I have been writing here for almost 10 years and often addressed the depraved and incessant attempts by Serbia (in or out of former communist Yugoslavia) to inflate the numbers of people who perished in the WW2 Jasenovac camp in Croatia, while ignoring or blaming others or covering up the fact of 94% of Serbian Jews having been exterminated for the sake of Serbia’s WWII status as one of the first Jew-free (Judenfrei) states of Europe. The past several weeks have produced articles of similar content or intention in other media sources such as American Thinker and The Jerusalem Post, which caught not only my attention but also the attention of many around the world and especially across Croatia, Serbia and Israel.
However, The Jerusalem Post had within two or three days taken down from its portal the article written by David Goldman, “This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now” and yet kept on its portal the article written by a Serb from Serbia, Dejan Ristic, in reply top David Goldman’s article.
Hence, not only would the reader of Jerusalem Post not be afforded the decency and the right to compare on its portal both Goldman and Ristic articles, but we have here evidently yet another example how deeply rooted support for Serbian lies and depravity regarding WW2 events in Europe and its victims appears to be. So, in case you, the reader, are reading in Jerusalem Post the Dejan Ristic, tripe published on 17 August 2021, so that you may know what he is referring to I will publish in its entirety the article Jerusalem Post published on 15 August 2021 and written by David Goldman, and taken down by the Jerusalem Post within a couple of days, but kept online by the Pressreader.
The greatest problem and threat to the truth is that Dejan Ristic in his reply to David Goldman’s article holds that Goldman “…tried to make meaningless 76 years of continuous research, both by experts and institutions of Yugoslavia – later Serbia and Croatia – as well as institutions such as Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)….” The problem and threat to the truth is that research done by Yugoslavia cannot be trusted as its outcome was nothing more than communist propaganda against Croatia’s independence fighting in WWII and Serbs were an important part of that propaganda and they continued so, maintaining a lie of numbers of victims, even after Yugoslavia was smashed apart in the 1990’s despite the Serbian aggression and atrocities committed as Serbs tried to stop the breakup of communist Yugoslavia. All Croatian research has proven that both Yugoslav and Serbian research are incorrect, devoid of many most relevant historical facts and charged with political propaganda in favour of the Greater Serbia agenda.
What David Goldman’s articles appear to pursue is the truth, bare truth and facts and Serbs don’t like this, neither do those who stand behind the Jerusalem Post it seems.
On July 11, 2021, an Australia-based journalist David Goldman wrote an article “Erasing the History of the Holocaust” published on the American Thinker portal and in it, among other things, Goldman writes:
“…However, one of the most insidious Holocaust relativization battles is occurring in the Balkans, where the very soul of Holocaust history is being ‘stolen’ by another group and where one of the main weapons of choice is a WW2 concentration camp called Jasenovac.
While there is no doubt that it was a place of brutality, Jasenovac is also used as a wellspring of fake news to underline Serb ‘martyrdom,’ with the camp’s death toll exaggerated by Serbian historians in order to ‘prove’ that their suffering was equal to or greater than that of the Jews, so that in the Balkans, at least, Jews are being Photoshopped out of the Holocaust and replaced with Serbs.
The site, which Yugoslavia in 1979 rebranded as ‘The Auschwitz of the Balkans,’ also has the dubious honor of being the only former concentration camp that is unable to provide any forensic evidence for its claims, while at the same time publishing stolen pictures of Nazi horrors from Treblinka, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland in lieu of providing any evidence of its own.
Moreover, recent independent research has shown its victim database as being 89% unverifiable or fake, while the original official death toll has increased 40-fold since 1945 — and is incredibly still growing in 2021!
This deliberate manipulation of Holocaust history has been given legitimacy by many in the liberal elite like Wiesenthal Center head Ephraim Zuroff, U.K. historian Rory Yeomans, and many others, who seem determined in supporting a Wag the Dog–like farce promoted by the same people who in July 1995 used their Jasenovac claims as justification of their genocidal slaughter at Srebrenica.
This substitution of the Jewish Holocaust for the mythical ‘suffering’ of Serbs,’ or what some writers termed the ‘hijacking of the Shoah,’ represents an existential threat to accepted history, exemplified by Serb nationalist Vuk Draskovic, who has erroneously claimed: ‘It is by the hands of the same executioners that both Serbs and Jews have been exterminated at the same concentration camps, slaughtered at the same bridges, burned alive in the same ovens, thrown together into the same pits.’
So as the actual Jewishness of the Shoah is further diluted, the warnings from Holocaust experts like Professor Lea David from the University of Haifa grow louder. ‘The Serbian political elite has hijacked Holocaust imagery and symbolism to present Serbians as righteous victims and justify a new nationalist ideology,’ she says.
But these are just some of the threats to Holocaust history, mostly underwritten not by tiki torch–carrying white supremacists, nationalist populists, or radical jihadists, but rather by those tasked to honor and protect the lessons of the Holocaust — not just for the Jewish people, but for the entire world.”
“This disgraceful mocking of the Holocaust needs to stop now” The Pressreader as it appeared in The Jerusalem Post · 15 Aug 2021 · • By DAVID GOLDMAN The author is an Australian writer and freelance journalist and director of the thegoldmanreport.org, a site dedicated to exposing Nazi collaborators and neo-Nazis living Down Under.
“When on a hot and balmy June weekend in 2018, as Dr. Ivo Goldstein was being interviewed for Croatia’s popular Sunday at 2 TV show on the increasingly problematic Jasenovac concentration camp, little did he know the maelstrom he would ignite.
Some 28 minutes into the interview, Goldstein was asked by the host: ‘Many have commented on the lack of any forensic evidence from this particular camp. Can you explain why this is the case?’
