In reality, it means nothing, because the comparison between the number
of Serbs dying at the hands of NATO according to the Serbs and the
number Kosovars dying at the hands of the Serbs according to the
Kosovars (and NATO) is akin to the comparison between the damage of
throwing a bullet versus actually shooting a gun.

Stan collins

It's up to you, Costas.

Snip

    Pacifica Network News Home May 4, 1999

        COMPLAINT AGAINST NATO LEADERS FILED IN UN CRIMINAL COURT

   A group of international lawyers, students and academics
   today filed a complaint with a UN Criminal Tribunal for the
   former Yugoslavia charging NATO leaders with war crimes and
   serious violations of humanitarian law. Pacifica's Dan
   Coughlin spoke with Glenn Rangwala, an international lawyer
   based at Cambridge University in England, who has led a team
   of international legal experts in assembling today's
   submission to the UN Criminal Tribunal.

          FEDERAL CHARGES LEVIED AGAINST NY CITY POLICE OFFICERS

OKUCANI, May (Hina) - The fourth anniversary of the Croatian
military and police operation "Flash" was marked in Okucani on
Saturday.

The operation was undertaken to liberate the western part of the
Slavonski Brod-Posavina County (central Croatia) from Serb
occupation in 1995.

Representatives of the Croatian Army, police, county and town
officials, as well as associations of families of soldiers of the
Homeland War, and veterans laid wreaths and lit candles on
locations where Croatian soldiers had been killed during the
operation.

A monument was also unveiled in commemoration of killed Croatian
soldiers.

(hina) lml

By Jack G. Shaheen, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding,
Georgetown University, 1997
http://www.cmcu.net/

Dr. Jack G. Shaheen, Pennsylvania-born emeritus professor of mass
communications at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and now
a visiting professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at
Georgetown University, wrote the book, literally, on media stereotyping of
Arab Americans. In 1974, upon returning from a one-year Fulbright teaching
grant at the American University of Beirut, he began collecting material
illustrating the treatment of Arabs and other Middle Easterners by U.S.
television, films and the mainstream press.

The result was a series of articles printed in national publications followed,
in
1984, by his landmark book, The TV Arab. His research also established the
need for and helped define the mission of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an organization with which he has
been informally affiliated since its establishment in 1980. Subsequently, he
has lectured at universities and before Arab-American, Muslim-American and
human rights organizations throughout the United States and abroad.

His new book concentrates also on the stereotyping of Muslims in the United
States, which in many ways has subsumed the original problem of
Arab-American stereotyping. To explain to readers why it is important to
distinguish between stereotypes and realities, Shaheen submits a series of
meticulously footnoted findings concerning the Muslim presence in the world
in general and the United States in particular, as well as the Christian Arab
presence in both.

“Islam, the fastest growing of the world religions, is now the second
largest,” Shaheen points out. “It is estimated that by the year 2000, Muslims
will constitute 27 percent of the world’s population. The 56 states which are
predominantly Islamic constitute one-third of the membership of the United
Nations...Eighteen million—nearly 80 percent—of the world’s 23 million
refugees are also Muslims...

“Through immigration, conversion, and birth, Muslims are our country’s
fastest  growing religious group. Approximately five to eight million
Muslims—African-  Americans, South Asians, American whites and
members of other ethnic groups—live in the United States...In 1970
there were fewer than 1,000  Muslims in Houston; today there are an
estimated 60,000. Nearly half  a million Muslims now reside in the
Chicago metropolitan area...  Approximately 400,000 Muslims live in
New York City...There are more  than 200,000 Muslim businesses
[in the U.S.], 1,500 mosques,  165 Islamic schools, 425 Muslim
associations and 85 Islamic publications.”

Turning to the Christian presence in the Middle East and among Arab
Americans, Shaheen presents carefully documented statements such as
these: “As [Duke University Prof.] Ralph Braibanti points out, ‘While
there are profound theological differences between Islam and Christianity,
there are also significant similarities. For example, social harmony with
Christians and Jews has always been a central tenet of Islam...On social
problems for instance,  there is almost complete agreement between
believing Christians and Muslims’...

“Approximately 15 million Christians—ranging from Eastern Orthodox to
Eiscopalian to Roman Catholic to Protestant—reside in Arab countries.
But motion pictures and television programs never show Arab Christians
even though the majority of America’s three million Arab- Americans are
Christians. According to the American Muslim Council, ‘about 30 percent’
of Arab Americans are Muslims.”

Having established the importance of his subject, Shaheen tells some
surprising tales. For example, “in 1980, during the height of the Iranian
hostage crisis, a national poll gauging American attitudes toward Arabs
revealed that 70 percent of the American people surveyed identified Iran
as an Arab country and 8 percent ‘admitted they did not know whether
it was or not.’”

