******UPDATE******
I’ve just heard from Glenn at Instapundit, saying he would pass the letter below on to his wife, Dr. Helen. Whether or not she prints a correction, I’m glad to know these two conservative bloggers are standouts from the rest, willing to read a corrective letter even when it mentions the word “Balkans” or “Kosovo.”
******************

As often happens, people who know nothing about the Balkans other than what the propagandists filled their heads with will bizarrely inject a chapter from those wars into a completely unrelated discourse. And they will sound like lunatics only to the miniscule fraction of their viewership or readership that has a clue. The rest of the ignoramuses will nod their heads as the false wisdom and false analogies issue forth from the ignoramus who’s speaking.

And so we have yet another, otherwise wonderful conservative site – as always skeptical of liberal propaganda except when it concerns the Balkans — falling victim to this tired, laughable pattern. The site belongs to Dr. Helen Smith, a good woman who was kind enough to mention my “Clintonisms” book on her site after her husband, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. “Instapundit“), passed it on to her.

But last week she interviewed a woman named Dr. Barbara Oakley who, in trying to illustrate a simple point about people being deaf to evidence of their badness — as many well-intentioned psychologists are — dragged in, of all things, the Racak “massacre”.

You may be wondering: What does Racak have to do with the American Psycho Association?

Barbara Oakley adopted two Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, that’s what.

Dr. Helen opened the interview with the question: “What got you interested in the dark side of psychology?”

And Oakley responded first with a short story about how her sister stole their mother’s boyfriend — 40 years her senior and suffering from emphysema — then dropped him after he took her and his oxygen tank to Paris. The rest of the answer went like this:

We all wonder: why do people do things like this? But for me, it also became something personal. We have two adopted sons from Kosovo, they were refugees. They were right next to the village of Racak, where there was a massacre, and that massacre is what brought NATO into the war. And our sons actually heard that massacre taking place. It was a half a mile from their home. So several years later we went to Kosovo and met with some of their relatives.

I was watching Slobodan Milosevic on television and they asked him, “Why did you do this sort of thing — massacring these people?” And his answer was “Oh, well, it’s because there was a war.” And then they said, “Well why did you torture them before [they] were killed?” And his answer was, “I can’t hear you.”
…
I just thought, Gosh that’s very similar to the kinds of things my sister would do. She literally couldn’t hear you if you said some things she didn’t want to hear…I kept seeing this personality pattern at every level of society.

I was alerted to this farce by a regular reader and fan of Dr. Helen, named Vincent. Here was the relevant portion of his letter:

…I’m a native-born Polish-American who has followed Serbian events since I began to smell a rat in the mid-1990s. I was a liberal back then (until the terrible spring of 1999)….These days, I’m much more anti-government and libertarian and I frequently visit the site of conservative psychologist Dr. Helen Smith and I did so the other day and watched a video from Pajamas TV featuring Barbara Oakley, Ph.D. who spoke of the horrific and offensive liberal bias of the APA.

Dr. Oakley’s interview was ruined for me by her opening reference to the “Racak massacre” that you and many others have so thoroughly debunked, and Helen Smith did absolutely nothing to correct Oakley! Amazingly, Oakley ends her interview by describing her next book as being about “nice people” with “good intentions” who end up doing more harm than good despite their “good intentions”! (If that isn’t old news, I don’t know what is.) Anyway, I wasn’t going to let her rehashing of old, tired, long-discredited Racak mythology stand unopposed so I sent her a brief civil email describing her error and linking to your recent Republican Riot post “The Hoax that Continues a War”.

She replied by merely saying that she doesn’t trust journalists but that she does trust her sister who worked at a Macedonian refugee camp in 1999 and she trusts her adopted Muslim sons (who now live near me here in SE Michigan!) who lived “nearby” Racak. (As for me, I distrust those who claim to be purely innocent “victims”, (cough…Muslims…cough), along with those Albanian sympathizers who conveniently forget to mention the KLA’s use of civilian villages as cover for their schemes and ambushes.) She then went ad hominem and further stated that she doesn’t trust Racak skeptics Diana Johnstone and Renaud Girard because they are “notoriously radical and unreliable leftists”. She failed to debunk your specific article or engage or acknowledge the arguments of non-leftist folks like you, Michael Savage, and Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Shlafly, and other conservatives who opposed Clinton’s attack. I’m sorry to remind you that your work is still needed in keeping the truth alive and that even conservative outlets like Pajamas TV and Dr. Helen Smith are being used for pro-Muslim propaganda…

Vincent is that miniscule fraction of the non-clueless readership I mentioned in my first paragraph. None of Dr. Helen’s or Dr. Oakley’s hundreds of other readers/viewers know anything is amiss. And so these ladies would have had nothing to be embarrassed about…except that Vincent was also listening.

