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Jewish World Review July 26, 2006 / 1 Menachem-Av, 5766 As Bush stands firm in the Middle East, he capitulates in Europe By Julia Gorin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Writing for an outfit called FamilySecurityMatters.org last week, Weekly Standard contributor and longtime champion of Balkan Muslims Stephen Schwartz describes an overnight bus ride from Kosovo's capital Pristina to a resort town in Montenegro:
"A man behind me began speaking almost immediately and without stopping, in Albanian — which I understand…insistently focused on the nature of G-d (a favorite subject for Islamic fundamentalists), [and on] the nefarious influence of Sufis who thought they could reinterpret the faith, the evil intentions of Americans, Iraq, and bloodshed. I was startled because it is rare to hear Albanians, after the rescue of Kosovo, badmouth Americans…G-d is one, who are these people like this American who come and try to tell us how to be Muslims? What about Iraq? Why is this American here with his friend?"
Schwartz then describes a rest stop: "I did not find out where I was until I asked a waiter in the restaurant, because none of the Albanians crowded in the back with me and my Sufi companion and the whisperer in darkness would speak civilly to me. When I asked one man, in Albanian, the name of the town, he answered in Serbian: 'ne znam,' 'I don't know.' Another said it was the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica (it wasn't). And finally a thin punk who could not have been over 20, and who, I soon realized, had been encouraging the voice behind me, said in perfect English, 'I don't understand English.' At the end of the rest period all three people filed back into the bus and avoided looking at me.
"Muhammad woke up and asked me what was going on. I told him, 'Someone back here is making Wahhabi speeches.' He grinned as if in disbelief, but said, 'I'm not surprised.'"
Nor should anyone else be, given this shockingly predictable consequence of our 1990s misadventures in the Balkans. Only Mr. Schwartz is surprised — understandably, given what he wrote just last year:
Kosovo is the most heavily-policed, militarily-occupied region in Europe. It does not now and has never had a 'fundamentalist minority' in the sense the term is now understood, and no serious evidence to the contrary can be produced.
So what happened? Did the Albanians whom Mr. Schwartz encountered on his trip turn fundamentalist overnight? Or maybe, just maybe even for Muslims in the throes of gratitude to the West, the first allegiance is to Islam. Apparently, some people need to actually get on a bus with hostile Albanian Muslims to learn what the rest of us have been able to glean from dispatch after dispatch coming out of the region. For example, there is the fact that the Kosovo Liberation Army whom we fought for had trained with al-Qaeda, and there was the Albanian applicant to al-Qaeda who boasted of his experience fighting Serb and American troops in Kosovo. And still Mr. Schwartz would be surprised to pick up the Jerusalem Post this week and read this about the Balkan Muslims he's spent years shilling for: "Jewish groups are troubled by a new property restitution law in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina that officially discriminates in favor of the country's Muslims."
Nah, couldn't see that one coming at all. How tidy the stream of history. The golden rule of Islamic conquest, which we should have learned from Oslo, may help explain the situation: Accept the infidel's help in waging jihad until he is no longer willing to carry you to the next stage, at which point you take up arms against him.
Should we refuse to advance the violent Albanian Kosovars to the next stage of their bin Laden-affiliated Balkans jihad by handing them an independent Kosovo this year, such will be the outcome that we face and that the Albanians have been arming for since the year they first waved the American flag and hoisted Bill Clinton's photograph onto Pristina buildings. The U.S. will of course support Kosovo independence, because terrorism in the Balkans has never gone unrewarded by the West. Besides, who wants another armed front in this world war?
The befuddled Mr. Schwartz continues: "But I am known in the Balkans as an opponent of radical Islam...I had repeatedly been recognized during this trip on the streets and in mosques in Albania and Kosovo, and was previously warmly greeted."
Hmm, now here is something even more interesting: mosques — in Albania and Kosovo. Admissions from a man who, along with all the other Balkan "experts" who cheer-led our alliance with al-Zawihiri-organized fighters against Western Christians responding to domestic terrorism, assured us that Balkan Muslims were "European," "secular," "non-religious," and every other adjective to distance "these" Muslims from "those" Muslims. And yet in a casual viewing of Ninoslav Randjelovic's DVD "Days Made of Fear" one sees nothing but destroyed, burned and desecrated churches and monasteries amid a backdrop of mosque after mosque after mosque — some of the newest ones donning Saudi flags.
Mr. Schwartz isn't the only member of the press to have tacitly admitted to the Islamism that was initially denied by the media in its warmongering against Yugoslavia. We were told that these Slavic Muslims weren't religious, but when a reason is needed to explain why so few alleged Bosnian or Kosovar rape victims have come forward, we are told that as Muslim women, the victims are reluctant to do so because of the stigma that Islam attaches to rape victims. Such has been the nature of the consistently inconsistent, selective and convenient Islam of the Balkans. But that convenience is fast disappearing, because however this "nominally" Muslim population started out, there is only one direction for it to go from here.
Mr. Schwartz has written that "Kosovo has not become a gateway for the spread of terror throughout Europe." We have since learned that the explosives used in the London and Madrid attacks originated in Kosovo.
