The truth is, international law did not die in Gaza—it died in Bosnia
Esad Širbegović is a writer and analyst based in Zurich, Switzerland. He is also a member of the International Expert Team at the Institute for Research of Genocide Canada. In 2022, he served as the Director of the International Expert Team for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, focusing on the Srebrenica genocide denial case at the University of Vienna. Esad’s work is deeply rooted in his personal experiences and centres on the critical issues of Islamophobia and genocide
Srebrenica-Potocari Genocide Memorial Center in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The decision by Austria’s national broadcaster, ORF, to provide a platform for genocide denial reflects a broader crisis in European political discourse—one marked not just by historical amnesia but by the active rehabilitation of dangerous narratives. In a recent interview, Austrian islamophobic Nobel laureate Peter Handke reiterated his long-standing denial of the Obmana – Bosnian Genocide, dismissing it as Brudermord (biblical fratricide) rather than acknowledging it as a systematic crime against humanity.
Europe’s failure to confront denialism is not merely a failure of memory but an enabling mechanism for ongoing violence. The refusal to hold perpetrators and their apologists accountable normalizes impunity. When public broadcasters lend credibility to figures like Handke, they do not merely host a controversial voice—they participate in the erosion of truth. The consequences extend beyond historical distortion; they shape the political terrain in which future atrocities become conceivable.
Fratricide as the worst crime
The Obmana – Bosnian genocide was the first genocide broadcast on television. In 1995, distressing images from Srebrenica filled living rooms worldwide, exposing the failure of international protection. Despite a lengthy process of prosecuting war crimes through the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and court decisions implicating the complicity of European peacekeepers in the massacres, denial of the Bosnian genocide continues to be well tolerated.
While Handke is by far not the only prominent public figure that engages in it, his rhetoric makes clear how the Obmana has come to be weaponised in minimising German and Austrian guilt.
Handke portrays the genocide as a tragic civil war between “brothers” – Brudermord. He romanticises war criminals as victims and embeds genocide denial in a fascist narrative of redemption through ethnic violence.
According to him, fratricide is “much worse” than genocide – i.e. those who kill their “brothers” must be deemed worse criminals than the Nazis who killed “the other”. By framing atrocities this way, Handke effectively minimises the responsibility by Germans and Austrians since World War II.
In this twisted narrative, the descendants of Nazis can claim moral superiority, insisting they did not commit the “worst crime of all”— Brudermord. The chilling implication is that Jews were never truly “brothers” to Europeans like Handke.
Serbs nationalists may see Handke as an ally in genocide denial, but he doesn’t defend them—he uses them. Through them, white Europe cleans its bloody hands from its vast crimes – from Auschwitz to Algeria, from Congo to Rwanda. Handke’s theological language is an alchemy of European conscience, shifting guilt onto Muslims, Jews, and “Balkan savages”.
Transplanting anti-Semitism
Handke’s logic parallels and reinforces Germany’s broader campaign to shift the blame for antisemitism—and even the Holocaust—onto Arabs and Muslims. It constructs an ideological superdome: a narrative that erases responsibility for genocide while elevating Nazi descendants to moral superiority over both Jews and Muslims. Central to this logic is the idea that fratricide—the killing of a “brother”—is a crime worse than genocide, thereby reframing the Holocaust as a tragic internal rupture. Handke’s Brudermord logic amplifies and consolidates Germany’s wider campaign to shift blame for antisemitism—and even the Holocaust—onto Muslims.
Germany’s intentions are clear.
The Bundestag passed a resolution implicitly blaming Muslim immigrants for rising antisemitism. German state media fabricates a “Muslim Nazi past,” claiming: “Unlike Germany, the Middle East has never reckoned with its Nazi past.” The state-funded NGO Democ brands the Palestinian keffiyeh a Nazi symbol and echoes Netanyahu’s discredited claim that the Grand Mufti “inspired” the Final Solution. Just as Peter Handke sought to erase the crimes of Serbian war criminals, Germany’s political establishment—amplified by figures like Douglas Murray—is now constructing a revisionist moral alibi: one in which Nazis are reimagined as reluctant, remorseful perpetrators, while Palestinians are vilified as more evil than the Nazis themselves. In this upside-down narrative, the Nazis become victims of Nazism.
Bosnia’s High Representative, Christian Schmidt, is actively participating in this distortion—portraying a Nazi pilot as a victim of Nazism.
