Rae Back to B13YO! BOSNIA, AGAIN page 109 1980's Reunion RNS/REU TERS Tote et tie 80'4! Dessert Reception Saturday, September 9, 1995 8:30 pm First Center Office Plaza 26957 Northwestern Highway Southfield, MI Couvert: $15.00 per person For additional information, contact the BBYO office: (810) 788-0700 - 1980's Alumni Reunion Committee - Reunion Co-Chairpersons: Shelly Rubenfire Michelle Soltz Reunion Committee: Staci Arsht Andrea Jaron Charlotte Edelheit Janice Lachman Lisa Eidelman Ilene Lubin Darrin Elias Mickey Rosner Allan Feuer Steve Rotenberg Bruce Gorosh Steve Schanes Paula Goldman-Spinner Karen Sokol A Futon Back to School Special... Sale Package includes...Frame , Futon and Removable Cover Large selection available Sale Runs August 12t Thru September 10th It's a Sofa, It's a Bed, It's a Lounger! • Our Futon Mattresses are made in Michigan 4' A Futon is a natural fiber filled mattress, placed on a hinging, solid wood frame. The unique upholstery fab- ric covers are removable, cleanable & changeable! STARTING AT '199.00 Natural Bedding and Home Furnishings 110 ROYAL OAK 306 S. Main St. (810) 548-4422 NOVI Novi Town Center (810) 349-5040 UTICA 7770 Auburn Rd. (810) 254-9828 A Bosnian woman mourns over the remains of her son. they are voicing that it is moral- ly intolerable for America to pur- sue her course of pragmatic inaction. In Washington, the options for policymakers in the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia are all po- litically and diplomatically un- palatable — just as the choices all seemed unpalatable to Amer- ican officials in the 1930s and early 1940s, when decisive Amer- ican leadership might have slowed the Nazi killing machine. Diplomats and politicians point out that there is no good way to protect Bosnian civilians without a massive and open-end- ed military commitment, an enormously expensive and risky proposition. Unilateral Ameri- can action in an essentially Eu- ropean problem, they say, would complicate relations with our Eu- ropean allies. They also complain that atroc- ity stories are difficult to verify. All these arguments, planted firmly in fact, but nourished by fear and political self-interest, echo the past excuses of Western leaders faced with the persecu- tion and eventual murder of Eu- ropean Jewry. Tragically, such horrors are re- vealed only after they are over as the secrets are unearthed from the mass graves and the killing centers. By then, the world's in- dignation is essentially mean- ingless — a final and particularly grotesque act of violence against the victims. That is the motivation behind the growing Jewish activism on Bosnia this summer. A number of mainstream Jew- ish groups recently have made strong calls for the unpopular op- tion of force to end the killing in the former Yugoslavia. "It's not necessarily a position that our members favor," an of- ficial with one major group told me last week. "We understand the open-ended risks. But it's a moral issue that we, as a Jewish organization, can't duck." The Holocaust museum is us- ing its immense credibility to go beyond memorializing Hitler's victims. The center's role, its leaders insist, will be incomplete if it does not help the world stop new instances of genocide before the final body count is tallied. Static museums that simply display artifacts are non-contro- versial; museums that seek to use the lessons of the past to af- fect the present cannot escape the controversies of the day, they argue. Last week's event was care- fully designed to avoid any taint of taking sides in a feud where passions run deep. Some Jewish legislators also are abandoning the illusory safe- ty position that has dominated Western policy since Yugoslavia blew apart — that the situation there is essentially insoluble and not worth political or military risk. The legislators offer no magi- cal answers, but increasingly un- derstand that silence is complicity, as it was a half-cen- tury ago. They and others know that Bosnia is not the Holocaust. However, it is not a Jewish neurosis to argue that the mem- ory of the Holocaust can be cheapened by applying the term to every conflict that results in the death of innocent civilians. In the former Yugoslavia, the historical reality that all sides have been guilty of horrors in the past century make direct com- parisons with the millions of in- nocent Jews who died in Hitler's camps particularly odious. But there is an unavoidable similarity. The excuses for not intervening could come back to shame us, just as the civilized world was shamed by its disas- trous inattention to Jews during World War II. There are a million good rea- sons to stay away from Bosnia. But, as the Holocaust museum teaches with such clarity, there are no moral ones for refusing to take chances to prevent geno- cide. ❑