Why Balkenende should talk a bit more about Srebrenica

Mark Steyn is on a roll:

'So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot is apparently: yes to the European Constitution, or yes to a new Holocaust. If there's a neither-of-the-above box, the EU's rulers are keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent's peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal whackoes champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I'm not unsympathetic to. But it's a curious rationale to pitch to one's electorate: vote for us; we're the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. Or as the cute but gloomy Omar Naber, the Slovenian Eurovision entrant, put it in his Naberly way: "Come on; tie my hands so I can drown In lies, I bleed to death in your lap."'

'And, insofar as the past 60 years in Europe have been comparatively non-bloody, that's surely due to Nato and the American military presence, both of which your average EU apparatchik would scrap in an instant without worrying about Theresienstadts looming round the corner. The nearest to a latterday Theresienstadt was Yugoslavia and that didn't exactly reflect well on the EU. Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg and as the holder of the rotating Euro-Presidency the Union's chief negotiator with the disintegrating Yugoslavia, told the Americans to butt out and declared: "The hour of Europe has come!" The hour of Europe came and went, and a couple hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too grateful for the Americans to butt back in again.'

Although Steyn has never been a stranger to hyperbole he has a point. The Dutch let Srebrenica happen. A cabinet fell over that, albeit years later and only a few weeks before elections were to take place anyway. Dutch soldiers, mind you, who were at the mercy of French general Bernard Janvier, who basically told the Dutch soldiers to go to hell when they requested air support. How's that for European cooperation? We told the UN we could do it, but over 7,000 Bosniak men and boys died. It's one of the few examples of Europe having acted on its own, and I can't say it helps Balkenende to make his case.

Now, I'd rather be talking about the contents of a constitution which I've opposed for years, rather than discuss past war crimes, but you'll only have to scroll downwards to see at what level our government wants to pursue the debate. Well, at your service!

(Incidentally, that the VVD dared to include Srebrenica in this sick pro-EU commercial only indicates that they should read a book every now and then. This one will do.)

19:36

permalink comment(s) (0) trackback(s) (0)

« 

 »