There’s a movie that just opened, called “Storm,” about a Hague prosecutor and an of course innocent Bosnian-Muslim victim of — what else — Serbian crimes during the Bosnian war. Here’s the NY Times hack review of the hack flick, by Stephen Holden:

Crime, Punishment and Painful Memories of Bosnia

“Storm,” Hans-Christian Schmid’s dry, concise thriller, examines the politics surrounding the prosecution of a former Bosnian Serb Army commander for war crimes. Its United States release seems inspired by the current trial in The Hague of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. In the movie his apparent fictional stand-in, Goran Duric (Drazen Kühn), is charged with supervising the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnian Muslim civilians.

What seems to be an open-and-shut case against him suddenly falls apart with the suicide of the prosecution’s chief witness, Alen Hajdarevic (Kresimir Mikic), a gaunt, wild-eyed Muslim, who hangs himself after it is discovered that he lied to the court about witnessing events at which he wasn’t present. His death is a bitter blow to Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox), an intrepid prosecutor who has just been handed the case by her cynical, hard-nosed boss, Keith Haywood (Stephen Dillane).

That alone is weird; a Muslim doesn’t commit suicide unless he’s wearing a belt bomb so he can take a bunch of others with him.

Determined that she not be made a scapegoat for others’ failures and that the case remain open, Hannah is given one week to travel to Bosnia to find new evidence against Duric. At Hajdarevic’s funeral in Sarajevo, she meets his sister, Mira Arendt (Anamaria Marinca, the Romanian actress from “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), who has returned briefly from Berlin, where she lives with a husband and young son.

Hannah extracts information from Mira about a hotel that was a Bosnian Serb Army headquarters where atrocities were committed. Mira warily confesses that she was held prisoner there with other women and repeatedly raped. Hannah persuades Mira to travel to The Hague and testify against Duric, although because of time restrictions she can offer no assurances that Mira’s testimony will be admitted.

“Storm” begins with a prologue set three years earlier, in 2005, that shows Duric’s arrest while on vacation with his wife and two daughters. The movie is unambiguous about his presumed guilt. In the courtroom he is a bulky, glowering presence who casts a cold, imperious eye on the proceedings.

Well doesn’t that just say it all right there. Just as in real life, so it is in film: Serbs are presumed guilty. And no one makes an issue of this. Not in government. Not in media. Not in cinema. Like I always point out, entities that normally act as a check on one another — government, media, military, cinema, human rights organizations and so on — are always, always on the same page when it comes to the Balkans, reinforcing, parroting and perpetuating a single version of events. Notice that the filmmakers have no problem with the reality of the presumed guilt of Serbs, and so they depict it with an free conscience in the film. Then, the reviewer seems to have no problem with the presumed guilt portrayed by the filmmaker. Back to the review:

For a political thriller, “Storm” is remarkably restrained. There are no flashbacks to the wars in the Balkans or to the atrocities in the hotel, which Hannah visits seeking information. While there she is surreptitiously photographed and menaced by Serbian nationalists, one of whom throws a rock through her car window.

Mira, just before leaving for the Netherlands, is thrown violently against a wall by a Serbian thug and warned not to cooperate with “those pigs in The Hague.” Ms. Marinca plays her as a worried but brave woman buffeted by outside forces as she prepares to unleash a flood of traumatic memories.

Oh those menacing Serbian thugs, Serbianationalists and all the other Balkan buzzwords! My but don’t I sleep better at night, feeling safe knowing that all those Serbian thugs and nationalists are behind bars at the Hague! Certainly there’s nothing at all for me to worry about from all those Bosnian Muslim “victims” of theirs running around. Is there? Maybe one day there will be a movie showing what happens to prosecution witnesses in trials of Balkan Muslims. A rock through a car window? Pushed up against a wall? If only!!

…As Mira faces the possibility that she won’t be allowed to testify about her ordeal, she blurts out a question about the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that lies at the heart of the movie: “What kind of court is this? What the hell is it actually for?” The frustrating answer, which Hannah must swallow hard to accept: Partial justice is better than none.