So the first question is this: Is the sister who was doing her good deed at the Macedonian refugee center the same sister for whom Oakley’s book is titled: Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend

The next point is in answer to Vincent’s remark, “Helen Smith did absolutely nothing to correct Oakley!”

Of course she didn’t. Dr. Helen did not have the wherewithal to correct Oakley, since when it comes to our very recent, final pre-9/11 war — the only recent war launched by a Democrat — she knows as much as the rest of the conservative pundits whom I admire: Nothing. However, I hope she will print at least a single-sentence blog post with a correction, or disclaimer, or at least a link to the updated, post-propaganda, version of events, along with an apology to her readers.

To that end, I generously composed and sent the following letter, documentation included, to her husband, since there is no visible email address for Dr. Helen.

Dear Glenn,

You might remember me from the time that you were nice enough to pass my ‘Clintonisms’ book on to your kindly wife, who gave it a blurb on her site. I don’t have an email address for Helen, but my attention was called to the fact that she had interviewed a Barbara Oakley who rightly had a few reproaches for that awful APA organization.

The reason I was alerted to it was that unfortunately, the interview was blighted by some of Oakley’s opening remarks about the long-debunked staged atrocity known as the Racak “massacre”, used by Clinton to start the war against Slavs on behalf of Muslims in Kosovo who were claiming repression and exclusion while actually boycotting the host society’s institutions and setting up a parallel system. This should sound all too familiar by now, but in 1999 we called it “racism” by the host society — as a terror war was being waged against it on its own borders. To which we lent the full might of NATO.

Ironically, Oakley used the debunked propaganda to make a point about blocking out the truth. We learn that she gets her perspective on that region the way most pro-Albanian Americans do: having Albanian friends, acquaintances, contacts. In this case, it’s her adopted Muslim-Albanian sons. I also understand that her sister worked at a refugee center in Macedonia at the time, and this further underscores Oakley’s views. Unfortunately the “on the ground” people are often mistaken when they think they see the big picture, as related to Oakley by her sister. (Is this the sister who stole their mother’s boyfriend, by the way?; she went into that in the same breath practically.)

Anyway, the reason I’m writing is that I wanted to at least let Helen know, so she can do a one-line disclaimer blog after-the-fact or something, or at least say “for a more up-to-date view than Dr. Oakley’s opening remarks on the Kosovo conflict (which is still playing out)…”

She could link either to a Racak piece of mine, documented with links, or if she doesn’t want to link to me, there was a much shorter piece debunking the “massacre” in The Toronto Sun as early as 2001: “The Hoax that Started a War.”

The reason I’m allowing for the possibility that she may not want to link to me is that if you ask any of your mainstream conservative colleagues about “Julia Gorin and the Serbs,” you’ll get the typical, hasty response dismissing me as some kind of Serb-lover or Serb apologist or propagandist. That’s something that comes with the territory for anyone who deigns to look under the Balkan rock and find the horror — then makes the mistake of trying to let the world know. But I started on this unpleasant, unpopular, and confusing journey as just a mainstream conservative like you or any of your blogger colleagues, who didn’t trust the Clinton-led involvement there at a time that Lewinsky/Broaddrick threatened to be his defining legacy. But while everyone else moved on when cued, I continued watching. And saw the fallout, along with the underlying truth that steadily seeped out after the fact, away from the public eye once the spotlight left.

