Srebrenice

With so much going on it was easy to pass by the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenice massacre, when 8,000 men and boys were killed by Serb forces under the noses of Dutch UN peacekeepers, while the government of John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd maintained a policy of masterly inactivity, as did the rest of the EU. Only when the Yanks started kicking NATO was there any action.

In pre-blogging days on the ES bulletin boards I remember comparing today's Left with its 1930s counterparts, and asking how many students had gone to fight in Bosnia as their forebears did in Spain.

My answer was - hardly any. I remember one solitary Geordie who was in all the papers.

But I was wrong. While the Native Brits bewailed the horrors and sat on their hands, maybe a few hundred young British Muslims went to defend their brothers in religion. Thousands went from all over the world. After all, no-one else was doing anything for the Bosnian Muslims. Before 9/11, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, Bosnia was the crucible from which the modern jihad was cast.

The Mark Steyn article I linked to in the last post contains the following :

Since 9/11 most Britons have been sceptical of Washington's view of this conflict. Douglas Hurd and many other Tory grandees have been openly scornful of the Bush doctrine. Lord Hurd would no doubt have preferred a policy of urbane aloofness, such as he promoted vis à vis the Balkans in the early 1990s. He's probably still unaware that Omar Sheikh was a westernised non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking English student until he was radicalised by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims.

Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati was another Europeanised Muslim radicalised by Bosnia. The inactivity of Do-Nothin' Doug and his fellow Lions of Lethargy a decade ago had terrible consequences and recruited more jihadists than any of Bush's daisy cutters. The fact that most of us were unaware of the consequences of EU lethargy on Bosnia until that chicken policy came home to roost a decade later should be sobering: it was what Don Rumsfeld, in a remark mocked by many snide media twerps, accurately characterised as an "unknown unknown" - a vital factor so successfully immersed you don't even know you don't know it.

Food for thought ...

UPDATE - I've moved this post forward to add a couple more points.

The Pub Philosopher has an apposite post - looking at the massacre through the eyes of a 'root cause' merchant.

And how about this for biscuit-taking hypocrisy ?

But Mr Straw said the international community bore some of the blame, adding: "We mourn the thousands killed here. And, as we utterly condemn those responsible for the slaughter, we recall the chilling words of Edmund Burke that 'the only thing that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'.

"For it is to the shame of the international community that this evil took place under our noses, and we did nothing like enough. I bitterly regret this, and I am deeply sorry for it."

That really makes my blood boil. One word - Darfur.