What kind of question is that! What is the court for? It’s to promote Islamic supremacy based on affirming the Muslim sense of Christian villainy and oppression. And the frustrating answer we must accept: Sometimes jurisprudence falls short of giving the Muslim world a complete victory. And this is very hard to swallow.

Let’s just think about how essential Serbs are for show business in general. Just ask yourself: What would show business do without Serbs?

In addition to Law & Order’s Serbian-rape fantasy, and in addition to anti-Serb opuses like Richard Gere’s Nazi propaganda in 2007 and the bogus movie “Behind Enemy Lines” — as bogus as the “real” story reported in our media — below are some recent-past TV and film items that I’ve been meaning to mention.

More Serbian-rapist fantasies, from 2007; sent by a reader in Boston named Ed:

The series (of two 2-hour episodes) was entitled “Prime Suspect” and I’m pretty sure it was the last there will ever be of the Helen Mirren “Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness” episodes, where she stars as Detective Superintendent Tennison.

She hunts down a Croatian Serb who has murdered and raped a 14-year-old Bosian Muslim IN LONDON. He is an escaped “war criminal” who fled to Britain after the conflict under an assumed identity of a “good” Serb (to escape war crimes) whom she couldn’t arrest because he was being “protected” by the foreign dept or MI6 whatever because he was helping them chase down his old buddies who had also fled, i.e. he turned traitor to his fellow Serbs that committed murders, rape, women, children, torture, etc. of Bosnian Muslims.

She eventually catches him and makes the charges stick because he had committed the rape and murder of a Muslim girl in the UK who was a UK citizen after he had arrived in Britain. He was married and had wife and little girl (very, very caucasian looking, i.e. blond, blue eyes, etc.) who knew everything there was to know about him but cared not. In short, another example of the kind of thing you have been writing about…the fact that the US and its allies have been pinning the proverbial tail all over the Serbs and mentioning nothing of the Muslim part in creating or at least perpetuating this age old clash of cultures and the wholesale slaughter involved.

The show was first aired in April 2004, but these things take a while to reach Boston and PBS airing in the U.S. PBS hauls it out every once in a while for another showing.

Of course, as we know, everything in the show is a direct contradiction of reality. The Balkans people doing the raping in England and Switzerland are Albanians, not Serbs. And the criminals and war criminals and terrorists whom MI6 protects are Albanians, Bosnians and Croatians. And the children who are indifferent — even proud — of their parents’ and grandparents’ crimes are Croatian and Albanian. Croatian teenagers proudly carry on the Ustasha legacy today, even on our own shores. Bosnians, meanwhile, have so internalized their Western-bestowed status as victims that they no longer are even aware they committed any crimes, and so their children are unaware that there’s anything to be either ashamed or proud of.

Ed soon sent me another one:

Sorry to have to mention it, but another taped PBS (out of Boston) “Mystery Theatre” movie story line concerned yet another murder of Albanian-Muslim men, women and children by Serb policemen during the 90’s conflict — but told in the present day carryover to London. One Albanian Muslim woman immigrant being stalked by an immigrant ex-Serb policeman in London and his consequent apprehension by “Inspector Lynley” in a 2-hr issue of the series by the same name.

In this particular movie [episode], the Inspector’s wife is accidentally shot and killed by the Muslim woman who meant the bullet for the ex-Serb policeman whose job in London was to chauffeur a local mob kingpin. Since these movies that I have mentioned to you are all made under the auspices of the BBC, I suppose one can easily tell what the Brit popular point of view is and is being propagated via these stories all having a “blame Serbs for the murder of Muslims” theme.

Only one show approached something reality-reflective when it comes to the Balkans. And that show is Kelsey Grammer’s “Medium,” starring Patricia Arquette. Early in one episode two seasons ago, a criminal was killed off in the hospital where he was recuperating after a shootout or something. When Arquette (playing real-life medium and show consultant Allison Dubois) asked the hospital staff about him, she was told “Serbian mafia — or Bosnian; take your pick.” It wasn’t much, but it was a noticeable departure from the one-side-only-bad-guys version everyone else still tries to give us. And the recent breakthrough movie “Taken” also deserves kudos, going a step further in accuracy. In it, Liam Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped into sex slavery by Albanians and sold to an Arab sheikh.

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