That’s when Goldstein, one of the most respected historians in the Balkans, dropped his bombshell. ‘…this is because in April 1945, Hitler flew special machines to Jasenovac. These machines were used to dissolve the bones that were left…,’ he said.
At a time when antisemitism is growing exponentially with one in four American millennials believing the Holocaust was faked while just over half of Germans believe that Jews overplay the Holocaust, Goldstein’s claim that as Berlin was being pummelled into dust by Russian artillery, Adolf Hitler found time to fly a hitherto unheard-of machine into some Balkan boondoggle in order to ‘dissolve’ human bones was not only tin-foil hat fantasy, but the last thing that Jews need right now.
More to the point, why allow the contamination of Holocaust history with a place that cannot provide any independent forensic evidence past a few thousand victims and that has an ever-increasing – including in 2021 – victim list that has repeatedly been proven to have been doctored?
Furthermore, why did groups like Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum for decades look the other way as the Jasenovac Memorial Site stole pictures from Treblinka, Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere in order to bolster its inflated claims? And why do these organizations to this day continue to substantiate ex-Yugoslavia’s claims of an astronomical World War II death toll, despite three of its own official population censuses showing otherwise?
Located in Croatia about 100 kilometres south of the capital Zagreb, Jasenovac was established by the collaborationist Ustashi in August 1941. According to most sources, about 85% of inmates were Serbs, Roma, Bosnians and Croats, while the remaining 15% being Jews. In 1947/48 Yugoslavia’s forensic examination of the camp and surrounding county found that all up, between 2,500 and 4,500 were killed in the camp.
In 1980, a cash-strapped Yugoslavia rebranded Jasenovac as the ‘Auschwitz of the Balkans,’ in a cynical attempt to try and extort money out of West Germany, with the camps’ death toll subsequently being pumped up to 59,000, then 72,000, 77,000, 99,000, 250,000 and all the way up to 800,000 victims, like some macabre game of ‘genocide bingo.’
However, not only could Belgrade not provide any physical evidence to back up these newly inflated numbers, rather it disgracefully announced that a camp with less than 4,500 proven (mainly non-Jewish) victims was now equal to Auschwitz, the site of the ghastly murder of nearly 1.5 million people, most of them Jews.
If there was ever a clear case of antisemitism and self-hatred – especially by those Jewish historians who have allowed the history of Holocaust to become hijacked for what is basically a Balkan territorial dispute – this was it.
It goes without saying that the growing legions of Holocaust-deniers around the world would love nothing more than to be helped in their quest to dent the veracity of the most tragic and evil event of the 20th century. Historians have long commented how to the West, Serbia promotes Jasenovac as part of the Jewish Holocaust, but in the Balkans, Jews have been removed from the Holocaust altogether and replaced with Serbs.
As Dr. Lea David, professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa noted, ‘The Serbian political elite then hijacked the images and symbols of the Holocaust in order to equate Serbian victims with Jewish victims and promote Serbian righteous victimhood as enduring throughout the 1990s wars. Having established Serbs as victims of the Holocaust, the Serbian government then moved to sideline the roles of Serbian Communist partisan fighters and to rehabilitate quisling Chetnik members and other right-wing figures,’ she says.
As the University of Otago’s David McDonald also noted in Globalizing the Holocaust: A Jewish ‘Useable Past’ in Serbian Nationalism: ‘Holocaust imagery pushed the envelope, allowing Serbian nationalist goals to gain wider, more universal appeal. It could resonate with domestic Serbs and those in the Diaspora, as well as with Jews and non-Jews… where myths of Serbian and Jewish suffering were interwoven, providing a new series of national myths.’
As for the US Holocaust Museum, on its website, it admits ‘Determining the number of victims… for Jasenovac is highly problematic, due to the destruction of many relevant documents, the long-term inaccessibility to independent scholars of those documents that survived…’
So why quote figures if they are ‘highly problematic,’ especially considering the museum is aware Yad Vashem throughout the 1990s repeatedly tried obtaining the original Jasenovac documents from Serbia but has been flat-out refused to this day? Just as puzzling was Yugoslavia’s decades-old assertion that more victims’ remains are ‘to be discovered,’ yet during its 47-year rule of the site, it never bothered once to try and locate these mysterious ‘missing’ remains.
Those who have conflated the only wartime concentration camp without any verifiable data with scientifically proven Holocaust facts have done immeasurable harm to Jewish history. In this era of hyper-antisemitism and a world of increasing hatred of all things Jewish, it’s high time that everyone – especially Jews – stopped collaborating with malign actors to mock the Holocaust.”
Regretfully, it seems to me that The Jerusalem Post failed to heed the message in the above David Goldman’s article and continues supporting the Serbian agenda of victim number fabrication and denial of victims made by WW2 Serbia. That is disappointing but not as utterly disappointing as the appalling morality that laces its keeping on its portal the article by Dejan Ristic in reply to David Goldman’s but taking David Goldman’s article down so that readers could not refer to it! Just as well the facts and the truth of history will not cower to or be intimidated by the likes of Greater Serbia propagandists and their entourage. Ina Vukic
THE JERUSALEM POST HAS PUBLISHED AN EDITORIAL ON THE ABOVE MATTER EXPLAINING WHY THEY REMOVED FROM THEIR PORTAL THE ARTICLE BY DAVID GOLDMAN AND THE EDITORIAL CAN BE FOUND VIA THIS LINK
Furthermore, Ivo Goldstein mentioned in the above article by David Goldman has published his reply in Jerusalem Post 21 August 2021 and his reply can be read here