Hounslow Green Party stands rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Damian James Read as its candidate in Hanworth Village ward

The Green Party’s candidate for the Hanworth Village ward in the Hounslow Borough Council Election of 5 May 2022 was Damian James Read. Of the seven candidates standing, he came last with 595 out of 3,358 votes – 17.7%. He is featured on the Hounslow Green Party’s website and in its list of candidates. They tell us ‘In his spare-time Damian grows “high carbon capture” trees, and other trees, from seed that he intends to plant around Hanworth to create an “Urban Arboretum”.’

However Read, who previously supported Labour and Jeremy Corbyn and has tweeted under the names @damianjread and @cockneyactivist, has more controversial views. He has a long history of viciously anti-Semitic statements, including Holocaust denial. Under his own name, he shared a link entitled ’21 things about the Holocaust that Zionists don’t want world to know.’

The link took you to a page entitled ‘Holocaust or Holohoax ?’ on a white-supremacist website, which speaks of ‘the alleged murder of 6 million jews by the Germans during World War Two. This is commonly referred to as “The Holocaust”. This alleged historical event is also thrown at anyone objecting to mass immigration in to White Nations as proof of the absolute evil of White Nationalism. The alleged holocaust was also the official reason for setting up the Sate of Israel...’.

When UK prime minister David Cameron tweeted about the ‘millions murdered in the Holocaust, Read tweeted back at him ‘I think you mean 300,000. An horrific event I agree. But not 6 million is it’, and ‘No missing 6 million’.

Some other statements Read has either tweeted or ‘liked’ include:

‘the Rothschilds came to control our economy’

‘Zionist controlled media’ (in reference to the international media)

‘Is it true that the BBC is in fact a dept of the Israel Embassy ? Is that why so many Zionist [sic] seem to have been given top jobs ?’

‘Fuck the Zionist Jewish Apartheid state’ 

‘6 million figure seems to have been repeated ad nauseum throught 20thC. Nazis blamed’

‘it’s God chosen [sic] people. God told they [sic] could commit genocide with impunity just like the Nazis’ (in reference to Israel)

‘I didn’t sell my soul to the Devil, He sold his soul to me #Evil #Israel #Zionist’ (in reference to Netanyahu, whom he depicts with fangs and blood dripping from his mouth, above a dead or injured baby – a version of the traditional ‘blood libel‘ anti-Semitic trope).

(most of these tweets were subsequently deleted; screenshots are below)

All this could have been learned through a minute’s googling. I have written about Read and his anti-Semitic circle before, for Engage – a website devoted to the struggle against anti-Semitism. It raises the question of how carefully the Green Party vets its candidates ?

The Left is wrong about racism

Witnessing the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK over the summer, I felt an old sense of frustration: the Left is wrong about racism and has been wrong for a long time. I know this, because I have lived much of my life near the hearts of the black community in London – Notting Hill, North Kensington and Brixton – and attended, back in the 1980s, a very rough and very multiethnic, largely working class and black secondary school: Holland Park Comprehensive. I was a white, Left-wing, ‘right on’ (as ‘woke’ was then called) teenager who joined the Labour Party Young Socialists and agitated against Apartheid South Africa. But my lived experience taught me that racism was not how the Left perceived it.

Our multiracial, mostly Left-liberal teachers taught us that racism was white and anti-black. In English class, we studied Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry; Mildred Taylor’s 1976 novel about racism in Mississippi in the 1930s. But London in the 1980s was not the Jim Crow South. I honestly cannot recall a single incident at Holland Park of any pupil or teacher ever being racist to a black person to their face. There was, however, plenty of racism, and it primarily involved white and black kids being racist towards ‘Asians’; i.e. children whose families were from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. I recall a playground fight, in which a very large black boy punched a much smaller Asian boy in the face so hard I could hear the blow, and was later told by a teacher it had begun with the black boy racially taunting the Asian. On another occasion, an Asian supply teacher took our class for a lesson and a black boy commented ‘this school is being P***-ised’. A white girl in our class went on a racist rant when a new boy turned out to be Asian, complaining ‘Why can’t we have someone English ?’ An Arab boy was reduced to tears when a white girl he fancied called him a ‘P***’.

