thedrifter
07-04-07, 05:03 AM
July 04, 2007
Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker
By Julia Gorin
For the past eight years, I've been in a lonely place politically. I don't mean the kind of lonely that conservatives generally find themselves in. I'm talking about utter desolation, for there are just as few conservatives as liberals where I've been. One of the only non-Serbian Americans to do so, I watched with steady interest for the better part of a decade the clockwork predictability of the fallout from our forgotten Kosovo intervention, a bombing campaign against an emerging post-Communist democracy rooted in Judeo-Christian values--on behalf of tribalistic, blood-code-following nominal Muslims claiming oppression and no less than genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Watching the Albanians predictably move on to terrorizing Macedonia within a few months of our intervention that would "contain" the conflict, and then watching Albanians turn their weapons on NATO peacekeepers within 18 months, I wondered what it would take to get a national discussion going about that huge, self-destructive debacle. What would it take to have the debate that, it must be said despite my hobby of mocking Europeans, the German public had in 2001 when it put its politicians' feet to the fire after learning the hoax that their country had been party to, thanks to a German documentary unapologetically titled "It Began with a Lie."
In sharp contrast to every other cynically reported war, this time not only were our peacenik presses on board, but conspicuously they didn't try to ingratiate us to the enemy perspective by letting us hear incessantly from the other side, as they're otherwise fond of doing. Something was off. Even the evolving "alternative media"-self-tasked with policing the mainstream press and usually very wary of "facts" coming from the mainstream media and of cause celebres--were either silent on this or on precisely the same page as the New York Times, with its Sontag yentas for the first time explaining the concept of "just war". I found that, aside from Serbian-Americans (and Serbian-Canadians), who would later describe 1999 as a surreality they observed as if outside themselves, the only other people who as a group understood that our action meant something awful for the free world were the Russian-Jewish community that I myself had come from-a cartoonishly patriotic and capitalistic immigrant group with less than zero feeling for "Mother Russia" (if we're talking about the 70s and 80s wave).
Every now and again, a glimmer of hope that the fraud would be revealed surfaced, first in March, 2000 with a Washington Post article titled "Was it a Mistake? We were Suckers for the KLA" and then in April, 2001, with a Toronto Sun article titled "The Hoax that Started a War". Now, I thought, the story of the century-a fabricated genocide and PR campaign starting a war-would finally "break."
But the silence persisted, and none of the rare newspapers giving the occasional op-ed space to the dissenting perspective was interested in actually investigating. Nothing changed in this regard after the attacks of September 11th. Not even after a Washington Times article titled "Hijackers connected to Albanian terrorist cell" came out a week after 9/11, reading:
Albania is one of several places U.S. intelligence agencies are focusing their resources...Islamic radicals, including supporters of bin Laden, have been supporting Albanian rebels fighting in the region, including members of the Kosovo Liberation Army...KLA members have been trained at bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan...As of last year, the group operated a residence in Tirana, and the CIA has been pressing Albania's government to expel all associates of the Islamic terrorists.
Meanwhile, every one of my own articles attempting to expose the hoax-relegated to a small segment of the alternative media because of a near blackout on the subject everywhere else-dropped with a thud. As did an article coming out two months after 9/11, titled "Al Qaeda's Balkan Links". Same thing with a March 2002 National Post article titled "U.S. Supported al-Qaeda Cells during Balkan Wars, Fought Serbian Troops"
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network has been active in the Balkans for years, most recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO...In the years immediately before the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the al-Qaeda militants moved into Kosovo...to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region.
Even after another National Post article in 2004 by Canadian former UN General Lewis MacKenzie, titled "We Bombed the Wrong Side?", came out, Kosovo remained off the media's and public's radar-something that vested politicians were counting on.
But then came March 2004, when rumors, proved false, that Serbs drowned three Albanian boys, were used as a spark for the orchestrated pogroms of March 2004, leading to the deaths of 19 people, the displacement of 4,000 Serbs, the destruction of dozens of churches and medieval monuments plus hundreds of homes. Surely people would demand to know what on earth was going on over there, I thought, and what are these people whom we "rescued". All the questions that weren't asked in 1999 would finally be asked, I thought.
