A new beginning? Or the continuation of the 1000 year old jihad that has ravaged the Balkans ever since? I say pull the UN out, arm the Serbs to the hilt and give them carte blanche…….
Bosnia: Jihadists bomb police station; analysts state the obvious and warn of more to come
As is so often the case with the Balkans, analysts are quick to attribute the problem of jihadist activity to the influence of “Wahhabism,” though without accounting for why the Wahhabists’ teachings resonate so readily with what we were told were peaceful, secularized, tolerant Muslims. To suppose otherwise, of course, raises the specter of there being something about Islam, even among our modern, moderate “friends and allies” that is not of the Wahhabists’ invention, but nonetheless generates acts like the one described below.
What are the Wahabi mosques doing in the heartland of Europe?
In any event, however, the West in general, and NATO countries in particular, are dismally willing to stand idly by while Saudi petrodollars fund an Islamic revival, complete with its inherent problems of Sharia law and jihadist doctrine, in the Western pet project comprised by the Muslim components of the former Yugoslavia. At the root of that inaction are two issues: the economic blackmail of dependence on oil, and the politically correct article of faith that Islam must be a “Religion of Peace”… if people would just stop “misunderstanding” it.
“Bosnia: Suspected Islamist bombing ‘the beginning’ say experts,” from AdnKronos International, via JW
Sarajevo and Belgrade, 28 June (AKI) – Sunday’s bloody bombing of a police station in Bosnia in a suspected radical Islamist attack is only the beginning of a wave of violence in Bosnia, terrorism experts said on Monday.
Police have arrested at least five people over the attack in the central town of Bugojno, in which one person was killed and six wounded.
Among those arrested was Haris Causevic, who admitted planting the explosive device near a police station in the town 75 kilometres northwest of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
Causevic is believed to be a member of the fundamentalist Islamic Wahabi Islamist movement. Benevolence towards Wahabism by Bosnian authorities have allowed it to radicalise supporters and plot violence, according to Galijasevic and other terrorism experts.
Local politicians have for too long treated Wahabi groups propagating violent Islam with excessive tolerance, Bosnian terrorism expert Dzevad Galijasevic, told Adnkronos International (AKI).
“This (attack) was to be expected and it is just the beginning,” Galijasevic, who is a Muslim, told AKI.
“Bosnia has a very stormy period ahead,” he warned.
Galijasevic said about five percent of Bosnia’s 1.5 million Muslims had been indoctrinated by Wahabi ideology, but the number of their supporters may be about 12 per cent of the population.
Though Wahabism is considered a radical religious movement in Bosnia, Wahabis are playing a central role in terrorist activities in the Musim-majority country, according to Galijasevic.
“Their activities have nothing to do with religion,” he said.
There had been scores of murders and terrorist activities in Bosnia, but local authorities have played these down as “isolated incidents and ordinary crime,” Galijasevic said.
“Bosnia-Herzegovina simply isn’t ready to explicitly call it terrorism, although western intelligence agencies are pefectly aware of what’s going on,” he stated.
Galijasevic claimed radical Islam had a strong supporter in wartime Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and current Muslim member of the joint state presidency Haris Silajdzic, who condemned Sunday’s bombing as an attack on the state.
Galijasevic heads a non-governmental southeast European counter-terrorist organisation with Serbian expert on terrorism Darko Trifunovic and a Croatian Domagoj Margetic.
They have frequently warned that Bosnia has become a European hotbed of radical Islam and Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist activities.
Trifunovic agreed that most of Bosnian Muslim leaders have ignored the activities of radical Islamists and played down their terrorist activities.
Not to mention playing down their having anything to do with “religion.”
“We have been highlighting this problem for years, but no one paid attention,” he told AKI.
Attacks such as the one in Bugojno were the “logical consequence” of ignoring the security threat posed by Wahabism, he said.
“I’m afraid this is not the end,” Trifunovic said.
Update:
The central question here is: do the “moderates” here have the political will, support of the population, and is it their own genuine intention, to prevent the outright Islamization of Bosnia? Time will tell.
And a follow-up question: do said “moderates” have a better defense than to glibly insist the chapters and verses quoted by the “radicals” were “taken out of context?”