The core ideas of the AfD have become mainstream in German politics. With the sole exception of its stance on Russia, the AfD’s positions—especially on anti-immigration, Holocaust revisionism, and the scapegoating of Arabs and Muslims for antisemitism—have been widely adopted by the political center. What was once far-right rhetoric is now implemented by establishment parties that are planning to strip German citizenship from those who oppose the genocide in Gaza.
This shift reflects a long-standing strategy of displacing guilt. Historian Ernst Nolte, celebrated by the CDU-aligned Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 2000, argued the Holocaust was a reaction to Soviet “barbarism,” relativizing Nazi crimes by equating Auschwitz with the Gulag.
Nolte argued that Hitler had “rational” reasons for targeting the Jews and rejected the “collective guilt” attributed to Germany since 1945. AfD leader Alice Weidel now echoes this stance, dismissing Germany’s remembrance culture as a “guilt cult” and rejecting “guilt” in terms strikingly similar to Nolte’s.
Where Nolte blamed the Soviets, today’s political establishment blames Muslims, but the goal is the same: to rewrite German guilt out of history.
From denial to enabling
Genocide denial is not a passive forgetting but an active, harmful force that perpetuates violence. Recognised by scholars like Gregory Stanton as the final stage of genocide, denial ensures that cycles of brutality do not end but often restart, allowing past atrocities to be erased and repeated.
For survivors and their descendants, denial deepens trauma by invalidating suffering, distorting truth, and stripping victims of dignity, memory, and justice. These wounds extend beyond individuals, affecting entire communities across generations.
Meanwhile, genocide denial shields perpetrators, delays reparations, and blocks reconciliation, leaving survivors without closure and deepening social divisions. It perpetuates violence by denying past genocides and allowing perpetrators to go unpunished, creating a political climate in which repeated violence against persecuted groups becomes more likely.Gregory Stanton not only identifies denial as the final stage of genocide but also as a critical warning sign of the next one.
It also undermines international law and human rights frameworks, signalling that even crimes against humanity can be ignored.
We see this clearly in how Europeans are reacting to the genocide in Gaza, denying that it is happening at all, despite repeated pronouncements by UN experts and genocide scholars.
The truth is, international law did not die in Gaza—it died in Bosnia. It was kept artificially alive by empty promises until the Palestinians, through their sacrifice, exposed its collapse. Their suffering reveals that Europe – the birthplace of this international legal order – is fully complicit in genocide.
The genocide denial playbook developed in Bosnia is now applied to Gaza. It follows a familiar pattern: blame “both sides,” portray victims as aggressors, and isolate guilt to a few individuals—thus hiding systematic violence. This blueprint, refined in Bosnia, is perhaps most clearly echoed in Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen’s response to calls for Israel’s exclusion from Eurovision: he affirmed Israel’s right to participate, urging criticism be limited to Netanyahu and his government—not the state—thus separating policy from structure and evading deeper accountability. This reflects the familiar pattern of genocide denial in Bosnia, where the prevailing narrative reduces responsibility to a few “bad apples” within the Serb state apparatus—as if genocide were a spontaneous aberration rather than a meticulously planned, state-executed crime requiring widespread coordination and intent. Following this logic, the European Union’s Commissioner for Bosnia, Adebayo Babajide, along with diplomats from EU member states, laid wreaths at a Serb military cemetery near Bratunac—honoring the very forces that carried out the genocide.
Bosnia’s post-Dayton structure is itself a denial of both the Obmana and the Holocaust. Republika Srpska—created through genocide—still exists, despite its leadership and army being convicted for genocide. Holocaust survivors like Jews, Roma, and Sinti remain second-class citizens, barred from the political offices due to bloodline. The West, meanwhile, symbolically mourns Srebrenica each year while upholding this system.
Today, genocidaires govern Srebrenica, denying the very crimes they committed. Like letting SS run Auschwitz. Dayton enshrined impunity, not justice. Denying the genocide of Bosniaks laid the groundwork for enabling future genocides—such as the one unfolding in Gaza. Once Europe erases Muslim suffering at home, it justifies violence abroad.
Bosniaks were painted as “Turks,” foreigners in their land. Palestinians are dehumanized as a “demographic threat” and “human animals.” In both cases, language strips personhood before bombs fall. Sarajevo was besieged under an arms embargo. Gaza is starved and bombed under blockade—with Western support.
Cultural erasure also mirrors: libraries and mosques destroyed in Bosnia; schools, archives, and hospitals razed in Gaza. Denial continues—Bosnia’s was post-war, Gaza’s unfolds in real time.
When the University of Vienna refused to apologize to genocide survivors, it signaled a moral shift: legal and ethical norms no longer apply to Muslims in Europe. Genocide begins not with bombs but with words.