Just as three-quarters of Americans could not distinguish between the
Indo-European Iranians and the Semitic Arabs, according to Shaheen,
nearly 40 percent of America’s Muslims are African-Americans, but
the U.S. media  “tend to identify them all with Louis Farrakhan’s radical
and highly publicized Nation of Islam.” Yet, says Shaheen, according
to The Washington Post,  “Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam is ‘a tiny splinter
group [with] less than 20,000 members.’”

Another bizarre fact is that in 1996 Janet Parshals, hostess of a nationally
syndicated evangelical Christian radio program, erroneously told her American
listeners that Muslims worship the “Moon God.” This gross misconception is
by no means unique to one Christian fundamentalist preacher, Shaheen
reports. It is widely repeated among evangelical media, with one such media
commentator, Dr. Robert Morey, having written that the Muslim “god Allah
was a pagan deity. In fact, he was the Moon-god who was married to the sun
goddess and the stars were his daughters.”

Shaheen devotes 17 pages to what might best be described as Hollywood’s
undeclared but seemingly endless war on both Arabs and Muslims, with
villains or buffoons of either persuasion gratuitously introduced to liven up
otherwise weak scripts. Many of the same examples have appeared in
Shaheen’s previous writings, but the total of such slurs and slanders against
one-quarter of the human race would be a sufficiently damning indictment of
the American film industry to make this writer give up Hollywood films
altogether—if I had not already done so long ago.

Interestingly, Shaheen makes particularly persuasive cases against CBS
among television networks and Walt Disney Productions among filmmakers,
despite the fact that, if memory serves me, he has been a consultant to both
in the past. Presumably he was engaged to head off consumer boycotts by
Arab Americans, but then found he was ignored more than he was heeded by
the two companies. Shaheen suggests in several ways that it is time for
Muslim and Arab Americans to unite on effective actions to halt these
outrages.

To me some of the most interesting anecdotes were contained in the 35
pages (more than one-third of the book) devoted to “Print and Broadcast
News.” There Shaheen cites a series of mistaken and sometimes surprisingly
elaborate predictions by America’s self-described “terrorism experts,” along
with networks and mainstream newspapers that should have known better,
that the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and the destruction
of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island would turn out to have been carried out by
Islamic groups. The Oklahoma bombing, however, was conducted by two
U.S. army veterans with no foreign ties, and investigators concluded that the
loss of the aircraft was due to an accidental electrical spark that ignited a
gas
tank.

In fact, Shaheen points out, the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism
reported that of 99 international terrorist attacks against U.S. interests in
1995, 62 of these attacks took place in Latin America, 21 in Europe, 6 in
Asia, 6 in the Middle East, 3 in Africa and 1 in Eurasia. Similar results were
reported for 1993 and 1994. Likewise, according to Shaheen, “The Los
Angeles Times reported that of 171 people indicted in the United States for
‘terrorism and related activities ‘ in the 1980s, 11 were connected to Arab
groups, 6 percent of the total.”

Further, although the media are quick to label such groups as “Islamic
terrorists,” no one described Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin,
yeshiva student Yigal Amir, or West Bank Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein,
who killed 29 Muslim men and boys at prayer in a Hebron mosque, as “Israeli
terrorists.” Nor did headline writers call Waco, Texas cult leader David
Koresh or abortion clinic murderer Michael Griffin “Christian terrorists.”

Shaheen quotes New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal’s statement
that “almost all the terrorism directed at the United States originates in the
Middle East.” Shaheen also quotes some particularly biased and misleading
comments from Mortimer Zuckerman, the strongly Zionist owner and
editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report and owner of the Atlantic
Monthly and the New York Daily News . Shaheen also cites a statement
by Middle East Quarterly editor Daniel Pipes to USA Today that “the
[Muslim] fundamentalists are on the upsurge, and they make it very clear
they’re targeting us”; a warning by Israel apologist Amos Perlmutter in
The Wall Street Journal of an “Islamic war waged against the West,
Christianity, modern capitalism, Zionism and communism,” and a charge
by Congressional employee and Muslim-basher Yossef Bodansky that
“Islamist leadership and terrorist organizations have launched an increasing
barrage of denunciations and attacks against the church.”

Shaheen also quotes extensively from Steven Emerson, whose alarmist and
highly misleading documentary film “Jihad in America” was shown on PBS
stations. And, in a commendable attempt at balance, Shaheen also quotes
several film critics and media reviewers with obviously Jewish names who
debunk many of the misleading or erroneous statements of such alarmist and
generally misinformed Muslim- and Arab-bashers.