The Bosnian Muslim Government Reformed the WWII Nazi SS Division Handzar in 1992-1995
Finally, Hoare rejected Fox’s 1993 news report from the London Daily Telegraph out of hand, but this was not done by the Republican Policy Committee of the United States Senate, which cited Fox’s report as credible and accurate [...]
Marko Attila Hoare rejects and suppresses this factual image of Bosnian history in favor of a fantasy or delusional image from a television comedy. The real Heinrich Himmler (Heimlich Bimmler) reviewing the real or “historical” Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar, 1943.
Did the Bosnian Muslim Army and Government reform or recreate the infamous Nazi SS Division Handzar or not? Based on Martko Attila Hoare’s response to my article, Hoare now concedes that, indeed, there was a formation in the Bosnian Muslim Army termed the “Handzar Division”.
Let me reiterate that. Hoare admitted that the Bosnian Muslim Government did indeed reform the Handzar Nazi SS Division of World War II. When you cut through and deconstruct all the ideologically-driven claptrap, innuendo, ad hominen, personal attacks, this is the conclusion that he reaches.
Hoare is so caught up in his own arrogance and conceit that he does not even notice that he admitted this fact.
Marko Attila Hoare used this fantasy image to illustrate his article on the reformed Bosnian Muslim Handzar Nazi SS Division. Michael Palin is shown as Heimlich Bimmler (Heinrich Himmler), John Cleese as Mr. Hilter (Adolf Hitler), and Graham Chapman as Ron Vibbentrop (Joachim von Ribbentrop), from a 1970 episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Reality is rejected over delusional fantasy constructs.
Hoare, nevertheless, convinces himself that he was “vindicated” in denying the existence of the reformed Handzar Division. How does he do this? His rebuttal consists of challenging the strength of the reformed Handzar Division. Now that he admits that it existed, he now challenges the size of the formation. His argument is: The reformed Handzar Division did exist, as you claimed, but it was very small. It was a little bitty Nazi SS Division, not a big bad full-sized Nazi SS Division!
The Holocaust as joke? Michael Palin as Heimlich Bimmler (Heinrich Himmler) in a 1970 comedy sketch. Isn’t Hoare a Holocaust denier? Fact: Bosnian Muslims, Albanian Muslims, and Croats played a role in the real Holocaust.
But is this a valid argument? Is someone pregnant or not? Can you be pregnant by degree? Is someone dead or not? Can you be only dead to a small degree? Did the Bosnian Muslim Army recreate the Handzar Division or not? This requires a simple yes or no answer. What Hoare initially challenged and questioned was the existence of the division. To be sure, he hedged his bets and cheated by conceding that the division might exist “conceivably” but that its number was small in size.
Hoare hedged his bets this way: “[I]t is conceivable that there really was a handful of Muslim zealots who, during the recent war, fought on the Bosnian side and grandiloquently named themselves the ‘Handžar Division’ after this historic unit.”
Hoare, in essence, denied that the division existed at all. This was the gist of his article. Now he admits and concedes that it, in fact, existed. Now he argues that the unit or formation was a small one. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what he claimed because he constantly changes his arguments and contentions.
Fact versus delusional fantasy? This is a factual image of the real Henrich Himmler (Heimlich Bimmler) with the real Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar which Hoare has suppressed and repressed. Delusional fantasy is more reassuring than factual reality.
A fair characterization of his initial argument was that there was no evidence for the reformation of the Handzar Division. The eyewitness account of military analyst and journalist Robert Fox was deemed not credible. Hoare disingenuously hedged his argument by claiming that “conceivably” it could have existed. The way to translate this argument is: No, the Handzar Division was not reformed. But, nevertheless, it is possible it may have been reformed. Of course, this is nonsensical and absurd.
Hoare then concluded: “Monty Python is a much better source for accurate historical information than Neil Clark and his comrades.”