Continue reading at Uncancelled

Michael Gove’s anti-Balkan Brexit propaganda

I recently received a pro-Brexit pamphlet through my door that argues I should vote for Britain to leave the EU because of the danger that further EU expansion into the Balkans will result in more immigrants from the Balkans coming over (see image, above).

This echoes an article Michael Gove published in the Daily Mail some weeks ago:

The Albanian Option. It sounds like a John le Carré novel. You imagine a story with political intrigue, huge sums of money going astray, criminality and double-dealing. And you’d be right. But the Albanian Option isn’t holiday reading fiction — it’s diplomatic fact. Albania is on course to join the European Union — alongside four other countries, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. The already unwieldy group of 28 is due to become a throng of 33. And Britain isn’t just backing this move. We’re paying for it. Every week we send £350 million to the EU. And now millions of your hard-earned taxes are being directed to these five prospective members. Between now and 2020 the United Kingdom will pay almost £2 billion to help these nations prepare for membership of the EU — that’s more than we will spend on the NHS Cancer Drugs Fund over the same period. This bounty will be our greatest gift to Albania since the comic talent of the late Sir Norman Wisdom, that country’s improbable national hero, lit up the dark days of Stalinist dictatorship. Indeed, I wonder if the Albanian people are now convinced that Britain’s Foreign Office is full of Norman Wisdom characters, lovable chumps whose generosity and good-heartedness make them easily gulled into accepting all sorts of bad advice. How else could they explain their good fortune in being on the receiving end of a £2 billion Balkan bonanza?

…

As Justice Secretary, I am well aware that there are around 10,000 foreign criminals in our jails — and one in 20 of those is Albanian. Of all the prisoners in our jails who come from European countries, 10 per cent come from Albania — yet Albania comprises less than half of one per cent of the overall population of Europe.

…

Those prisoners currently cost the British taxpayer almost £18 million a year to keep in custody. And that’s before Albanian citizens even have the right to move to the UK! The Home Secretary knows the problem is very far from diminishing. Already this year we’ve seen 20 gangsters from Albania convicted of running a brutal drugs ring in Manchester.

…

Of course, as the Home Secretary rightly noted, Albania is not the only accession country with an organised crime problem. Albania’s neighbour on the Adriatic Sea, Montenegro, has a breathtakingly beautiful coastline and romantic interior. It also, unfortunately, has mafia gangs, a reputation as a centre for money-laundering and a record for narcotics trafficking. The prime minister, Milo Djukanovic, has been a leader of the country almost continuously for the past 30 years. He started as a Communist apparatchik and friend of the murderous Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. But today he is a fan of the European Union and chummy with EU power brokers.

Has everyone got that ? Albanians and Montenegrins are basically all criminals and we need to leave the EU to stop them flooding into our country and swamping it. Huge, China-sized countries that they are. Gove’s exploitation of stereotypes of Albanians and Montegrins as criminals echoes the sort of propaganda popular among the supporters of Slobodan Milosevic and his successors, who first attempted to destroy the Albanian people of Kosovo as a group, then to deny their state international recognition. Note that Gove does not distinguish between Albanian criminals and Albanian people in general. Consider this sentence: ‘I wonder if the Albanian people are now convinced that Britain’s Foreign Office is full of Norman Wisdom characters, lovable chumps whose generosity and good-heartedness make them easily gulled into accepting all sorts of bad advice. How else could they explain their good fortune in being on the receiving end of a £2 billion Balkan bonanza?’ He is concerned that ‘the Albanian people’, not just Albanian criminals, might consider British officials to be ‘chumps’.

