck Bosnia striking elsewhere in the West, it’s not impossible to imagine it, either. The same language we saw in the former Yugoslavia that laid the groundwork for the slaughter, of Muslims as interlopers, as a fifth column, a foreign implant, bent on establishing sharia — necessitating a preemptive, if unfortunately genocidal, first strike — is now commonplace even in the United States and the United Kingdom, historically liberal democracies.
I came away from those three days in Sarajevo, discussing the surge in anti-Muslim hate speech on a transatlantic and continental scale, keen to write about those who survived.
I came away with six lessons.
archive.is
twitter.com