So was the Handzar Division reformed or not? In his rebuttal to my article, Hoare now admits that the Handzar Division was reformed. He again hedges his bets by claiming this time that it was a small unit formed by “zealots”. But, again, the size of the unit or formation was never the question or issue. If there was a small unit or formation in the U.S. Army or British Army termed the “Adolf Hitler Regiment” or “Das Reich Division”, would it be relevant or material that the unit in question was only made up of “a handful” of “zealots”? Now that the existence of the unit is accepted and acknowledged, the issue shifts to the size of the unit, which is unknown.
Hoare concluded: “It would seem that the ‘Handžar Division’, confidently described as numbering ‘about 6,000 troops’ by our friend, does indeed turn out to be a bit smaller when the available evidence is examined closely.”
Alija Izetbegovic, a war president of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, was during WWII a member of the SS Handzar Division
Hoare here mischaracterized Fox’s original statement by quoting my estimate of the strength of the unit. Fox stated that UN peacekeeping “officers” had told him that the reformed “Handzar Division” was “up to 6,000-strong.” Fox emphazied that the strength of the unit was an approximation or estimate made by UN observers. Fox refers to the formation as a “unit” and as an element of the Bosnian army. Hoare ignores this explicit language and now argues that Fox claimed that the reformed unit consisted of “about 6,000 troops”. But nowhere does Fox state that the unit was made up of 6,000 troops. The phrase “up to 6,000-strong” could encompass any number from one member to 6,000 members. Moreover, Hoare ignored that fact that Fox referred to the formation as a “unit” in his report leaving the actual size open to debate. Fox referred to the members of the unit as “Handzars” and as “[h]ardline elements of the Bosnian army, like Handzar.” Fox wrote that the formation was a “unit” of the Bosnian army similar to other units: “The Handzars are working closely with other units around Fojnica. ” But even at 6,000 men, it would only have ranked as a regiment or brigade, which usually consist of up to 5,000 men, not a division, which is generally accepted as a formation of 10,000 men or more. In short, the focus or emphasis of the Fox report was the existence of the unit, not the size, on which issue Fox only proffered a potential maximum figure that was based on a UN estimate.
Finally, Hoare rejected Fox’s 1993 news report from the London Daily Telegraph out of hand, but this was not done by the Republican Policy Committee of the United States Senate, which cited Fox’s report as credible and accurate. In a January 16, 1997 report, the Committee, chaired at the time by U.S. Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican from Idaho, noted that “there exists another group known as the Handzar (‘dagger’ or ‘scimitar’) Division” and quoted from Fox’s report. Thus, members of the U.S. Senate, tasked with safeguarding the lives of U.S. troops, found Fox’s report to be factual, credible, and accurate. Only Marko Attila Hoare questioned the veracity and accuracy of the Fox report. Absurdly, the Bosnian Muslim Government or Army never denied the existence of the reformed “Handzar Division”. Only Hoare has done this. At the war crimes trials of Bosnian Muslim military commanders at the ICTY, the existence of the “Handzar Division” as part of the Bosnian Muslim Army is openly acknowledged and detailed.
The translation is: The Bosnian Muslim Government of Alija Izetbegovic reformed the Nazi SS Division Handzar during the 1992-1995 civil war. This is the only logical conclusion when one cuts through all of Hoare’s labels and propagandistic nomenclature.
Hoare uses a bevy of labels to do the thinking for him: “Serb-nationalists” (yes, with a hyphen!), “Milosevic supporters” (at least Hoare gets the correct pronunciation of his name with the correct Serbo-Croat form of his name), “Islamofascist” (no hyphen, a neologism popular after 9-11), “members of a US-based circle of Milosevic supporters and Srebrenica deniers” (an analogy with Holocaust deniers), “Great Serbia” (a propaganda term coined by Austria-Hungary before World War I), “ex-Maoist” (is that a good or a bad thing?), “Milosevic-supporting, Srebrenica-denying website” (hyphenated now, denoting an activity), “all good Chomskyites” (are there such people as “Chomskyites” out there?), “Serb nationalists and their supporters” (no hyphen; do “Serb nationalists” have supporters?), “Serb nationalists and their fellow travellers” (didn’t this term go out with the Joseph McCarthy Communist Witch Hunts during the 1950s Red Scare?), and “the Great Serbia supporters”.