They weren't. And the silence grew louder. The questions still weren't asked even when the 9/11 Commission found that Bosnia, with our help, had been the breakout event that transformed al Qaeda into a truly global network; they weren't asked even when the Commission found that two of the 9/11 hijackers had fought alongside Bosnian and international forces against the Serbs, and that five of the hijackers had been trained in Bosnia, and that Australian David Hicks trained in a KLA camp. But the national dialogue that the issue demanded remained absent, and the media maintained its blackout, one door after another slamming in my face every time I proposed a piece on the repercussions of our Balkans intervention.
What o what would it take, I wondered, for people's eyes to stop glazing over at the mention of the words "Bosnia", "Kosovo" and "Balkans". The answer came a few days before Valentine's Day this past February, when a Bosnian immigrant shot nine Americans at a mall in Salt Lake City, an incident that raised some American eyebrows. But the media were prepared, quickly taking the story right back to Bosnia and rehashing the same "Serb-sparked Balkan-wars" explanation that brought us in on the Muslim side in the first place. The story died soon enough, after a round of the familiar "Bosnians aren't all like that" and "Community fears American Backlash" articles. However, the seed for the long-awaited questions had finally been planted, so that three months later when four Albanians were arrested for plotting to massacre American servicemen in New Jersey, the public finally wanted some answers.
Conservative Confusion
One thing that comes with researching and trying to talk about the Balkans for eight years, and something that's important for this readership to understand, is that people we otherwise respect--people who seem to "get it" on every other vital issue of the day, including Islam--are utterly clueless on the Balkans-and, alternately, agenda-laden. The Balkans are every respectable commentator's blind spot. Notice that in their daily opining on the war on terror since 9/11, our best minds don't touch on the Balkans, a key region in the fight for civilization. In trying to engage people-including the conservative intelligentsia that went along with the peaceniks on our 1990s "humanitarian" wars-I find that people are confused, confounded, overwhelmed and bored by the subject.
Name your favorite conservative pundit, your most trusted jihadwatcher, and in deconstructing the war on terror and the danger of Islam and jihad, there is always, always one exception that he or she will make: the Balkans. That's where we give the Muslims the benefit of the doubt, where world trends don't apply, where Muslims don't stage atrocities or provoke military responses or use Western dupes; the area is suspended in its own context, immune to the tactic of nationalism followed by separatism - which we buy and then Americans die as that separatism morphs into Islamism.
This is nothing personal against anyone who has attacked me in these pages, but a simple statement of fact that I and the handful of other Balkans observers out there have noticed over the better part of a decade: The Balkans make smart people stupid. And that includes people and publications we conservatives generally respect, such as the Wall St. Journal, National Review, Weekly Standard, and so on.
As well, it is a favorite vocation of conservatives who want to earn their "I'm not anti-Muslim" stripes--to pile even more on those most expendable of whities, the Serbs. The Balkans are the bone we toss to the Islamic world in its perpetual but elsewhere transparent imaginings of genocides, massacres and hate crimes against them. At the policy level, attempting to win over the Muslim world by giving them Serbian territory and all the interventions that this included was a clearly stated goal-not only by Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Robert Wexler (D-FL) in April, but early on by Lawrence Eagleburger who, as Dr. Srdja Trifkovic wrote in his book Defeating Jihad, "said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf War I." Adds Trifkovic, "The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist base in the heart of Europe, a moral debacle, and the absence of any positive payoff to the United States."
What is it about the Balkans that makes it such an exception? What is it about the Serbs that makes "Serbian propaganda" which is consistent with our own intelligence less preferable to Muslim propaganda? At the same time, what is it about the Serbs and the Balkans that makes George W. Bush indistinguishable from William Jefferson Clinton; Henry Hyde indistinguishable from Tom Lantos; John McCain indistinguishable from Joe Biden; Condoleezza Rice indistinguishable from Madeleine Albright; Joe Lieberman indistinguishable from Eliot Engel; and Wesley Clark from Bob Dole?
This confusion has found its way to the pages of American Thinker. As we finally, finally are confronted on our own shores with the direct consequences of our actions, as Americans pay the price of their leaders' still unadmitted foreign policy disasters, all the opinion makers--without following the direction the region has taken and without reading even a shred of Hague transcripts or articles based on those transcripts--have the gall to come out of the woodwork and do their piece to keep the Balkans chapter closed. This is my contribution toward sparing American thinkers any further such insults to their intelligence.
In the recent section "Disputing Julia Gorin," American Thinker contributor Ray Robison wrote the following:
One of the articles that Gorin cites comes from a website of something called CNW group. If you read the "about us" portion you find that this is not a news service but a press distribution service. This "story" is actually a press release from something called The Centre for Peace in the Balkans... This organization is nothing but a front.
