It’s taken over four years, tens of thousands of dollars, and a dozen trans-Atlantic trips… but my Kafkaesque ordeal north of the border is finally over. Having lost the initial case against me in September 2013, and the appeal on April 27 of this year, the government in Ottawa has missed the deadline for appeal to the Federal Court, the final instance.
The particulars of the case are now available to the curious in these two PDFs (attached). It is a long read, but well worth it. No summary would do justice to this breathtakingly sordid story of Canada’s liberal-fascist regime making a 100% politically motivated decision to exclude a “hateful individual” (their words!) from its territory, scrambling for some quasi-legal cover to justify that decision, and then mobilizing its unlimited financial and other resources htoping to wear the designated victim down.
For the early stages of my fight, go here and here. In the first of those two reports I wrote on February 26, 2011, two days after being expelled: “The Muslims are feeling triumphant, of course … but the affair is far from over.” It is now over, and I am deeply grateful to my friends in Canada whose perseverance and belief in the justice of my case has made it possible. They include my attorney Dorothy Fox and a loyal support group in Ontario, as well as my court witnesses, former Canadian Ambassador in Belgrade James Bissett, former UNPROFOR Commander Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, former New York Times correspondent David Binder, and former senior Bush-I Administration official, Col. Ronald Hatchett (US Army, Ret.).
The political nature of the case has been blatantly clear all along. As Diana Johnstone wrote a week after I was sent from Vancouver to Seattle, which prevented me from addressing a Serbian students’ group at the University of British Columbia, this amazing decision is all the more scandalous in that it was taken ad hoc in response to the hate campaign by self-declared representatives of one Bosnian ethnic group – the Muslims – carrying out a vendetta against another Bosnian ethnic group, the Serbs:
Is this what you mean by “multiculturalism”? The banning of a peaceful speaker is contrary to the democratic principles which the Western NATO powers, including Canada, constantly preach to the rest of the world. It would be reprehensible regardless of the circumstances. However, upon examination, the circumstances aggravate the case. The hate campaign launched against Dr. Trifkovic by certain groups claiming to represent Bosnian Muslims is based on distortions, lies and glaring sophistries. I say this as one who by no means shares all of Dr. Trifkovic’s political analyses or religious convictions, but who recognizes that he defends his convictions with an intellectual integrity totally lacking in the attacks against him. In particular, I tend to consider Dr. Trifkovic’s assessment of an alleged Muslim threat to the West to be misplaced or exaggerated. However, the treatment that he has received from Canada in response to the complaints of a Muslim lobby provides unexpected support to his argument.
“One point on which I do agree with Dr. Trifkovic is precisely the point for which he is most fiercely attacked: Srebrenica,” Dr. Johntone wrote in March 2011. Today, as the propaganda pitch escalates to the point of hysteria with the approach of the 20th anniversary of the massacre, it is particularly pertinent to remember her summary:
I wish to point out the ambiguities in the expression “genocide denial” used to characterize Dr. Trifkovic’s position on Srebrenica. The ambiguity concerns the difference between facts and interpretation of facts. I must insist that everyone has the right to be wrong about both; Canada has no means to exclude from its territory all the people who are constantly misstating facts and interpreting them erroneously. But I wish to point to a difference. On Srebrenica, the facts are partly established, partly disputed, and partly unknown. This is because material evidence is by no means as clear and comprehensive as the general public has been led to believe.
Independent studies have been hard to carry out, but certain facts can now be considered established, Diana Johnstone went on. There were a large number of Muslim casualties following the July 1995 fall of Srebrenica, some of them victims of executions, in violation of international law. These were massacres that took place in the context of a bloody three-sided civil war in which massacres were committed by all sides:
Description of the massacres that took place in Srebrenica as “genocide” is not fact but interpretation. It hinges on the disputed question of intention. To some observers, including myself, the crime of genocide implies intent to exterminate a population, and cannot be done by sparing women and children. The Serb forces who captured Srebrenica helped women, children and the elderly leave the war zone for safety. The execution of captured military-age men is more plausibly explained by revenge or by desire to weaken the enemy forces. This would indeed be a war crime, but not “genocide”. The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, largely financed and staffed by the NATO countries which took the Muslim side in the Bosnian civil wars, found a way to describe Srebrenica as “genocide” by redefining the term. The three-judge panel accepted a sociologist’s theory that by killing all the men, the Serbs meant to commit a localized “genocide”, since in that “patriarchal” society, the women would not come back without their men. This is not what most people understand by the term “genocide”. The ICTY verdict has subtly deceived the general public, while providing a justification of NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia against the Serbs, stigmatized as responsible for “genocide”.
This orchestrated stigmatization of Serbs as “genocidal” – amounting to incitement to racial hatred – is back on the agenda. In addition to being a major obstacle to genuine peace and reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from where I write these lines, it is also yet another proof how easily it is, in this postmodern world, to turn fiction into facts and vice versa.
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