How can one explain this plethora of labels? Why does Hoare use such preposterous and risible labels? We use labels to preclude thought or thinking. Labels are a shortcut to thinking and intellectual debate or discussion. In fact, labels are meant to preclude or prevent any thought at all. This is why Hoare uses labels. They are mindless and senseless. Why use them then? In essence, Hoare does not want to debate or discuss these issues rationally or logically. He thus engages in the use of labels, what is termed “name calling” in propaganda analysis. In propaganda, we use “pulpit words” or “glittering words” to describe ourselves and our own actions and the opposite words to describe our opponents. In short, Hoare wants to preclude any thought or debate. This is why he resorts to such propagandistic words. There is no thought or thinking going on, no discussion or debate or dialectic. There is only a stream of pre-selected labels or prejudiced or loaded words. It is like when Polonius asked Hamlet what he was reading: “Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words.”
The case is closed. As Detective Steve McGarrett would say to Detective Danny Williams, “Book ’em, Danno!”
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Recently, the West and the Middle East pundits and analysts have been trying to analyze the provisions of the new draft constitution proposed by the Russian side as a solution to the Syrian conflict.Naturally, analyzing the provisions, any of the sides involved in the conflict is trying to present itself as the legitimate government. That raises the question of whether to adopt such a draft or not, because a newly appointed government would have to comply with a new constitution. Not surprisingly, not only the moderate opposition and illegal armed groups, but the official Syrian authorities as well subject the ...
The Bellamy salute is the salute described by Francis Bellamy, Christian socialist minister and author, to accompany the American Pledge of Allegiance, which he had authored. During the period when it was used with the Pledge of Allegiance, it was sometimes known as the "flag salute". Later, during the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascists and Nazis adopted a salute which had a similar form, and which was derived from the so-called Roman salute. This resulted in controversy over the use of the Bellamy salute in the United States. It was officially replaced by the hand-over-heart salute when Congress amended the ...
Serbian emergency shelters for Bosnian refugees sold to the public as a concentration camp to win public support for international intervention.In August 1992, millions of people were shocked to see photographs of a supposed Bosnian Serb death camp. But the death camp story was a lie. The ITN crew had filmed from inside a fenced-in storage area. By shooting through the fence ITN created footage that gave the impression that the Bosnian men were imprisoned. With a little editing, this footage was turned into pictures that gave the impression of a death camp – media manipulation.The death camps were in ...
The most useful parable about progressives is that offered by Bernard Sanders, self-styled “socialist-progressive-independent” rep from Vermont. Sanders owes his political career to rage against the Vietnam War among radicals, many of whom moved into the state in the early 1970s. They forthwith planned a long-term, carefully organized, assault on Vermont’s two-party structure. Sanders linked his political ambitions to this effort to organize a third force, the Progressive Alliance. He became mayor of Burlington and, later, congressman.At a rapid clip the emphasis moved from party-building to Sanders-building. By 1994, it was apparent that the only movement B. Sanders was interested in ...
As the U.S. and NATO casualties rise from the war in Afghanistan, with 2010 being the deadliest year of the nine-year war for the U.S., the question needs to be asked of how we got involved in that interminable and unwinnable conflict? The Afghan war has been dubbed Barack Obama’s War but its origins go back much earlier. Is the U.S. military disaster in Afghanistan an instance of blowback?What is the standard definition of “blowback”? The U.S. intervenes illegally in a volatile and unstable scenario and over time the consequences of that criminality come back to reek havoc on U.S. ...