Albania has been one of Britain’s staunchest allies over the past two decades. Its troops have fought alongside ours, sustaining casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Gove is, of course, a neoconservative who strongly supported the US-led intervention in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. While the Albanian troops were shedding their blood in support of the unpopular intervention in Iraq, while other British allies refused to step forward, Gove did not say at the time ‘Go home; we don’t want you on our side as you’re a bunch of criminals and scroungers.’ No, he waited until the Brexit campaign cynically to stab them in the back. Though it is not inconceivable that he launched his anti-Albanian tirade in a fit of pique after his suggestion that the UK could form part of a ‘free-trade zone’ of countries outside the EU, along with Albania, was trashed by the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama.

His portrayal of Montenegro’s Djukanovic as a ‘friend of the murderous Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’ is another exercise in cynicism, given that Djukanovic has been a longstanding ally of the West who, as Montenegro’s president, visited Tony Blair in London during the Kosovo War in 1999 to declare his opposition to Milosevic’s policy – at considerable personal risk, given Montenegro was then under the military control of Belgrade’s forces.

Gove was, until 2011, a trustee of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society, whose policy at the time was to support the expansion of the EU to include the Western Balkan countries and Turkey. According to its manifesto, The British Moment, published in 2006 and currently selling on Amazon for as little as 29p, ‘The EU should contemplate expanding to include Turkey, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.’

Gove did not express any dissent from this policy at the time. He thus subscribed to a political vision that was outward-looking, seeking to combat totalitarianism and human-rights abuses, and promote Western liberal-democratic values across the world, and that sought to embrace Albania, Montenegro, Turkey and other Balkan states as allies in this project. He has now done a 180-degree turn, and subscribes to a political vision that is inward-looking and isolationist; the counterpart of Donald Trump’s call for a wall to be built against Mexican immigrants. Instead of seeking to export our positive values, Gove wants to keep the outside world out. No longer allies, Balkan states in Gove’s eyes are now threats; sources of immigrants who will come over, import crime with them, steal our jobs and scrounge off our taxpayers. The tension in neoconservatism was always present between its positive, optimistic, liberal-interventionist tendency that perceived a world inhabited by sisters and brothers in need of solidarity and freedom, and its regressive, pessimistic, Islamophobic and anti-immigration tendency that perceived a world inhabited by hordes of unredeemable economic migrants and jihadis. Orcs, one might say. Gove’s definite defection to the second tendency is a powerful indication of the movement’s degeneration.

What a disgraceful, miserable political evolution Gove has undergone. A powerful European union of democratic states including all the countries of the Western Balkans and, one day, a fully democratic Turkey is one we Brits should be proud to be part of.

Vote REMAIN on 23 June

What does it mean to be left-wing today ?

The Daily Mail’s leaking of Mehdi Hasan’s letter to Paul Dacre did not reveal Mehdi’s hypocrisy, merely an uncomfortable truth: these days, if you want to write for any outlet, you will probably have to disregard profound political differences with it while capitalising on the ground you share. That a left-wing journalist like Mehdi should admire some of the Mail’s values while loathing others is almost inevitable. For though the model of a simple binary political division between the Left and the Right may have appeared plausible during the 1980s, today it no longer does, and boundaries are increasingly blurred.

Continue reading at The Guardian or at Left Foot Forward

Douglas Murray’s falsehoods

Douglas Murray published a personal attack on me on the Spectator’s website on 10 May. Since the Spectator has not permitted me the right to reply, my letter was published at Left Foot Forward, and is now republished here. In addition, another reader of the Spectator wrote to complain about Murray’s attack on me; the Spectator did not publish his letter either, so the author has permitted me to publish it here.

Sir,

Douglas Murray’s personal attack on me (Spectator, 10 May 2013) involves a string of falsehoods. He claims ‘It is no one’s fault if they have not heard of Hoare. His opinions are largely self-published.’  Yet the outfit of which Murray is currently Associate Director, the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), published one of my reports on its website every month for most of the period that I worked for it (2005-2012); they were all erased a few months after Murray was appointed to the post. He accuses me of having ‘an unquenchable animus’ against him, and claims ‘This has been demonstrated in an endless stream of blogs and tweets.’ Yet I have mentioned Murray in only five of the 251 (at the time of writing) posts on my blog; one of these was only in passing and one was only in response to attacks on me by his HJS colleagues. He accuses me of ‘frequent abuse’; I have never abused him once, much less ‘frequently’.