We get that one a lot, of course, when we report on jihadists’ own reliance on Islamic texts and teachings to motivate and defend their acts. Oddly, enough, such bland pronouncements just never seem to halt the jihad. It keeps happening, and we keep reporting on it. “Bosnia: Radical Muslims urge boycott of security forces,” fromAdnKronos International. August 17:
Sarajevo, 17 August (AKI) -Â Radical Wahabi fundamentalists have been leafleting mosques throughout Bosnia Herzegovina urging Muslims not to join the country’s police and army.
AdnKronos is frequently a useful source, but one can’t help but note what amounts to a George Carlin-esque attempt at softening the blow of a succinct term like “jihadist” by stretching it out over more syllables. By the year 2020, they should be up to a good paragraph or so in the mainstream media.
“Those are forces devoted to a fake god who we should fight against with all of our powers,” read the leaflets, which Wahabis have been putting in mosque collection boxes.
Members of Bosnia’s Muslim community dismissed the leaflets as a “desperate and insane appeal”.
The leaflets also contained several passages from the Koran which had been “misinterpreted” and “used out of context”, they said.
Funny how that keeps happening.
Similar leaflets were found in mosque contribution boxes just before the bombing of a police station in the central Bosnian town of Bugojno on 27 June that killed one policeman and injured six others.
Wahabi leaflets first appeared in Bosnia when the government decided to contribute to NATO forces in Afganistan and Iraq. The leaflets accused the government of “betraying our Islamic brothers” in these countries.
Bosnia’s imams are said to be deeply concerned by the bombing in Bugojno and the reappearance of wahabi pamphlets. Bosnian mosques are not well protected and it is impossible to monitor people entering them, according to the imams.
The Wahabi movement first appeared in the Balkans during the 1990s wars, when ‘mujahadeen’ from Islamic countries came to Bosnia to fight on the side of local Muslims.
Wahabi cells have been radicalising supporters, running training camps and plotting violence in recent years, according to a number of terrorism experts
Bosnia state security agency OSA director Almir Dzuvo said in July there were some 3,000 well equipped radical Islamist militants in Bosnia, who posed a serious terrorism threat to the country.
Bosnia: Muslims “wanted to draw NATO into war”
Of course, when people point out the activities of jihadists in the Balkans, theCommentary crowd accuses them of supporting the enormities and crimes, real and/or trumped-up, of the local opposition to that jihad. Of course, that accusation neither logically follows nor accords with fact. “Bosnia: Muslims ‘wanted to draw NATO into war,’” from AKI, October 7 (thanks to JW):
The Hague, 7 Oct. (AKI) – Bosnian Muslims wanted to draw NATO into their country’s 1992-1995 war to help them against the Serbs, British general Michael Rose told the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on Thursday.Serbs deliberately targeted civilians with sniper fire in the capital Sarajevo in order to intimidate them, said Rose, who served as chief of the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia in 1994.
He was testifying at the trial of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is conducting his own defence.
But cross-examined by Karadzic, Rose conceded that there had been some cases in which Muslims fired at their own people to blame the Serbs and trigger foreign intervention.
He also said that reports in western media on Serb attacks on eastern town of Gorazde were often exaggerated.
Karadzic is being tried on eleven counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment is focusing on the shelling of Sarajevo and a massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern town of Srebrenica in July 1995….
Update:
Kosovo goes to the polls
Fitzgerald: The jihad in Serbia
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses why all anti-jihadists should support Serbia today:
The jihad in Serbia is one that is obscured in a particularly vexing way. Accordingly it must be emphasized that in alerting people to attacks on the Serbs, and to the destruction of ancient churches and monasteries, and on the infiltration into the area of Arabs bringing a brand of Islam quite different from the relaxed, syncretistic local version (not exactly full-bodied Islam in practice, because that local practice was affected by the centuries of proximity to non-Muslims, and to the effect of Communism), one is not endorsing any massacres by some Serbs. One can distance oneself — most Serbs do, unfeignedly — from Milosevic and those atrocities that were committed by some Serb forces.