Unfortunately, most conservatives have forgotten that they did not support that “humanitarian” bombing, and need only to see Albanians waving American flags to accept the peculiarly bipartisan policy supporting the Kosovo surrender/giveaway, deluding themselves that they have found at last the truly moderate Muslim ally America thinks it needs. Sorry for the length of this, but please do pass it on to Helen. I hate to see her good work so sullied.
Yours,
Julia

I have yet to hear back from either Glenn or Helen, and a correction has yet to be posted. But I have to allow for the possibility that my letter didn’t reach them, or that they haven’t had a chance to read it, since I only sent it last Wednesday. After all, what other reason could there be for responsible professionals to not respond to such a letter? Aside from the usual reason that I don’t hear back after taking the time and energy to inform these otherwise informed folks: they don’t have time for the truth in the Balkans. But since that would be too painfully predictable, I’m hoping it’s just an issue of time in the case of the good Dr. Helen.

But there is more to be said here in response to the abominable Dr. Oakley. Let’s get back to that Macedonian refugee center where her sister was working — and let’s illustrate my point about it being difficult for people on the ground to get the big picture. From Hague observer Andy Wilcoxson:

Muharem Ibraj and Saban Fazliu, two ethnic Albanian witnesses from Kosovo who testified in Milosevic’s trial, said Serbian security forces encouraged civilians to remain in their homes, and that it was the KLA who made the civilian population leave the province.

Fazliu testified that the KLA would kill anybody who disobeyed its orders. He said, “The order was to leave Kosovo in later stages, to go to Albania, Macedonia, so that the world could see for themselves that the Albanians are leaving because of the harm caused by the Serbs. This was the aim. This was the KLA order.”

During the war, the London Times reported how “KLA ‘minders’ ensured that all refugees peddled the same line when speaking to Western journalists” by threatening the refugee’s loved ones. Unfortunately, that report was one of the few honest pieces of journalism to come out of Kosovo.
…
Goran Stojcik, a Macedonian ambulance driver who worked in the refugee camps during the war, testified under oath at the Hague Tribunal that he had eye-witnessed Western news crews stage-managing fake news footage in the refugee camps…In one example, he said a news crew threw a refugee child into the mud to make him cry for the camera.

On another occasion, he said his colleague’s medical supplies were stolen so a perfectly healthy man could be wrapped in bandages and placed on a stretcher to be portrayed as wounded in front of the TV cameras.

I guess the boyfriend-stealing sister might have missed something like this while doing time at a refugee center making amends for her past behaviors, at the Serbs’ expense.

Here is more on this, from Wilcoxson again:

Eve-Ann Prentice, the British journalist who testified at the Milosevic trial that she saw bin Laden at [Bosnian President] Izetbegovic’s offices, covered the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict for The Guardian and the London Times.

The difference between Ms. Prentice and most Western journalists who covered the war is the fact that she covered it from inside Kosovo, while her colleagues chose to report the war from the sidelines — particularly from the refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania.

The problem with reporting from the refugee camps was that the KLA had minders in the camps to ensure that all of the refugees peddled the same line when speaking to journalists.

Unlike her colleagues in the refugee camps, Ms. Prentice took great pains to ensure that whenever she interviewed civilians, neither the KLA nor the Serbian security forces were present.

According to Ms. Prentice’s testimony, the vast majority of ethnic Albanian civilians she interviewed told her that they were under immense pressure to leave Kosovo and that most of the pressure was coming from the KLA.

Only one of the Albanians that she interviewed told her that he was afraid of the Serbian security forces.

According to Prentice’s testimony, “The KLA told ethnic Albanian civilians that it was their patriotic duty to leave because the world was watching. This was their one big opportunity to make Kosovo part of Albania eventually, that NATO was there, ready to come in, and that anybody who failed to join the exodus was not supporting the Albanian cause.”… 

Alice Mahon, who served as a British MP from Halifax and a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels during the Kosovo war…told the Tribunal of one particularly dramatic incident when an ethnic Albanian woman, who came to Britain as a refugee from Kosovo, had a nervous breakdown in her office. This poor woman had been chased out of Kosovo by the KLA and was terrified at the thought of going back. Fortunately, Ms. Mahon was able to use her influence as an MP to allow this woman to remain in Britain.

The next point is this: The “massacre” heard by the Muslims whom Oakley trusts and whose Albanian word she accepts at face value (despite the Balkan saying “He lies like an Albanian witness”) was the gun battle between the KLA and the Yugoslav police in the famous operation that Yugoslavia invited the international press to observe.