Murray claims that my problem with him is ‘my [Murray’s] insistence on expressing my own opinions rather than his [Hoare’s].’ I have no problem with him expressing his own opinions; I simply frequently find the opinions he does express repellent, and exercise my right to say this. It’s called ‘freedom of speech’. He claims I object to his use of the term ‘white British’, and suggests ‘if he wants to continue his attempts to insinuate that I am racist because of this usage then he really ought to go the whole hog and accuse the authors, compilers and most participants in the 2011 census of being racists as well.’ But the problem is not his use of the term ‘white British’; it is his claim that ‘London has become a foreign country’ because ‘in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs “white Britons” are now in a minority’. This suggests the problem lies in there being too many British citizens with black, brown or yellow skin, or with white skin but whose families originate outside the UK. I don’t believe the authors of the 2011 census were saying anything like that.

Finally, Murray claims I was never a leading member of the HJS but merely ‘a freelance contributor to the website’. Yet as Greater Europe Co-Director, then European Neighbourhood Section Director, I appeared on the HJS staff list on the website from 2005 until the start of 2012; a screenshot of this staff list from around March 2008 can be found on my blog. I have documents in my possession proving that I was centrally involved in the organisation long before Murray joined, and helped formulate its leadership strategy in conjunction with its current President Brendan Simms, its current Executive Director Alan Mendoza, and others whose names have vanished from the website.

Yours faithfully,

Marko Attila Hoare
Kingston University

****

Dear Sir,

I refer to Douglas Murray’s May 10th blog entry, “A reply to certain critics”. Murray refers to Marko Attila Hoare thus:

‘It is no one’s fault if they have not heard of Hoare. His opinions are largely self-published.’

Hoare is, in fact, well known as a historian of the former Yugoslavia.  His work has been published by the Oxford University Press.

I make this point because I go to the Spectator blogs for commentary such as that written by Alex Massie, which is knowledgeable, stylish, and thought provoking. Murray’s latest screed, on the other hand, is not only ill informed and unfunny but reads in part like an attempt to smear someone in the course of a private vendetta. Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are full of this kind of toxic rubbish; can’t what is supposed to be the voice of urbane British Toryism offer something of a higher standard?

You might also point out to Murray that those who write superciliously ‘of a publicly-funded body called Kingston University’ need to get their literary references right: the writer and critic was William Dean Howells, not ‘Dean Howells’. Alternatively, you could just refer him to Makepeace Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs.

Yours faithfully,

Jonathan Davis
Austin, Texas

The degeneration of British neoconservatism

In my last post, I pointed to the claim by Henry Jackson Society Associate Director Douglas Murray, that ‘London has become a foreign country’ because ‘in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs “white Britons” are now in a minority’, and that by remaining silent about mass immigration, ‘white Britons’ are ‘abolishing themselves’ and undergoing the ‘loss of their country’. I also pointed to the claims by HJS Executive Director Alan Mendoza, linking ‘anti-Israel feelings’ in Europe to the fact that the ‘European Muslim population has doubled in the past 30 years’, that ‘Muslims in Europe will likely speak out against Israel whenever any Middle Eastern news breaks’ and that ‘their voices are heard well above the average Europeans’ [sic]. I argued that it was not appropriate for the small number of Labour MPs on the HJS’s Advisory Council to go on supporting the HJS, given such views on the part of its leadership.

My post appears to have sufficiently rattled the HJS leadership to prompt a series of online attacks on me by Mendoza and one of his HJS subordinates, Raheem Kassam. They made no attempt to explain or justify the disgusting statements in question, but are apparently sufficiently embarrassed by what I am publicising of their nature that they are seeking to discredit me as a witness. I was a senior staff member of the HJS – from the days when it still had some claim to being a bi-partisan, centrist political organisation – and this is something Mendoza is trying to deny. He now claims ‘At no time since HJS’s establishment of corporate form [sic] in April 2006 was Hoare a staff member’.

