The Newspaper of Record?

Neil Clark writes (http://neilclark66.blogspot.com):

The Times, the oldest newspaper in the country, has long been regarded as a paper of record. Lies and misinformation in other newspapers should of course be rigorously challenged, but in the Times when a writer puts forward information which he or she either knows is false, or has no evidence to back up the assertion, it is arguably even more serious, given the paper's historical reputation. Stephen Pollard has done that today. In his bitter tirade against members of the British Jewish community who don't share his opinions, he twice referred to the late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic as a 'genocidal butcher'.

Pollard has been asked to provide evidence to back up this claim on several occasions before and has failed to do so.

He needs to be held to account.

If like me, you feel strongly about this matter you can contact The Times editor, Robert Thomson either by email at editor@thetimes.co.uk, or at 1, Pennington Street, London E88 ITT. The Times comment editor, Daniel Finkelstein can also be contacted at that address and by email at daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk. You can also send a letter to letters@thetimes.co.uk.(If you'd like to contact Pollard directly to ask him about his sources, then his email address is stephen.pollard@cne.org)

Pollard must either produce evidence to show that Milosevic was a 'genocidal butcher',(Milosevic's four-year trial at The Hague certainly didn't come up with any) or else desist from making the claim in a public arena.

And unless Pollard can back up his allegation, The Times should print a retraction to say that their writer's claim was without foundation.

Quite.

In four years, at a cost of sixty million dollars and resulting in a court transcript of a staggering fifty thousand pages, absolutely no such evidence was ever uncovered at Milosevic's trial, despite numerous procedural abuses designed to produce a guilty verdict, and thus to vindicate NATO's war to dismember independent, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia in the interests of global capital and of assorted Holocaust-denying re-creators of the full panoply of 1930s Fascism (Franjo Tudjman), Saudi-backed Wahhabi rabble-rousers and erstwhile recruitment sergeants for the SS (Alija Izetbegovic), and Wahhabi traffickers of the Taliban's heroin into Europe, who insisted on wearing black shirts in deference to their fathers and grandfathers, and who have turned their statelet into a Mafia fiefdom (the Kosovo "Liberation" Army).

The failure to identify anything racist ever uttered by Milosevic should be contrasted with Tudjman's declaration that he would never allow a Serb, Jew or gypsy to marry into his family, and with pretty much anything ever said by Izetbegovic or by anyone from the KLA. This alliance between neoconservatives (such as Mr Pollard) and militant Islam should be seen as of a piece with that alliance in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Chechnya today, not to mention the neoconservatives' removal of one of the two principal Arab bulwarks against both Wahhabism and its Shi'ite twin (to which latter he was handed over to be lynched), and their current sabre-rattling against the other such bulwark (in Syria). And the heat needs to be turned up, and kept up, on those, such as Clare Short and Private Eye, who now purport to oppose the neocon-Wahhabi alliance having cheered it on at the tops of their voices in Yugoslavia.