Schwartz has also insisted that "Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj is not a religious person. He has never been involved or associated with any Islamic cause. He has no association with Islamist ideology whatever. He is not even a 'cultural Muslim.'" Puzzlingly, that didn't hinder a meeting that Haradinaj and fellow Christian-killer and Albright darling Hashim Thaci had with bin Laden in 1995.
Additionally, Schwartz has tried to advance the newest leg of the Albanian propaganda machine that is actively circulating documentaries, videos, articles and books chronicling Albanians who saved Jews during the Holocaust and claiming that Albania salvaged all its Jews. Like the others involved in this effort to spin influential circles here and in Europe into sealing the creation of Greater Albania, Schwartz doesn't mention that Albania's Jews survived because there were only 200 of them in the country to begin with. Moreover, they were spared because the Italians occupying the country weren't interested in killing Jews and didn't ask for them. In contrast, once the Germans themselves occupied Albania — to which they'd annexed Kosovo and formed the Greater Albania being sought again today — the Albanian SS Skanderbeg Division helped round up Jews in Kosovo, sending 400 to Bergen-Belsen.
Mr. Schwartz has described hapless Bosnian Muslims joining the Waffen SS out of some kind of mistaken notion, but in fact these Muslim Nazis had Jew-killing very much on the mind — in addition to Serb-killing which, for some reason, is not nearly as bad in Mr. Schwartz's book. Of course, he is hardly alone in his denial. When historian Carl Savich sent a photo of Heinrich Himmler reviewing the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Handzar Division to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1994, the word "Bosnian" was removed from the caption under the photo, which instead read "Muslim Croat SS Volunteer Division." A group called Holocaust Museum Watch has been lobbying the Museum to include Balkan Muslims as Holocaust criminals.
Mr. Schwartz is very much a 1930s Jew — despite his conversion to Islam. Jacob Gens, the leader of the Vilna Ghetto, kept telling resistance fighter Abba Kovner that it'll be all right, it'll be all right — until no one was left. But Schwartz is worse, for he already wears the enemy's uniform.
Back to the bus ride to Montenegro: "After four more hours of dark roads and threatening discourse, in which I felt a dream-like serenity, we arrived at the seacoast with dawn breaking…I will not forget the low, continuous, unfaltering stream of the diatribe on the bus: G-d is great, only G-d. Sufis are not Muslims. What is this American doing here? Who is his friend? Look at Iraq. Blood. Blood is what they want."
Like clockwork — and as The New York Times laid out in the 1980s but later ignored in its zeal for war against European Christians — thanks to our handiwork, other Balkan states with large Albanian and other Muslim minorities, including Montenegro, Macedonia, southern Serbia and even Greece have become ripe targets for Islamic takeover. It's something Mr. Schwartz manages to celebrate in his current Montenegro article "Free at Last," even amid his observations on the bus. In this latest article he calls Serbia a mafia state at the same time that he helps establish a mafia state called "Kosova." But then, this is a man who has prayed over the grave of the late Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, the blue-eyed Slavic "European Muslim" who requested to be buried near "the martyrs" and who wrote that "there can be no peace or coexistence between 'the Islamic faith' and non-Islamic social and political institutions." Such was America's "partner in the Balkans."
Schwartz is author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror. He needs to know by now what speaker and former terrorist Walid Shoebat has been imploring Americans to understand: More often than not, a single Muslim wears both faces. Understandably, to someone coming from the tradition of "ask two Jews and get three opinions," the ubiquitous Muslim phenomenon of a single opinion having two faces is hard to process.
Schwartz finishes the article about his trip with "The frontline today extends from America to Israel to Saudi Arabia, and still includes the Balkans." One wonders what he means by "still," considering that he never admitted to jihad activity in Bosnia or Kosovo in the first place.
Peter Brock's new book Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting identifies many such jihad-facilitating useful idiots who, by siding with the Muslim and Croatian descendants of the Third Reich in the 1990s, ensured a cultural and literal genocide of a Christian people, paving the way for our own.
And here we are: Kosovo's war criminal Prime Minister Agim Ceku, who is responsible for more than 600 deaths during the terror wars against Serbia, was received this month as an honored guest by Condi Rice. Richard Holbrooke gets awards for his work in implementing a racist state run by mob rule, without individual rights, property rights, safety of life and limb, or rule of law — a shining precedent for the rest of the world that any ethnic group can carve off a piece of a country once that group reaches a critical mass in any given city, state or province. All these values are enshrined in a small Statue of Liberty replica that sits atop a Pristina hotel.
In May, when the U.S. didn't want to send five Chinese Muslim detainees back to China, for fear of their fate there, Albania agreed to take them off our hands. It's doubtful that Albania was just being gracious. More likely, U.S. support for Kosovo independence was brought up and a deal was struck. When Kosovo becomes "Kosova" later this year with our blessing, and we help deliver the Balkan borders of Hitler's vision, it will spell our own doom.
While standing firm in the Middle East, the Bush administration embraces defeat in Europe, and extends the caliphate that the Clinton administration jump-started.
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JWR contributor Julia Gorin is a widely published op-ed writer and comedian who blogs at www.JuliaGorin.com. Comment on by clicking here.
© 2005, Julia Gorin. |
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