Robison was objecting to a source I cited in the following sentence: "But already the Albanians of Kosovo believe that independence is the very least they are due, and don't hesitate to attack UN officials or NATO troops that are perceived to stand in the way."
But which fact is he objecting to? The fact that Agim Ceku is the prime minister of Kosovo? Or the part where Ceku's Croatian troops shot at Canadian peacekeepers? If the Serbness of the source is what offends-and it usually does--then maybe the following source with a more graphic depiction will be more agreeable. From "Ceku Must Face Justice" by Canadian journalist Scott Taylor:
...if one only casually glances at the resume of the incoming prime minister, Agim Ceku, it becomes apparent that his election flies in the face of international justice, foreshadows more violence in Kosovo and ignores the sacrifices and valour of our Canadian Forces...As a colonel in the Croatian army, Ceku commanded the notorious 1993 operation in what is known as the Medak Pocket [in Croatia's Krajina region].
It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
And if you want to see for yourself, here's a 17-minute video of the fighting-and of some body parts--courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's "National" subsidiary.
Meanwhile, I must point out that Mr. Robison has engaged in a favorite ploy of many Albanian readers, namely picking out one source out of a dozen that are cited, which he then points to and says, "Aha! A Serbian source! This writer can't be trusted!" (Stigmatizing a source as "Serbian" and therefore not to be listened to is another favorite international pastime, no matter how much backup that source may have from mainstream, non-Serbian sources--which often don't even know they're backing up any Serbian claims.)
As to Mr. Robison's quip that this information is "extremist Serb propaganda" put out by "probably the same people who were raping and murdering the Kosovars in the first place," professional writers generally don't make conjectures parroting debunked popular mythology, so I won't dignify this buffoonery with a professional response. But if ethnic cleansing, racial supremacy, systematic murder and rape, organized terror and property plundering are what one seeks, here is an article about eyewitness Branko Piliser, an American who grew up in Kosovo and whom I interviewed for the Jerusalem Report and JewishWorldReview.com about his brother Slobodan, among the last of the Jews driven from Kosovo.
Next, Robison objected to my citing a Reuters story that stated, "Three synchronized explosions in Kosovo's capital city were aimed at blocking the path to independence from Serbia, the province's ethnic Albanian president and prime minister said on Sunday."
Robison countered by saying, "In my book it is pretty obvious that in the very story she cites the Serbs are again attacking the Kosovars. That is evidence that we are enabling jihadists? What the ...?"
My detractors don't normally make it this easy for me, but if Mr. Robison insists on giving his inexpert opinion about who was behind an attack, then I can't have much mercy. The reason Robison is confused is that he hasn't been following the region for the past eight years and is unaware of its evolution as the big picture plays out. Had he been, he would know by now that if Serbs are suspected of attacks or attempted attacks, the word "Serbs" appears in the news reports on the subject, starting with the headline. When those suspected are Albanian, no ethnicity is mentioned-as we recently witnessed here with the Ft. Dix arrests, when just about every news outlet referred to "former Yugoslavs" instead of fingering our Albanian protégés. (It works similarly in the Middle East: "Israelis kill six Palestinians in West Bank Raid" vs. "Bus explodes in central Jerusalem.") Here are some headlines which don't give any idea as to who is behind an attack, until you read the actual article:
Terror strike on Bill Clinton Avenue [Boulevard]: Kosovo car bomb injures 32 as U.N. analyzes peacekeeping effort, WorldNetDaily.com, Dec. 17, 2002.
Explosion at UN Mission in Kosovo March 11, 2005, BBC
Three blasts rock Kosovo capital, sparking fears of fresh unrest July 3, 2005, AFP
"Another Explosion Rocks Kosovo. EU Fiercely Condemns Violence" July 4, 2005, Serbian source
"UN says threats made against Kosovo staff" Nov. 27, 2006, EuroNews:
The UN says it's received "credible threats" against its staff and property in Kosovo. The UN-run province is braced for violence after a year-end deadline for a decision on the ethnic Albanian majority's demand for independence from Serbia was pushed back. Security has now been heightened after political activists called for a mass protest on Tuesday against the UN negotiation process, which began in February.
KLA letter admitting attack on UNMIK cars sent from Tirana Feb. 23, 2007, Kosovo paper Express, via BBC Monitoring-Europe (Indeed, according to an American peacekeeper I spoke with, deployed with the National Guard in Kosovo, U.S. forces are advised to not park their vehicles near UN vehicles, as those are always exploding.)