One must keep in mind both the way in which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. The role played by Arabs who came from outside never received the attention in the West it deserved. But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule, the ferocity of that Turkish rule, the role of the feared devshirme (which was not, as Bernard Lewis would have it, a kind of benign “recruitment” of Christian and in some cases Jewish children for the armies of the Sultan, but rather a forced levy of such children, snatched from their families to enter the armies of the Sultan).
Had such a history been discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic might never have obtained power.
Izetbegovic had openly demanded that Islam become the ruling force in Bosnia. His remarks on the need to reimpose the Sharia and impose full Muslim rule did send shivers down Serbian spines. And at the same time, Germany, which was so quick to recognize Slovenia and then Croatia, was remembered by Serbians as connected to Operation Kozara and many other massacres, as well as to Croatian collaborators with the Nazis, the Ustashe who killed Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies at Jasenovac. And Serbs have not forgotten the story of Kurt Waldheim in his “Intelligence Unit.” Germany’s quick recognition of these states was understood in light of all this, and seemed to many in Serbia to be what prematurely caused Yugoslavia to dissolve.
And these two histories that are vivid in Serbian imaginations, the recent one of German and Ustashe massacres, and the much older, much longer one of oppression and massacre by the Ottoman Turks. These were enough to terrify Serbs into supporting certain leaders whom, had they not been so terrified, they would never have followed.
In all of Europe, only a few French journalists and the Austrian writer Peter Handke tried to explain Serbian fears and Serbian history. In the United States, no one made the slightest effort. Milosevic = Serbs, Milosevic = bad, Serbs = bad. And Izetbegovic? Well, when he died, the plummy-voiced Paddy Ashdown (now some grand panjandrum in the Balkans) delivered himself of some solemn words of regret on the passing of the great man (the Great Man was a monster); not a hint of what Izetbegovic was all about.
In Bosnia and Kosovo, hundreds of millions of dollars from the Saudis and Arab fighters, have now been around — as they will go wherever Jihad-duty calls — for the last 15 years.
A few months ago, Albanians destroyed a few hundred Orthodox churches in Kosovo. Nothing happened at the UN. Just as nothing happened when a Hindu temple was destroyed in the middle of Kuala Lumpur by the Muslim-run government. Nothing was done when Joseph’s Tomb was reduced to rubble by the “Palestinians” in 2000. Nothing was done when the Bamiyan Buddhas were at long last, after 1,500 years, destroyed because, at long last, they could be. Here and there, there was about those churches as about the other cases, a cluck-cluck of disapproval. But nothing will happen.
And if Turkey is, insanely, allowed into the EU? What will the Balkans be like then, if not a place to settle, or still worse, a transit-point for Muslims, by no means all of them citizens of Turkey? Who will distinguish a Turkish Kurd from an Iraqi Kurd, or an Iranian Kurd? Who in Western Europe will really be able to distinguish an Arab “immigrant” slipping in from a Turk who is entitled to free movement within the EU? Chaos, anyone?
Shouldn’t the Western Europeans learn just a little about the Balkans? Let’s start with Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, or Ivo Andric (whose recently-reprinted Ph.D. thesis on the effects of Muslim rule, “The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule,” should not be forgotten), Milovan Djilas and his son Aleksa. No one can discuss the Balkans unless that person can adequately describe:
1) the devshirme system;
2) the condition of Christians under Ottoman rule, including such events as the Bulgarian Wars of 1875-1876;
3) the significance of the Battle of Kosovo;
4) who was Karageorge.
Be able to answer those questions, and you will have begun to earn the right to have an opinion about the Serbs, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
How many in the State Department today can answer those questions? Why not? Why didn’t those in the West study what Izetbegovic said? When Clinton ordered the bombing of the Serbs, had he heard, ever, about the devshirme? Did he know that Izetbegovic had written about imposing the Sharia? No, of course not. But had he, and had others, they might have reassured the Serbs long before, and helped to make them less panicky, less prone to give power to someone like Milosevic. The West entirely mishandled Serbia.
