Serbians have participated in atrocities ranking with the Nazis of Germany.

Richard Gwyn, Toronto Star

Aside from Greece, where the commonality is the Orthodox faith, the one Western democracy where there is considerable sympathy for the Serbs, although in no way support for what they are doing in Kosovo, is Israel.

Reflecting this popular mood, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has annoyed Washington by failing to join in the general condemnation of the Serbian government.

The reason for this responsiveness to the Serbs is that Israelis remember that during World War II, the one European country where Jews were comparatively safe was Serbia.

The performance of the Serbs during the awful era of the Holocaust - matched, in Europe, only by the Danes - derived from the ideology of Tito's partisans, a substantial majority of whom were Serbs. They were Communists. They believed therefore in the brotherhood of man, which made a Jew, provided that he or she was a true member of the proletariat, no different from a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim.

The wartime record of some other Yugoslavs was quite different. The Fascist Croat Ustashe outdid the Nazis in their ferocity against Jews, Gypsies, Serbs. The Waffen SS 21st division was recruited almost entirely from ethnic Albanians. In the winter of 1944-45 it carried out the last ethnic cleansing exercise of the war. It did this in Kosovo, against the Serbs.

This history does not in any way exonerate or ameliorate the atrocities committed by Serbs, first in Bosnia, now in Kosovo.

It does mean that they do not deserve to be demonized as a people as opposed to being criticized, severely, for the actions of some of them.

The demonizing of Serbs has become the unadmitted policy of NATO.

Day after day, NATO officials like spokesman Jamie Shea use hot-button phrases like ``Holocaust'' and ``genocide,'' and make accusations about mass rapes, human shields, mass graves, without providing any specific evidence for them.

This week, Shea declared that the Serbs in Kosovo were rounding up Albanian youths ``to use as human shields or as blood donors for wounded Serbs.''

The Yugoslav Health Minister described this accusation as ``disgusting.''

She's right. Unless substantiated, these kind of hearsay accusations are dangerously close to hate propaganda.

In every war, truth is always the first casualty - from the mythical story of the mass rape of Belgian nuns by the Germans in World War I to the totally fabricated (by a U.S. PR firm hired by the Kuwaitis) story that the invading Iraqi soldiers had torn babies from out of oxygen incubators.

But a war conducted for the sake of altruism - if also for the sake of NATO's self-interest in creating a job for itself - ought to be conducted by some minimal standards of decency and morality.

As the war has progressed, NATO has performed increasingly as an immoral organization (also as a thoroughly incompetent one, but that's another matter).

Its military strategy having failed - despite the bombing, the Serbs have actually added to troops in Kosovo - NATO is now conducting a war of attrition against the Serb people.

It is out to inflict so much pain upon the Serb people, by bombing bridges across the Danube far from the fighting, by destroying heating plants and fertilizer plants and TV towers, and passenger trains, that they will force their government to surrender.

NATO can't admit this of course. But to justify the increasing ``collateral'' damage, and the killing and wounding of civilians, it now depends on demonizing the Serb people so that the stomachs of the Western public won't begin to heave too much.

There is something quite sickening in the way a humanitarian war is now being waged in a manner that depends upon the ``enemy'' being depicted as subhumans.

To repeat, none of this in any way excuses what Serbs have done, and still are doing, in Kosovo.

But we are at risk of losing our own moral compass. To illustrate just how far we have wandered, consider this proposal for ending the war. All refugees return. All troops and special police are withdrawn. NATO troops move in to protect the population. The region becomes self-governing, with a referendum on independence held in three years.

Ideal for Kosovo, of course. By why not ideal equally to the Krajina region of Croatia from which Croat troops - trained and directed by retired American officers - ethnically cleansed 300,000 Serbs in 1996 from lands in which they had lived for centuries and about which the West did, then and now, nothing?

Not for one second would NATO apply to Croatia the rules it's demanding of Serbia, and is now enforcing by mass bombing.

But why not? Is it ethnic cleansing NATO really cares about? Or is it just saving its face?