So the question becomes: If the boys were just half a mile away from the battle — and the only people left around Racak by the time of the legitimate police operation that became the “massacre” were KLA and a handful of their relatives and other harborers — then the Albanian boys in need of new parents were more than likely either children of a fallen KLA fighter, or children of uncooperative Albanians killed by KLA. That would be the KLA that was known to everyone at the time — including media, politicians and the majority of Kosovo Albanians — as terrorists. In any case, the boys have been cooperative since, as all Albanians were quick to become once they saw who had won Western backing: the terrorists.

Enjoy your KLA spawn, Dr. Oakley. Sleep soundly.

The boys’ hearing the sound of gunfire and not of a “massacre” of course assumes that they heard anything at all. Why would I say this? Because they might have been simply told to say that they heard something, since every remaining “civilian” in the area, as usual, did as instructed, peddling the same story about Racak to international observers and media:

All the Albanian witnesses gave the same version: at midday, the policemen forced their way into homes and separated the women from the men, whom they led to the hilltops to execute them without more ado.

It went straight from Albanian lips to Bill Clinton’s and Madeleine Albright’s microphones:

Five days before beginning airstrikes, Bill Clinton thundered, “We should remember what happened in Racak…innocent men, women and children were taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed with gunfire.”

Madeleine Albright told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that there were “dozens of people with their throats slit” and that the only solution was “humanitarian air strikes.”

From BBC: “President Clinton and the head of the international observer mission in Kosovo [William Walker] both blamed Serbian forces for the killings…Those killed in the village of Racak, south of Pristina, were mostly men who had been rounded up and shot at close range. Some had been mutilated.”

In his report, former CIA operative William Walker, “spoke of ‘arbitrary arrests, killings and mutilations of unarmed civilians’ at Racak,” Peter Worthington wrote for the Toronto Sun in 2001, and cited the London Times’ even more imaginative touch: “…victims had their eyes gouged out, heads smashed in, faces blown away at close range, all ‘farmers, workers, villagers, aged 12-74, men, women, children.’”

Which is why, if you’re Slobodan Milosevic being asked repeatedly by journalists itching for a Democrat’s “righteous” war, about why you committed the atrocity staged by the KLA and international operatives, eventually you just might start to answer: “I. Can’t. Hear. You.”

Further, if we deigned to put the other part of Oakley’s Milosevic quote into context, we would in all probability find that he was not answering the question “Why did you massacre?” with the answer “Because there was a war.” But that he was answering Racak was a war.

It’s an easy contortion to achieve, especially if you remember that an oft-referenced Milosevic speech in Kosovo in 1987 “inciting nationalist fervor” was similarly doctored. His telling onlookers outside the hall where he was having meetings that local police shouldn’t be beating them for crowding to listen, turned into: “Nobody should dare to beat you.”; “No one has the right to beat you. No one will ever beat you again.”; “Nobody shall dare to beat you. We shall win.” — and so on, depending on how creative the reporting news organization felt like being, but all of them inserting the words into a speech he gave that day, “raged” from a platform.

In her response to Vincent, Oakley engaged in a common ploy used by conservatives who don’t have time for the truth in the Balkans: dismissing the updated, evidence-based “view” on the conflicts there as belonging to “leftists.” Conveniently forgetting that it was leftists who started our interventions there, supported by some “mainstream” conservative publications and think tanks.

Sorry you’re so common, Dr. Oakley. Now, if you could just point us to John Bolton’s leftism.

And yes, Vincent, it is a shame that conservative outlets like Pajamas Media have been infiltrated by the Balkans-based pro-Muslim propaganda. With contibutors like this, it’s unavoidable. Even Stephen “Suleyman Ahmad al-Kosovi” Schwartz gets print space at Pajamas Media — something that was only a matter of time for the man who guided The Weekly Standard to the dark side in the Balkans in the 90s. Fortunately and fairly, since Pajamas Media has a sense that it has no sense of which side is right, it gives space to the opposing view as well.

I’ll close by suggesting some further reading for Dr. Oakley, so that she might one day understand the psychology of her sons, and why they would do the KLA’s bidding, willingly or not, and wittingly or not:

How NATO Staged Albanian Flight During the Bombing

An Albanian Tragedy: A Stranger in Belgrade

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