And right now, despite the dribs and drabs that begin to come out about the exaggerations on which criticism and bombing of Serbians was based, despite the new evidence, or the evidence no longer hidden, of past Muslim atrocities, the Western world still seems ready to overlook what is now happening. And what is now happening are attacks on Serbian villagers and the destruction of Serbian churches in Kosovo. Is one supposed to permanently blame Serbia and never take its side because of what Milosevic did? Is one to overlook the role of Bosnia as a place of training for those who could tomorrow be conducting Jihad anywhere in the world?
There is no reason not to take Serbia’s side now. There is every reason — of principle and of Infidel self-interest — to take it.
**********
Fitzgerald: The jihad in Serbia revisited
Source
On May 15, 2006 I explained why those who oppose the global jihad should support Serbia today. It bears repeating:
The jihad in Serbia is one that is obscured in a particularly vexing way. Accordingly it must be emphasized that in alerting people to attacks on the Serbs, and to the destruction of ancient churches and monasteries, and on the infiltration into the area of Arabs bringing a brand of Islam quite different from the relaxed, syncretistic local version (not exactly full-bodied Islam in practice, because that local practice was affected by the centuries of proximity to non-Muslims, and to the effect of Communism), one is not endorsing any massacres by some Serbs. One can distance oneself — most Serbs do, unfeignedly — from Milosevic and those atrocities that were committed by some Serb forces.
One must keep in mind both the way in which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. The role played by Arabs who came from outside never received the attention in the West it deserved. But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule, the ferocity of that Turkish rule, evoked in summary fashion by memories of the feared devshirme (which was not, as Bernard Lewis would have it, a kind of benign “recruitment” of Christian and in some cases Jewish children for the armies of the Sultan, but rather a forced levy of such children, snatched from their families to enter the armies of the Sultan).
Had such a history been discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic might never have obtained power.
Izetbegovic had openly demanded that Islam become the ruling force in Bosnia. His remarks on the need to reimpose the Sharia and impose full Muslim rule did send shivers down Serbian spines. And at the same time, Germany, which was so quick to recognize Slovenia and then Croatia, was remembered by Serbians as connected to Operation Kozara and many other massacres, as well as to Croatian collaborators with the Nazis, the Ustashe who killed Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies at Jasenovac. And Serbs have not forgotten the story of Kurt Waldheim in his “Intelligence Unit.” Germany’s quick recognition of these states was understood in light of all this, and seemed to many in Serbia to be what prematurely caused Yugoslavia to dissolve.
And these two histories that are vivid in Serbian imaginations, the recent one of German and Ustashe massacres, and the much older, much longer one of oppression and massacre by the Ottoman Turks. These were enough to terrify Serbs into supporting certain leaders whom, had they not been so terrified, they would never have followed.
In all of Europe, only a few French journalists and the Austrian writer Peter Handke tried to explain Serbian fears and Serbian history. In the United States, no one made the slightest effort. Milosevic = Serbs, Milosevic = bad, Serbs = bad. And Izetbegovic? Well, when he died, the plummy-voiced Paddy Ashdown (now some grand panjandrum in the Balkans) delivered himself of some solemn words of regret on the passing of the great man (the Great Man was a monster); not a hint of what Izetbegovic was all about.
In Bosnia and Kosovo, hundreds of millions of dollars from the Saudis and Arab fighters, have now been around — as they will go wherever Jihad-duty calls — for the last 15 years.
A few months ago, Albanians destroyed a few hundred Orthodox churches in Kosovo. Nothing happened at the UN. Just as nothing happened when a Hindu temple was destroyed in the middle of Kuala Lumpur by the Muslim-run government. Nothing was done when Joseph’s Tomb was reduced to rubble by the “Palestinians” in 2000. Nothing was done when the Bamiyan Buddhas were at long last, after 1,500 years, destroyed because, at long last, they could be. Here and there, there was about those churches as about the other cases, a cluck-cluck of disapproval. But nothing will happen.
And if Turkey is, insanely, allowed into the EU? What will the Balkans be like then, if not a place to settle, or still worse, a transit-point for Muslims, by no means all of them citizens of Turkey? Who will distinguish a Turkish Kurd from an Iraqi Kurd, or an Iranian Kurd? Who in Western Europe will really be able to distinguish an Arab “immigrant” slipping in from a Turk who is entitled to free movement within the EU? Chaos, anyone?