A clear parallel between the genocide in Bosnia and the one in Gaza is the explicit genocidal intent expressed by those in power. In May 1992, Ratko Mladić admitted: “What you are asking me to do, gentlemen, is called genocide.”
In Gaza, Israeli officials have likewise declared intent: calling Palestinians “human animals,” and invoking the biblical command to destroy Amalek. This rhetoric makes clear that the violence is not accidental—it is ideological and premeditated. Words precede bombs.
The script repeats: dehumanization, denial, extermination. Same crime. Same complicity.
Preparing for a future genocide in Europe
Europe today faces a profound crisis as far-right nationalism surges and a vanishing middle class struggles amid growing social and economic precarity. In many Western countries, the middle class is shrinking while what the right calls “surplus population”—disproportionately composed of Muslims—is increasingly marginalised and scapegoated.
In a time like this, recasting a past genocide against an othered population as a misunderstanding contributes to creating the environment for the next genocide to come. And there are already clear indications that segments of the political class are pushing for removing this “surplus population” under various guises.
The Nazi euphemism “Umsiedlung nach Osten” (resettlement to the East) was a grotesque excuse to deport Jews to gas chambers. Today, European actors like Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner openly advocate for “remigration”, a sinister echo of this deadly logic aimed at uprooting Muslim communities.
It is naive—and deeply irresponsible—to trust the words of those who commit genocide. The EU is currently complicit in genocide in Gaza. That’s why its so-called “centrist” immigration policies should be seen for what they are: a step toward the forced removal of Muslims from Europe.
These are not neutral measures but ideological tools of racialized removal, cloaked in liberal rhetoric.
As the EU funds and arms genocide in Gaza, it also builds a legal regime for exclusion at home: the 2024 Migration Pact, Italy’s offshoring to Albania, and Frontex’s illegal pushbacks.
In an effort to psychologically condition children for expulsion, Frontex even published a children’s book about deportation.
Muslims are made killable abroad and removable within. Bosnia revealed Europe’s complicity in genocide disguised as neutrality. That façade has now fallen in Gaza—where international law is openly disregarded without hesitation.
This is not alarmism. It’s a pattern. The erosion of rights always begins with those deemed foreign. And when the groundwork – genocide denial – is laid, history shows us exactly where it leads.
The Nobel Prize for Peter Handke— the genocide denier—was a political signal. It was preparation of public for genocide. Now his “Brudermord” framework further prepares the same public for genocidal triumphalism over both Jews and Muslims, paving the way to portray them—when the moment comes—as primitive brothers who commit crimes that “civilized” white Europeans claim they would never commit: killing their own.
As Joseph Massad reminds us, Zionism began as a Protestant Christian project to racialize Jews as “Asiatics”—outsiders to Europe and not brothers to Europeans in any way. The notion that Jews are not their brothers is very clear to every white supremacist.
If genocide denial is not urgently addressed, if the Gaza genocide is not recognised and immediate action taken to stop it, Europe risks coming full circle. With genocide denial expanding and the urge to renounce responsibility for the Holocaust growing, the ground is being prepared for these horrific atrocities to repeat.
*Note about the term Obmana:
The term Shoa describes the genocide of the Jews. The term Nakba describes the genocide of the Palestinians. Obmana (engl Deception) is the term that describes the genocide of the Bosniaks.
Obmana is not only the act of physical extermination but also the key method by which Bosniaks were systematically placed in a position where they could not resist genocide. Between 1992 and 1995, deception played a crucial role in the planning and execution of genocide. Bosniaks were massacred exclusively where they had been deceived—by fascist Serbian and Croatian forces, by the United Nations, and by the West, which imposed an arms embargo, thereby stripping them of the right to self-defense.
Obmana culminated in the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995, when UN forces, instead of protecting the Bosniaks, became active participants in their destruction. Officially, Srebrenica was a “safe area,” but UN soldiers, rather than defending civilians, assisted Serbian forces in carrying out executions by identifying and separating men from their families. Thousands of Bosniaks were then brutally murdered.
Obmana (deception ) manifested itself in various aspects of the genocide. One of them was the international arms embargo imposed by the West on Bosnia and Herzegovina. While Serbian and Croatian forces were armed to the teeth, Bosniaks were left without the means to defend their homes, cities, and families. The embargo was not neutral—it was a tool of deception and directly benefited the aggressors. Just as Jews during the Shoah were forced to face the Nazi machinery without weapons or protection, so too were Bosniaks left to genocide without any possibility of defense.
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