Russian professor, Doctor of History Sergey Perevezentsev has touched upon a hidden historical and political motive of the scandal caused by the speech of the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow at the celebration of Bulgaria's liberation from Ottoman oppressors.It would seem that Bulgarian President Rumen Radev said everything correctly in his speech - he called to keep memory of the warriors of many nations killed on the fields of those old battles: Russians, Romanians, Finns, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Polacks, Lithuanians, Serbians and Montenegrins. "Historical tolerance" is preserved, and principle of "multiplicity of truths" is not broken.However, as the historian explained, in 1874 ...
"Please don’t write about Ya’ir Golan!" a friend begged me, “Anything a leftist like you writes will only harm him!"So I abstained for some weeks. But I can’t keep quiet any longer.General Ya’ir Golan, the deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, made a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. Wearing his uniform, he read a prepared, well-considered text that triggered an uproar which has not yet died down.Dozens of articles have been published in its wake, some condemning him, some lauding him. Seems that nobody could stay indifferent.The main sentence was: "If there is something that frightens me about ...
Media narrative: Hateful protestors stormed the Macedonian parliament after an ethnic Albanian Talat Xhaferi was elected speaker for the first time.Truth: Protestors stormed the parliament because Xhaferi was declared speaker in an illegal, unconstitutional manner as part of an ongoing coup d'état. It had nothing whatsoever to do with his ethnicity.Even though Xhaferi was "elected" in an irregular manner, the US and EU have already stated they recognize his appointment. This now paves the way for ethnic Albanian parties and the smaller of two main Macedonian parties (Social Democrats) to proclaim a government without the constitutionally required go-ahead from the President of the Republic.The latter has defied ...
With American military personnel now entering service who were not even alive on 9/11, this seems an appropriate time to reexamine the events of September 11, 2001 – the opaque motives for the attacks, the equally opaque motives for the counter-offensive by the United States and its allies known as the Global War on Terror, and the domestic fall-out for Americans concerned about the erosion of their civil liberties on the homefront.Before venturing further, it’s worth noting that our appraisal is not among the most common explanations. Osama bin Laden, his lieutenants at Al-Qaeda, and the men who carried out ...
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40thanniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende. Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other ...
The Yugoslav Youth MovementsThe idea of the Yugoslav unification became a leading ideological force of several youth movements among all Yugoslavs either of those living in an independent Serbia and Montenegro or of those living in Austria-Hungary. Their political-ideological inspiration was a pan-Italian unification movement – Young Italy (La Giovane Italia), established by Giuseppe Mazzini in 1831 in France.The Yugoslav youth movements flourished between 1903 and 1914 by having different regional or other names but not exclusively ethnic ones in various Yugoslav lands like Omladina (Youth), Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), Mlada Dalmacija (Young Dalmatia), etc.[1] The Austrian general of the ...
Belarus is a land known also as Belorussia (White Russia, Weißrussland) in East Europe which was for centuries occupied by a Polish-Lithuanian common state until it became included in Tsarist Russia in the late 18th century.[1] Belarus is facing many identity problems but the most important is the ethnolinguistic challenge to a separate Belarussian[2] national feature.National identityA common national identity is a focal element for the creation of a national state as without a common identity that is based on a fundamental element of group’s identity a psychological sense of common solidarity cannot be developed. However, such solidarity is a ...
The internal and much more external destruction of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was celebrating in 2015 its 20th year of anniversary. However, this historical and much more geopolitical event still needs a satisfactory research approach in regard to the true geopolitical reasons and political-military course of the destruction of this South Slavic and Balkan state. During the last quarter of century, the (western) global mainstream media unanimously accused Serbia and the Serbs of the national chauvinism as the main cause of the bloody wars on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, the role and direct impact ...
I will not dwell either on the prehistory nor early history of the region of Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet) in this article.The Montenegrins and medieval SerbiaIt used to pass from one state to the other, until Stephan Nemanja (1166−1196), a nobleman from Zeta (present-day Montenegro), founded the state of Serbia, whose center very soon later became exactly in today’s KosMet. First a Byzantine vassal dukedom, Serbia became soon an independent state, to become an empire under the rule of Stephan Dušan (1331−1355), the first Emperor of Serbia.[1]Serbia’s Nemanjić’s dynasty ended with Dušan’s son, Uroš, disintegrating into many feudal possessions.[2] In the epic ...
