CHAPTER NINE: DEMONIZING THE SERBS
This chapter is simply loathsome genocide denial of the basest sort. It's all here--the "Living Marxism" claim that the ITN footage was faked; bogus refutations of Roy Gutman's reporting; and, of course, claims that Muslim deaths at Srebrenica were highly exaggerated while the Western media ignored the "hundreds" of Serb civilians reportedly killed in the hills surrounding Srebrenica. Typically, Parenti demands impossible standards of accuracy as far as the Muslim deaths at Srebrenica are concerned, while he relays stories about supposed massacres of Serb civilians without bothering to provide any substantiation whatsoever.
After ten pages of this drivel, he ends the chapter with a dismissal of the public relations firm of Ruder & Finn (who represented both Croatia and Bosnia), human rights (or, in his telling, "human rights"--the quotes are the typographical equivalent of a contemptuous sneer)--groups such as Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, and of the wide spectrum of leftists who chose to speak out against the Serbian genocide. That he derides people such as Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag as "half-informed" is unconscious irony of the highest order.
This chapter is 14 pages long--the longest in this rather flimsy book so far--and there is absolutely nothing of merit in it to discuss. The 'charges' he makes in this book have long since been refuted; or rather, they were refuted by reality before he ever wrote them. Confronted with the truth, Parenti merely clamps his hands over his ears and screams louder.
This tedious compendium of lies and misinformation is nothing but hateful garbage. Refuting the completely discredited accusations in this chapter would be to dignify them with a response. I won't do it. We will move on.
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