No truce in the war of words

Ethnic cleansing. It’s a phrase connoting mass deportations and murder of one group by another. Britannica.com defines it as “the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups. Ethnic cleansing sometimes involves the removal of all physical vestiges of the targeted group through the destruction of monuments, cemeteries and houses of worship.” Sounds like a blow-by-blow description of the Islamic takeover of places like Persia and Afghanistan, to me. Anyway, the phrase has been used to describe what happened during the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs. It’s also been used to describe the treatment by Indonesian militants against the people of East Timor in the... [read full story]