Destroyed Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo by local Muslim Albanians after 1999In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance ...
Once NATO’s 1999 war on Yugoslavia came to an end, units of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) poured across the border. The KLA wasted little time in implementing its dream of an independent Kosovo purged of all other nationalities. Among those bearing the brunt of ethnic hatred were the Roma, commonly known in the West as Gypsies. Under the protective umbrella of NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR), the KLA was free to launch a pogrom in which they beat, tortured, murdered and drove out every non-Albanian and every non-secessionist Albanian they could lay their hands on.Not long after the war, I ...
When an intelligence agency arranges to disseminated fake news it is called “disinformation” and it is a subset of what is referred to as covert action, basically secret operations run in a foreign country to influence opinion or to disrupt the functioning of a government or group that is considered to be hostile.During the Cold War, disinformation operations were run by many of the leading players in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in the opposition Warsaw Pact. Sometimes the activity and the sponsorship were clearly visible, as when Radio Free Europe and Radio Moscow would exchange barbs about ...
As Turkey’s President Erdogan runs out of money, he is now, more than any time before, using religion to exploit the Balkans, especially the states that are more susceptible to Islamic influence. Bosnia is at the fore of Erdogan’s ambitious Islamic agenda, where he is sparing no political capital or financial resources, even under his current economic hardship, to assert his influence and distance the country away from the EU’s reach. Obviously, the Bosnians cannot survive simply on being devout Muslims, with the youth unemployment rate at almost 60 percent. Turkey is unlikely to economically recover anytime soon, and Erdogan’s ...
March 24 [2020] will mark the 21st anniversary of NATO’s occupation of Serbia’s Kosovo province, and so we reaffirm: Kosovo is Serbia. Serbia does not and will not ever recognize Kosovo’s claims of sovereignty. We call on NATO to end its occupation of Kosovo.NATO’s occupation of Kosovo and its increasing militarization of the province is a threat to the world’s common security. Albanian occupation authorities continue their assault on human rights and fundamental freedoms, brutally silencing critics in civil society and the media, and curtailing religious freedom. Hundreds of individuals from Kosovo, including members of the Serb community, have been ...
Amid a divisive debate in Ukraine on state honors for nationalists viewed as responsible for anti-Semitic pogroms, the country for the first time observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a 1920s statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots.The minute was observed on May 25, the 90th anniversary of Petliura’s assassination in Paris. National television channels interrupted their programs and broadcast the image of a burning candle for 60 seconds, Ukraine’s Federal News Agency reported.A French court acquitted Sholom Schwartzbard, a Russia-born Jew, of the murder even though he admitted to it after the court ...
Did the Bosnian Muslim Army and Government reform or recreate the infamous Nazi SS Division Handzar or not? Based on Martko Attila Hoare’s response to my article, Hoare now concedes that, indeed, there was a formation in the Bosnian Muslim Army termed the “Handzar Division”.
Hoare, nevertheless, convinces himself that he was “vindicated” in denying the existence of the reformed Handzar Division. How does he do this? His rebuttal consists of challenging the strength of the reformed Handzar Division. Now that he admits that it existed, he now challenges the size of the formation. His argument is: The reformed Handzar Division did exist, as you claimed, but it was very small. It was a little bitty Nazi SS Division, not a big bad full-sized Nazi SS Division!
Alija Izetbegovic, a war president of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, was during WWII a member of the SS Handzar Division
The translation is: The Bosnian Muslim Government of Alija Izetbegovic reformed the Nazi SS Division Handzar during the 1992-1995 civil war. This is the only logical conclusion when one cuts through all of Hoare’s labels and propagandistic nomenclature.
