By Brendan O’Neill
http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/brendanoneill/2009/01/07/whoring-the-holocaust/

During the civil war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, Holocaust imagery was rife in Western media coverage and in the pronouncements of Western politicians. Then, the Bosnian Serbs were labelled as the “new Fourth Reich”. The Guardian called them the “tinpot Nazis of the Balkans”. Others said the Bosnian Serbs were “committing the same crimes” as the Nazis, carrying out a “Holocaust” against Bosnian Muslims. Anyone who argued that, while the war in Bosnia was unquestionably terrible, it could not be compared to the crimes of the Nazis or seriously described as a “genocide”, was labelled a “denier” – a slur that provocatively sprung from the phrase “Holocaust denier”.

During NATO’s bombing campaign over Kosovo in 1999, Holocaust imagery was wheeled out again. American and European newspapers reported on the “Nazi-style annihilation” of Kosovo Alabanians by the Yugoslavs. The German defence minister said there was “serious evidence” in Kosovo of “systematic extermination that recalls in a horrible way what was done in the name of Germany at the beginning of World War II”. In truth, an estimated total of 3 000 people, on all sides, died during the Kosovo conflicts between 1997 and 1999. A terrible figure, of course. But let us remember that the Nazis frequently killed more than 3 000 Jews in a single day in their death factories.
Such was the Holocaust-hysteria during Bosnia and Kosovo that death camp survivor Elie Weisel felt compelled to intervene. “The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that Milosevic and his accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?”, he asked.

Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked, the "sassy, irreverent, UK-based online magazine of news and opinion", as the San Francisco Chronicle described it. He has been labelled "one of Britain's sharpest social commentators" by the Daily Telegraph and as a "loony lefty hack" by the far-right British National Party. His journalism is published widely on both sides of the Atlantic and is collated at: http://www.brendanoneill.co.uk/.