Unfortunately for Mendoza, although he has done his best to erase all online traces of what the HJS once was and of whom its original senior members were, the internet has not allowed him to get away with it. Here is a link to the HJS’s website from around March 2008, in which I appear two places from the top of the HJS’s staff list: HJSStaff9Mar08 (a screenshot appears at the end of this post). Indeed, his comments in the discussion at the thread beneath my article at Left Foot Forward are well worth reading for the comical nature of his attempts to deny this evidence.

Mendoza also claims that my involvement in the decision-making process in the HJS in my last years there was ‘precisely zero’, and that I rarely visited the London office. This is true: as I explained in my original post exposing him and his record, he ended the practice of holding meetings of the founding members, excluded them from any opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, and effectively abolished democracy within the organisation, turning it into his personal fiefdom and cash cow.

Finally, Mendoza claims that I am ‘frustrated’ because the HJS website had been the ‘sole outlet’ for my work – even though I am a published author with a rather more extensive record of online and paper publication than Mendoza himself. Though I do not pretend I was happy when Mendoza’s efforts to cut off his new HJS from its past involved a ‘reorganisation’ of the website that erased seven years’ worth of my articles – articles that he and the HJS had used to build its reputation, such as it is, as a ‘think tank’.

But all these personal attacks on me do not make the HJS and its current political views – on race and immigration, Islam, Europe, Israel and Palestine – any less ugly. The funniest part of Mendoza’s response to me was this bit: ‘Is HJS a pro-Israel organisation? Yes, HJS is certainly pro-Israel, just as it is pro-UK, pro-USA, pro-Canada, pro-India, pro-Australia, pro-Japan, pro-Taiwan, pro-Brazil, pro-Chile, pro-Uruguay, pro-Ghana, pro-South Africa, pro-Mongolia, pro-South Korea. We think you get the picture.’ Does a single person exist who would buy the line that the HJS’s view of Israel is the same as its view of Mongolia ?!

However, I have never accused the HJS of being ‘pro-Israel’, just as I have never accused Hamas of being ‘pro-Palestine’. The HJS treats the Palestinians as unworthy victims who deserve only colonial subjugation, and the Israelis as cannon-fodder for its own warmongering agenda. Anyone who really does want to destroy Israel would do well to donate money to the HJS, as it seeks to fight Iran and the Arabs to the death of the last Israeli.

Just as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 was a final wake-up call to anyone who harboured any illusions in the ‘progressive’ character of the Communist movement, so Murray’s and Mendoza’s views on race, religion and immigration should serve as final proof of the complete degeneration and moral bankruptcy of the tiny neoconservative faction in British politics, for anyone who may once have harboured illusions in it.

PS Despite his spurious claim to have a ‘well-established track record of support for the Bosnian Muslim population’, Mendoza was removed a year ago from the International Expert Team of the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada, which fights genocide denial over Bosnia, Srebrenica and the Holocaust. The IRGC’s director, Professor Emir Ramic, and its Governing Board were rather quicker than I was myself in correctly understanding him and taking appropriate action.

PPSS Contrary to what Raheem Kassam is claiming, I am not his ‘old acquaintance’; I have never met him, and only learned of his existence a few months ago. I have never submitted anything to The Commentator; as far as I know, it has republished just one of my articles – without asking my permission.

Labour’s shameful links with the anti-immigration right

The right-wing pundit Douglas Murray recently wrote:

‘To study the results of the latest census is to stare at one unalterable conclusion: mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority…

We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. “Get over it. It’s nothing new. You’re terrible. You’re nothing”.

For what it is worth, it seems to me that the vindictiveness with which the concerns of white British people, and the white working and middle class in particular, have been met by politicians and pundits alike is a phenomenon in need of serious and swift attention.’