Nor are recent headlines such as "NATO prepared to deal with possible civil disturbances in Kosovo" particularly a warning to the region's Serbs, with Albanians threatening violence if independence doesn't happen this summer.
Poole's and Robison's Vision Clouded by Sentimentality
Robison's experience of Kosovo, which he described in his original, heart-warming account for American Thinker, dates back to his year 2000 peacekeeping mission during which, he wrote, he felt like a "rock star" to grateful people including "gorgeous" and "giggling" toothless nurses. Of course he felt that way. As in other backwards, impoverished lands where any American is a celebrity, most of these people had never seen an American before, and this American was there to help them; naturally, he was embraced. (I can't help wondering, though, if any of these nurses were employed at the hospitals which during Kosovo's autonomous era wouldn't treat Serbian patients, forcing pregnant Serbs to go to Serbia proper to give birth. Are the giggling nurses among the Albanians who later got work at the UN-run mental hospitals abusing Serbian patients?)
In contrast, after his trip to Kosovo and Bosnia last month, Jesse Petrilla, founder of The United American Committee, which promotes awareness of Islamic extremism in America, concluded:
The Kosovo Muslims are of course grateful for [our help], yet I spoke with several dozen of them about their allegiances and it was blatantly clear that their allegiance was to the east, towards Mecca, and certainly not to the [W]est. Where will their allegiances be once they get their way and have an independent state? Considering the continual bombardment of Saudi money and Wahabist indoctrination in most every mosque and every school in Kosovo?
Like Ray Robison, AT contributor Patrick Poole also has been befriended by Albanians, his heart touched by some hospitable and, for the moment, grateful people. While Albanians made Robison feel like a rock star, Poole openly states on his blog:
While it is easy to get me to speak endlessly on any topic, if there's one topic that's near and dear to my heart it is anything having to do with my travels to Albania. I get teary just thinking about it.
If that's the case, Poole should responsibly recuse himself from the discussion, as he admits to being incapable of impartiality and objectivity on this issue. Both he and Robison are too close to the situation, their regard for a people clouding their vision and causing them to work backwards from a preferred and stale premise rather than follow the information. On this point, I should mention that I was writing my "Serb propaganda" for more than eight years before befriending my first Serb-which happened this past May in Israel.
It is clear that these two men depart from their anti-jihad guns when it comes to Albanians. Here is a perfect illustration in which, stunningly, Robison lays bare his conflicted confusion:
Gorin cites a Guardian article in which one of these "rebel leaders": "...called for the area to be included in Kosovo under K-For administration. But Nato, the UN and the US have called on his group to disband and respect current borders."
So just think about that for a moment. Here we have a commander of the extremists actually calling for western dictate over land he occupies. Can anybody with a straight face say this smacks of Islamic extremism? He did not say "we will behead infidels" or "the infidels must stop involving themselves in our region". He said he wanted NATO involvement.
A truly amazing statement. This is supposedly someone who knows something about the way jihad works? Is Robison unaware of the long-used tactic of enlisting the West's help to further one's territorial, nationalist and/or jihadist ambitions-until the West won't take the jihadist or nationalist agenda to the next stage, at which point the weapons turn against the Western Infidel? The Bosnian and Albanian jihads, as they are openly and casually called by Muslims around the world including Pakistani President Musharraf, was done by the book. Of course they called for a NATO intervention, and continue to call for Western interference where it is beneficial. For precedents on jihadists enlisting the aid of the international community (a.k.a. "Western dupes"), see the Oslo model (mind you, most Palestinians are "secular" too); also see Bosnia, 1980s Afghanistan and even the Islamic green-light that Anwar Sadat got from his imam before signing the Carter-brokered "peace" treaty with Menachem Begin.
In a September Human Events article titled "Will U.S. Back Islamo-Fascist State in Europe?", editor John Gizzi wrote:
Indeed, at the 16th Islamic Conference held in Pakistan in October 1998, Albanian separatism in Kosovo was defined as a jihad and the Islamic world was called on to help "this fight for freedom on the occupied Muslim territories."
It was at this time that the nascent al Qaeda "announced terrorist attacks against the ‘infidels', i.e. Great Britain, the USA, France, Israel, Russia, India and Serbia," according to this Serbian government report-if Robison, Poole and Albanian readers will deign to skim section 6, "Pan-Islamic Factor".
Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker
By Julia Gorin
For the past eight years, I've been in a lonely place politically. I don't mean the kind of lonely that conservatives generally find themselves in. I'm talking about utter desolation, for there are just as few conservatives as liberals where I've been. One of the only non-Serbian Americans to do so, I watched with steady interest for the better part of a decade the clockwork predictability of the fallout from our forgotten Kosovo intervention, a bombing campaign against an emerging post-Communist democracy rooted in Judeo-Christian values--on behalf of tribalistic, blood-code-following nominal Muslims claiming oppression and no less than genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Watching the Albanians predictably move on to terrorizing Macedonia within a few months of our intervention that would "contain" the conflict, and then watching Albanians turn their weapons on NATO peacekeepers within 18 months, I wondered what it would take to get a national discussion going about that huge, self-destructive debacle. What would it take to have the debate that, it must be said despite my hobby of mocking Europeans, the German public had in 2001 when it put its politicians' feet to the fire after learning the hoax that their country had been party to, thanks to a German documentary unapologetically titled "It Began with a Lie."
In sharp contrast to every other cynically reported war, this time not only were our peacenik presses on board, but conspicuously they didn't try to ingratiate us to the enemy perspective by letting us hear incessantly from the other side, as they're otherwise fond of doing. Something was off. Even the evolving "alternative media"-self-tasked with policing the mainstream press and usually very wary of "facts" coming from the mainstream media and of cause celebres--were either silent on this or on precisely the same page as the New York Times, with its Sontag yentas for the first time explaining the concept of "just war". I found that, aside from Serbian-Americans (and Serbian-Canadians), who would later describe 1999 as a surreality they observed as if outside themselves, the only other people who as a group understood that our action meant something awful for the free world were the Russian-Jewish community that I myself had come from-a cartoonishly patriotic and capitalistic immigrant group with less than zero feeling for "Mother Russia" (if we're talking about the 70s and 80s wave).
Every now and again, a glimmer of hope that the fraud would be revealed surfaced, first in March, 2000 with a Washington Post article titled "Was it a Mistake? We were Suckers for the KLA" and then in April, 2001, with a Toronto Sun article titled "The Hoax that Started a War". Now, I thought, the story of the century-a fabricated genocide and PR campaign starting a war-would finally "break."
But the silence persisted, and none of the rare newspapers giving the occasional op-ed space to the dissenting perspective was interested in actually investigating. Nothing changed in this regard after the attacks of September 11th. Not even after a Washington Times article titled "Hijackers connected to Albanian terrorist cell" came out a week after 9/11, reading:
Albania is one of several places U.S. intelligence agencies are focusing their resources...Islamic radicals, including supporters of bin Laden, have been supporting Albanian rebels fighting in the region, including members of the Kosovo Liberation Army...KLA members have been trained at bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan...As of last year, the group operated a residence in Tirana, and the CIA has been pressing Albania's government to expel all associates of the Islamic terrorists.
Meanwhile, every one of my own articles attempting to expose the hoax-relegated to a small segment of the alternative media because of a near blackout on the subject everywhere else-dropped with a thud. As did an article coming out two months after 9/11, titled "Al Qaeda's Balkan Links". Same thing with a March 2002 National Post article titled "U.S. Supported al-Qaeda Cells during Balkan Wars, Fought Serbian Troops"
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network has been active in the Balkans for years, most recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO...In the years immediately before the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the al-Qaeda militants moved into Kosovo...to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region.
Even after another National Post article in 2004 by Canadian former UN General Lewis MacKenzie, titled "We Bombed the Wrong Side?", came out, Kosovo remained off the media's and public's radar-something that vested politicians were counting on.
But then came March 2004, when rumors, proved false, that Serbs drowned three Albanian boys, were used as a spark for the orchestrated pogroms of March 2004, leading to the deaths of 19 people, the displacement of 4,000 Serbs, the destruction of dozens of churches and medieval monuments plus hundreds of homes. Surely people would demand to know what on earth was going on over there, I thought, and what are these people whom we "rescued". All the questions that weren't asked in 1999 would finally be asked, I thought.
They weren't. And the silence grew louder. The questions still weren't asked even when the 9/11 Commission found that Bosnia, with our help, had been the breakout event that transformed al Qaeda into a truly global network; they weren't asked even when the Commission found that two of the 9/11 hijackers had fought alongside Bosnian and international forces against the Serbs, and that five of the hijackers had been trained in Bosnia, and that Australian David Hicks trained in a KLA camp. But the national dialogue that the issue demanded remained absent, and the media maintained its blackout, one door after another slamming in my face every time I proposed a piece on the repercussions of our Balkans intervention.
