The beauty of blogging

The beauty of blogging is that it allows you to rant on without necessarily advancing our knowledge. Debating Holocaust deniers, for example, is such an exercise in futility since nobody serious can disagree about the key facts. That doesn't keep fools like Major General (ret.) Lewis MacKenzie -- who was nowhere near Bosnia in the summer of 1995 -- to declare that the massacre in the UN safe haven "was not a black and white event in which the Serbs were solely to blame." (He's right on that one -- I'd also blame the Dutch.) He doubts that more than a few thousand were murdered (which presumably would make it somehowe okay). He blames the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica for provoking the attack. He claims Naser Oric (whose name he misspells twice) was responsible for as many killed Serbs outside Srebrenica as the Bosnian Serbs were for killed Muslims inside the town. And he concludes, with admirable intellectual coherence, that the massacres couldn't possibly have been genocide because the Serbs let the kids and the women get away.

MacKenzie, of course, is a notorious revisionist who has been paid by Serb lobby groups for his fine work promoting their viewpoint. But I'm afraid that his views carry a certain weight with people on the far left who'd rather sacrifice a few thousand Muslims than allow any course of action that might result in an increase in U.S. power, or who compulsively dispute everything that is "fed" us by the "corporate" or "mainstream" media.

What I don't understand is how a fine paper like the Globe and Mail can give space to such lunatics. (By the way, it seems like you need a subscription to access the MacKenzie op-ed, but in a service to mankind another balanced news source has reproduced the piece on their website.)