Such words, one might expect, should place their author beyond the pale of respectable political opinion, in the sole company of UKIP and the rest of the fringe anti-immigration right.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

Anti-Serbian racism on US television

On 20 June, commenting on Amy Winehouse’s recent flop performance at a concert in Belgrade, the hosts of the US programme Chelsea Lately – Chelsea Handler, Chris Franjola and Greg Proops – made a series of crude and sneering racist remarks about Serbia and its people. After Handler expressed disbelief that Winehouse was allowed to perform while heavily intoxicated, Franjola commented ‘Well it was Serbia, they haven’t got a lot of rules over there’, to which Handler replied ‘I can’t believe they even allow Serbians to go to concerts’. Commenting on the fact that people in Serbia were describing the concert as a ‘disaster’, Proops remarked ironically ‘This is a place that had ethnic cleansing and genocide, and her concert was a bigger bummer than that’. After quoting Serbian defence minister Dragan Sutanovac, who wrote on his Facebook page that ‘Amy’s concert was a shame and a huge disappointment’, Handler quipped ‘Well so is your country’, which elicited a lot of cheering from the audience. After Franjola asked of Dragan Sutanovac ‘Wasn’t that the guy who beat up Rocky ?’, Handler commented ‘Dragan is a very popular Bolshevik name’.

[Unfortunately, the only remaining undubbed version of the clip that I can find on YouTube is accompanied by misogynistic insults directed against Handler that preclude it from being re-posted here, but readers are free to follow the link.]

Readers are urged to sign the petition calling upon the E! television channel to require Handler to apologise to the Serbian people. Proops has already apologised, though somewhat cursorily.

I had never previously heard of this television programme or any of its hosts, but judging by the clip about Winehouse and Serbia, it is a deeply unpleasant high-school-level sneer-fest. Indeed, the comments about Winehouse were just as petty, spiteful and unfunny as the comments about Serbia. An exemplar of the sort of gratuitous viciousness that passes for popular entertainment today. And sustained petty sneering of this kind will almost inevitably involve racism, sooner or later…

Sanela Diana Jenkins, misogyny and anti-Balkan racism

Sanela Diana Jenkins is a highly successful businesswoman and philanthropist, and the founder of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interviewer for The Observer, Carole Cadwalladr, has this to say about her: ‘She was born Sanela Catic to a humble Bosnian family, but there’s no doubt that Diana Jenkins is a classic romantic heroine: beautiful and bright, resourceful and determined, who rises above her background through sheer grit and force of will, and whose final apotheosis is achieved by a good marriage.’

Diana’s husband Roger Jenkins, one of the richest bankers in Britain, says ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. I can do anything now. I surrender to her better judgment on people and business.’ He maintained this opinion of her even after their separation was announced, saying that if they divorced, ‘Will she take half my money? Of course. And quite rightly so. I will happily give it to her.’ In Cadwalladr’s words, ‘although he was well off by most people’s standards, when she met him he wasn’t the insanely rich mega-banker that he’s become.’ According to The Daily Mail, ‘he credited his wife with charming the Qatari royal family into parting with £7.3billion last December. The Middle East investment deal rescued his employer Barclays at the height of the credit crunch.’ Residing in California, she mixes with the highest rank of the global elite, including celebrity friends such as George Clooney, Cindy Crawford and Elton John.

Jenkins is, in short, a self-made woman and success story by anyone’s standards. However, in the eyes of the London circles to which her husband belonged, there were three things wrong with her: 1) she was good-looking; 2) she was blonde; and 3) she was from Bosnia. The Daily Telegraph paraphrased her has saying that ‘society snobs drove me out of London’. In her own words: ‘They treated me like I was an Eastern European mail-order bride. I realised that, unfortunately, with social girls, if you have a big diamond ring they will talk to you, so I wore a diamond ring. Well, actually, when we could afford it, my lovely husband bought me a diamond ring. It hurt him to see how snobbily I was treated.’