What o what would it take, I wondered, for people's eyes to stop glazing over at the mention of the words "Bosnia", "Kosovo" and "Balkans". The answer came a few days before Valentine's Day this past February, when a Bosnian immigrant shot nine Americans at a mall in Salt Lake City, an incident that raised some American eyebrows. But the media were prepared, quickly taking the story right back to Bosnia and rehashing the same "Serb-sparked Balkan-wars" explanation that brought us in on the Muslim side in the first place. The story died soon enough, after a round of the familiar "Bosnians aren't all like that" and "Community fears American Backlash" articles. However, the seed for the long-awaited questions had finally been planted, so that three months later when four Albanians were arrested for plotting to massacre American servicemen in New Jersey, the public finally wanted some answers.
Conservative Confusion
One thing that comes with researching and trying to talk about the Balkans for eight years, and something that's important for this readership to understand, is that people we otherwise respect--people who seem to "get it" on every other vital issue of the day, including Islam--are utterly clueless on the Balkans-and, alternately, agenda-laden. The Balkans are every respectable commentator's blind spot. Notice that in their daily opining on the war on terror since 9/11, our best minds don't touch on the Balkans, a key region in the fight for civilization. In trying to engage people-including the conservative intelligentsia that went along with the peaceniks on our 1990s "humanitarian" wars-I find that people are confused, confounded, overwhelmed and bored by the subject.
Name your favorite conservative pundit, your most trusted jihadwatcher, and in deconstructing the war on terror and the danger of Islam and jihad, there is always, always one exception that he or she will make: the Balkans. That's where we give the Muslims the benefit of the doubt, where world trends don't apply, where Muslims don't stage atrocities or provoke military responses or use Western dupes; the area is suspended in its own context, immune to the tactic of nationalism followed by separatism - which we buy and then Americans die as that separatism morphs into Islamism.
This is nothing personal against anyone who has attacked me in these pages, but a simple statement of fact that I and the handful of other Balkans observers out there have noticed over the better part of a decade: The Balkans make smart people stupid. And that includes people and publications we conservatives generally respect, such as the Wall St. Journal, National Review, Weekly Standard, and so on.
As well, it is a favorite vocation of conservatives who want to earn their "I'm not anti-Muslim" stripes--to pile even more on those most expendable of whities, the Serbs. The Balkans are the bone we toss to the Islamic world in its perpetual but elsewhere transparent imaginings of genocides, massacres and hate crimes against them. At the policy level, attempting to win over the Muslim world by giving them Serbian territory and all the interventions that this included was a clearly stated goal-not only by Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Robert Wexler (D-FL) in April, but early on by Lawrence Eagleburger who, as Dr. Srdja Trifkovic wrote in his book Defeating Jihad, "said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf War I." Adds Trifkovic, "The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist base in the heart of Europe, a moral debacle, and the absence of any positive payoff to the United States."
What is it about the Balkans that makes it such an exception? What is it about the Serbs that makes "Serbian propaganda" which is consistent with our own intelligence less preferable to Muslim propaganda? At the same time, what is it about the Serbs and the Balkans that makes George W. Bush indistinguishable from William Jefferson Clinton; Henry Hyde indistinguishable from Tom Lantos; John McCain indistinguishable from Joe Biden; Condoleezza Rice indistinguishable from Madeleine Albright; Joe Lieberman indistinguishable from Eliot Engel; and Wesley Clark from Bob Dole?
This confusion has found its way to the pages of American Thinker. As we finally, finally are confronted on our own shores with the direct consequences of our actions, as Americans pay the price of their leaders' still unadmitted foreign policy disasters, all the opinion makers--without following the direction the region has taken and without reading even a shred of Hague transcripts or articles based on those transcripts--have the gall to come out of the woodwork and do their piece to keep the Balkans chapter closed. This is my contribution toward sparing American thinkers any further such insults to their intelligence.
In the recent section "Disputing Julia Gorin," American Thinker contributor Ray Robison wrote the following:
One of the articles that Gorin cites comes from a website of something called CNW group. If you read the "about us" portion you find that this is not a news service but a press distribution service. This "story" is actually a press release from something called The Centre for Peace in the Balkans... This organization is nothing but a front.
Robison was objecting to a source I cited in the following sentence: "But already the Albanians of Kosovo believe that independence is the very least they are due, and don't hesitate to attack UN officials or NATO troops that are perceived to stand in the way."
But which fact is he objecting to? The fact that Agim Ceku is the prime minister of Kosovo? Or the part where Ceku's Croatian troops shot at Canadian peacekeepers? If the Serbness of the source is what offends-and it usually does--then maybe the following source with a more graphic depiction will be more agreeable. From "Ceku Must Face Justice" by Canadian journalist Scott Taylor:
...if one only casually glances at the resume of the incoming prime minister, Agim Ceku, it becomes apparent that his election flies in the face of international justice, foreshadows more violence in Kosovo and ignores the sacrifices and valour of our Canadian Forces...As a colonel in the Croatian army, Ceku commanded the notorious 1993 operation in what is known as the Medak Pocket [in Croatia's Krajina region].
It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.
And if you want to see for yourself, here's a 17-minute video of the fighting-and of some body parts--courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Company's "National" subsidiary.
Meanwhile, I must point out that Mr. Robison has engaged in a favorite ploy of many Albanian readers, namely picking out one source out of a dozen that are cited, which he then points to and says, "Aha! A Serbian source! This writer can't be trusted!" (Stigmatizing a source as "Serbian" and therefore not to be listened to is another favorite international pastime, no matter how much backup that source may have from mainstream, non-Serbian sources--which often don't even know they're backing up any Serbian claims.)
As to Mr. Robison's quip that this information is "extremist Serb propaganda" put out by "probably the same people who were raping and murdering the Kosovars in the first place," professional writers generally don't make conjectures parroting debunked popular mythology, so I won't dignify this buffoonery with a professional response. But if ethnic cleansing, racial supremacy, systematic murder and rape, organized terror and property plundering are what one seeks, here is an article about eyewitness Branko Piliser, an American who grew up in Kosovo and whom I interviewed for the Jerusalem Report and JewishWorldReview.com about his brother Slobodan, among the last of the Jews driven from Kosovo.
Next, Robison objected to my citing a Reuters story that stated, "Three synchronized explosions in Kosovo's capital city were aimed at blocking the path to independence from Serbia, the province's ethnic Albanian president and prime minister said on Sunday."
Robison countered by saying, "In my book it is pretty obvious that in the very story she cites the Serbs are again attacking the Kosovars. That is evidence that we are enabling jihadists? What the ...?"
My detractors don't normally make it this easy for me, but if Mr. Robison insists on giving his inexpert opinion about who was behind an attack, then I can't have much mercy. The reason Robison is confused is that he hasn't been following the region for the past eight years and is unaware of its evolution as the big picture plays out. Had he been, he would know by now that if Serbs are suspected of attacks or attempted attacks, the word "Serbs" appears in the news reports on the subject, starting with the headline. When those suspected are Albanian, no ethnicity is mentioned-as we recently witnessed here with the Ft. Dix arrests, when just about every news outlet referred to "former Yugoslavs" instead of fingering our Albanian protégés. (It works similarly in the Middle East: "Israelis kill six Palestinians in West Bank Raid" vs. "Bus explodes in central Jerusalem.") Here are some headlines which don't give any idea as to who is behind an attack, until you read the actual article:
Terror strike on Bill Clinton Avenue [Boulevard]: Kosovo car bomb injures 32 as U.N. analyzes peacekeeping effort, WorldNetDaily.com, Dec. 17, 2002.
Explosion at UN Mission in Kosovo March 11, 2005, BBC
Three blasts rock Kosovo capital, sparking fears of fresh unrest July 3, 2005, AFP
"Another Explosion Rocks Kosovo. EU Fiercely Condemns Violence" July 4, 2005, Serbian source
"UN says threats made against Kosovo staff" Nov. 27, 2006, EuroNews:
The UN says it's received "credible threats" against its staff and property in Kosovo. The UN-run province is braced for violence after a year-end deadline for a decision on the ethnic Albanian majority's demand for independence from Serbia was pushed back. Security has now been heightened after political activists called for a mass protest on Tuesday against the UN negotiation process, which began in February.
KLA letter admitting attack on UNMIK cars sent from Tirana Feb. 23, 2007, Kosovo paper Express, via BBC Monitoring-Europe (Indeed, according to an American peacekeeper I spoke with, deployed with the National Guard in Kosovo, U.S. forces are advised to not park their vehicles near UN vehicles, as those are always exploding.)