A woman who is both young and beautiful and highly successful is likely to provoke a misogynistic reaction in many quarters, including among women (you only need to read the comments of Daily Mail readers or watch the Jeremy Kyle Show to see that men have no monopoly on misogyny). But for a certain type of English person the resentment will be much greater if the woman in question comes from a ‘lowly’ background, and being Bosnian will place her some way below the working classes and below most other white foreigners, without even the guilt over racism than might at least make the resentful ones a little embarrassed if she were black or brown.

I can confirm from personal experience that anti-Balkan racism is, indeed, a relatively acceptable form of prejudice in Britain. I recall one colleague at an institution where I once worked asking me to suggest a guest speaker for a seminar programme, and sneering when I suggested a Croatian name. One young man’s first comment, when I told him at a party that I was working on the history of the Balkans, was that I must clearly have a high tolerance for blood. A Serbian friend of mine recalled to me that when she worked as a waitress, a customer asked her where she came from, and when she said ‘Serbia’, he replied ‘I’ll get my gun out, then.’ A Bosnian friend of mine used to tell people at parties she was from Belgium, to avoid the dampening of the conversation that would frequently result from telling the truth.

It is testimony to the pervasiveness of anti-Balkan racism, in the UK and the wider English-speaking world, that when the American left-wing celebrity Michael Moore gave vent to this prejudice in his international bestseller Stupid White Men, it passed virtually without comment. Moore wrote:

‘This godforsaken corner of the world has been the source of much of our collective misery for the last century. Its residents’ inability to get along – with Serbs fighting Croats fighting Muslims fighting Albanians fighting Kosovars fighting Serbs – can be traced to the following single event: in 1914 a Serb anarchist by the name of Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand. This incident kicked off World War I. Which led to World War II. Over fifty million people died from both wars. I don’t know what it is about these people. I mean, I don’t go around killing Texans. I don’t go burning down whole villages in Florida. I’ve learned to live with it. Why can’t they?’

‘Then Tito died, and all hell broke loose. Croats started killing Serbs. Serbs killed Muslims in Bosnia. Serbs killed Albanians in Kosovo. Then the United States bombed Kosovo, to show them that killing was wrong. In the past few years there has been peace, then war, then peace again, and now war again. It never stops. These people are addicts.’

Moore’s advice to the former Yugoslavia was to ‘Admit that you are powerless over your addiction to violence, and that your lives have become unmanageable.’ Had he described African Americans as having an ‘addiction to violence’, it is difficult to imagine him getting away with it, but for the Balkan peoples, such language is apparently acceptable.

Nor is Moore unique in his prejudice. The New York Times concluded an editorial in 2005 with the opinion that ‘In the Balkans, the default mode is violence.’ Julie Burchill wrote in The Guardian – yes, The Guardian ! – back in 1999, ‘Croatia’s not a country; it’s a bloody division of the German armed forces – scratch a Croat, find a Kraut.’ Nebojsa Malic of Antiwar.com described the Kosovo Albanians as ‘medieval barbarians’ – of course, Malic is from the Balkans himself, but he was published by an American website.

Many serious scholars have commented intelligently on the pervasiveness of anti-Balkan prejudice, including Maria Todorova and Tom Gallagher. Here, I would just like to add my own brief personal observations.

Anti-Balkan prejudice now means something specific for the former Yugoslav lands. Bulgarians and Romanians may be subject to anti-East-European prejudice in the UK similar to that experienced by Slovaks or Poles. Turks may be subject to anti-Muslim prejudice. I have no personal experience of how these groups fare in the US. But the prejudice directed against former-Yugoslavs is of a kind that transcends the borders of Western nations. It is related to the wars of the 1990s and to the stereotype of violence, primitivism and tribalism that that conflict rejuvenated; former Yugoslavs would not have experienced the same degree of prejudice before the 1990s. It is a prejudice for which journalists bear their share of the blame for repeating and publicising cliches, as do Balkan nationalists themselves for manufacturing negative myths about each other’s peoples – hence, the stereotypes of the Serbs as violent and nationalistic, of the Croats as pro-Nazi and of the Albanians as criminals.

However, the Bosnians in some ways come off the worst, and this is related to the perception of them as weak and pathetic; as being a people without a proper country or functioning state. Their suffering during the war of the 1990s, followed by their defeat in the war (albeit one snatched from the jaws of victory by US diplomacy), followed by the long, continuing and humiliating international supervision of their country, has cemented the stereotype of them as perpetual victims unworthy of respect; in some sense, equivalent to actual homeless people. I suspect that if Jenkins had come from Russia or Ukraine, she might still have been sneered at as a ‘mail-order bride’, but she would not have been despised as a refugee from a virtual country as well.

To end on a positive note: these stereotypes are widespread but they are not universally held. There are plenty of circles in multiethnic London that would not be snobbish about someone on account of their nationality; where someone with a background like Jenkins’s would be the norm rather than the exception. The snobs who drove Jenkins out of London may be representative of part of the London financial elite, but in cultural terms they represent a primitive, ethnically homogenous anachronism in our cosmopolitan city. They are worthy of the same sort of contempt as the average participants on the Jeremy Kyle Show. Primitivism and vulgarity span the class divide.

EU insult to Bosnians and Albanians

Citizens of Bosnia and Albania recently received the right to visa-free travel to the EU. These are the last countries in the Balkans whose citizens have received this right, leaving Kosova as the only remaining country in the region whose citizens do not enjoy it. Yet it appears that EU officialdom is less than enthusiastic.

‘It is a possibility to travel, to meet friends, family and to get to know each other better… [but] it does not give any rights to work or to stay longer in the EU’, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said after she met in Sarajevo with Bosnian officials and university students. ‘If the [European] Commission sees that there is a systematic abuse of this, automatically, of course, the visa liberalisation, visa freedom can be withdrawn’. Furthermore,’I hope we will not reach that stage, but we are here today with the Belgium presidency (of the EU) to bear in mind the limits in order not to give the wrong message and to inform people’. She then visited Tirana, where she repeated this warning: ‘we encourage Albanians and Bosnians to think carefully and to respect the rules established for visa liberalisation in the Schengen area.’

‘Visa liberalization allows you to come and you are welcome but you cannot abuse visa liberalization’, said Melchior Wathelet, immigration and asylum secretary for Belgium, which currently holds the rotating EU Presidency. ‘It doesn’t mean you can seek asylum, get money from member states, seek welfare support from the member states, or that you will be allowed to work in the EU’. Furthermore,’Do not undermine the signal that has been given by the member states, it’s really a signal of confidence towards Bosnia’. Wathelet said. Malmstrom said the European Commission would make a report on the way the procedures have been respected ‘in six months’.

What these worthy Eurocrats are actually saying, of course, is ‘we in the EU don’t much like Muslims, Gypsies or poor foreigners in general, and you worthless Balkan untermenschen had better not get above yourselves and do anything that might upset the racist and Islamophobic constituency in Western Europe, to which our mainstream politicians nowadays are grovelling.’

In the face of such an insulting threat, it is heartening to note that some are ignoring it. As BalkanInsight reports, Mirela Imsirevic, a 28-year-old Roma from Sarajevo, is planning ‘to finally get a life’ by taking her five children abroad: ‘I would like to live abroad…in any country that would let me do it’.

This appears sensible; if it is really true that visa-free travel can be withdrawn, then all those who want to come had better hurry up. There are few causes more noble than upsetting gypsy-baiters like Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy and their supporters as an end in itself. Bosnians in particular should remember the EU’s responsibility for causing the economic and political mess in their country; the appeasement of Milosevic and Karadzic; the arms embargo; the betrayal of Srebrenica. The EU owes you. Albanians have been among the staunchest defenders of the free world over Afghanistan and Iraq, something that cannot unfortunately be said for all EU member states. The least the EU can do is to allow you to immigrate to it without whining.

Bosnians, Albanians and other peoples of the Balkans should send a clear message to the EU apparatchiks that they will not be intimidated. Come on over !