Nor are recent headlines such as "NATO prepared to deal with possible civil disturbances in Kosovo" particularly a warning to the region's Serbs, with Albanians threatening violence if independence doesn't happen this summer.
Poole's and Robison's Vision Clouded by Sentimentality
Robison's experience of Kosovo, which he described in his original, heart-warming account for American Thinker, dates back to his year 2000 peacekeeping mission during which, he wrote, he felt like a "rock star" to grateful people including "gorgeous" and "giggling" toothless nurses. Of course he felt that way. As in other backwards, impoverished lands where any American is a celebrity, most of these people had never seen an American before, and this American was there to help them; naturally, he was embraced. (I can't help wondering, though, if any of these nurses were employed at the hospitals which during Kosovo's autonomous era wouldn't treat Serbian patients, forcing pregnant Serbs to go to Serbia proper to give birth. Are the giggling nurses among the Albanians who later got work at the UN-run mental hospitals abusing Serbian patients?)
In contrast, after his trip to Kosovo and Bosnia last month, Jesse Petrilla, founder of The United American Committee, which promotes awareness of Islamic extremism in America, concluded:
The Kosovo Muslims are of course grateful for [our help], yet I spoke with several dozen of them about their allegiances and it was blatantly clear that their allegiance was to the east, towards Mecca, and certainly not to the [W]est. Where will their allegiances be once they get their way and have an independent state? Considering the continual bombardment of Saudi money and Wahabist indoctrination in most every mosque and every school in Kosovo?
Like Ray Robison, AT contributor Patrick Poole also has been befriended by Albanians, his heart touched by some hospitable and, for the moment, grateful people. While Albanians made Robison feel like a rock star, Poole openly states on his blog:
While it is easy to get me to speak endlessly on any topic, if there's one topic that's near and dear to my heart it is anything having to do with my travels to Albania. I get teary just thinking about it.
If that's the case, Poole should responsibly recuse himself from the discussion, as he admits to being incapable of impartiality and objectivity on this issue. Both he and Robison are too close to the situation, their regard for a people clouding their vision and causing them to work backwards from a preferred and stale premise rather than follow the information. On this point, I should mention that I was writing my "Serb propaganda" for more than eight years before befriending my first Serb-which happened this past May in Israel.
It is clear that these two men depart from their anti-jihad guns when it comes to Albanians. Here is a perfect illustration in which, stunningly, Robison lays bare his conflicted confusion:
Gorin cites a Guardian article in which one of these "rebel leaders": "...called for the area to be included in Kosovo under K-For administration. But Nato, the UN and the US have called on his group to disband and respect current borders."
So just think about that for a moment. Here we have a commander of the extremists actually calling for western dictate over land he occupies. Can anybody with a straight face say this smacks of Islamic extremism? He did not say "we will behead infidels" or "the infidels must stop involving themselves in our region". He said he wanted NATO involvement.
A truly amazing statement. This is supposedly someone who knows something about the way jihad works? Is Robison unaware of the long-used tactic of enlisting the West's help to further one's territorial, nationalist and/or jihadist ambitions-until the West won't take the jihadist or nationalist agenda to the next stage, at which point the weapons turn against the Western Infidel? The Bosnian and Albanian jihads, as they are openly and casually called by Muslims around the world including Pakistani President Musharraf, was done by the book. Of course they called for a NATO intervention, and continue to call for Western interference where it is beneficial. For precedents on jihadists enlisting the aid of the international community (a.k.a. "Western dupes"), see the Oslo model (mind you, most Palestinians are "secular" too); also see Bosnia, 1980s Afghanistan and even the Islamic green-light that Anwar Sadat got from his imam before signing the Carter-brokered "peace" treaty with Menachem Begin.
In a September Human Events article titled "Will U.S. Back Islamo-Fascist State in Europe?", editor John Gizzi wrote:
Indeed, at the 16th Islamic Conference held in Pakistan in October 1998, Albanian separatism in Kosovo was defined as a jihad and the Islamic world was called on to help "this fight for freedom on the occupied Muslim territories."
It was at this time that the nascent al Qaeda "announced terrorist attacks against the ‘infidels', i.e. Great Britain, the USA, France, Israel, Russia, India and Serbia," according to this Serbian government report-if Robison, Poole and Albanian readers will deign to skim section 6, "Pan-Islamic Factor".