Shouldn’t the Western Europeans learn just a little about the Balkans? Let’s start with Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, or Ivo Andric (whose recently-reprinted Ph.D. thesis on the effects of Muslim rule, “The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule,” should not be forgotten), Milovan Djilas and his son Aleksa. No one can discuss the Balkans unless that person can adequately describe:
1) the devshirme system;
2) the condition of Christians under Ottoman rule, including such events as the Bulgarian Wars of 1875-1876;
3) the significance of the Battle of Kosovo;
4) who was Karageorge.
Be able to answer those questions, and you will have begun to earn the right to have an opinion about the Serbs, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
How many in the State Department today can answer those questions? Why not? Why didn’t those in the West study what Izetbegovic said? When Clinton ordered the bombing of the Serbs, had he heard, ever, about the devshirme? Did he know that Izetbegovic had written about imposing the Sharia? No, of course not. But had he, and had others, they might have reassured the Serbs long before, and helped to make them less panicky, less prone to give power to someone like Milosevic. The West entirely mishandled Serbia.
And right now, despite the dribs and drabs that begin to come out about the exaggerations on which criticism and bombing of Serbians was based, despite the new evidence, or the evidence no longer hidden, of past Muslim atrocities, the Western world still seems ready to overlook what is now happening. And what is now happening are attacks on Serbian villagers and the destruction of Serbian churches in Kosovo. Is one supposed to permanently blame Serbia and never take its side because of what Milosevic did? Is one to overlook the role of Bosnia as a place of training for those who could tomorrow be conducting Jihad anywhere in the world?
There is no reason not to take Serbia’s side now. There is every reason — of principle and of Infidel self-interest — to take it.
That was what I wrote in May 2006. And now, under the article that I did two years ago, I have found a posting by someone who had served in the American military and had been in the Balkans at the time that Wesley Clark was running the American military operation there.
His comment is also worth reproducing:
As part of a U.S. military planning staff, I (amongst other educated U.S. military officers) attempted to warn the amazingly insane and emotionally unstable Gen Wesley Clark that his intentions would lead only to the following:
1) We would facilitate the establishment of a Muslim state in Kosovo.
2) This would be the second Muslim state to established in the heart of Europe, following Bosnia, in just three years. What might the consequences be?
3) This would grow into a very painful experience for Europe and the U.S. 10-20 years down the road.
4) We would enforce Serbia’s perception that they are the bastard stepchild of Western Civilization.
Clark fired over twenty of his top intelligence analysts for briefing these views to him. He persisted with his fantasy that the Kosovar Albanians were as pure and clean as the wind-driven snow; innocent victims of a simple Serbian compulsion for evil. Yeah, right!
Clark was clueless and a madman. Behind closed doors, the overwhelming majority of officers on the EUCOM planning team thought he was INSANE. However, after he fired the first several, everyone got the picture. Cook the intel to make the Kosovars look like angels and the Serbs like demons.
Clark had a demented and paranoid beef with Milo because the Serbian President showed the American General no deferrence whatsoever during Dayton negotiations with Ambassador Holbrook, for whom Clark was a bag carrier/military aide.
I was also in Bosnia for seven months as a human intelligence officer; the most civilized persons I met with overall, were Serbs. The most frightening, Muslims. The place was crawling with mujahideen who were only there, of course, because the Americans had done nothing to save the Muslims (who DID suffer badly, I should add). Dirty pajamas, long beards, AK’s, the works. I know, because I disarmed them myself.
I visited a Catholic Church in a (former) Half-Croat/Half-Muslim town, Gornji Vakuf. The church had been razed, burned, and the alter lined with 110 young Croats who were summarily executed, along with the Parish Priest. On the rectory was spraypainted the words, “There is no more time for you here.” In other parts of the town, many walls and buildings were spraypainted with the words, “Mismo Hamas,” which is Serbo-Croat for, “I am Hamas.” In fairness, I did see a noticeable amount of “Ustace” (Ooh-stah-shah) “U’s” spraypainted in other towns, too.
Milo was a bastard. That said, the Serbs are the most maligned and heroic of our brothers in Europe. After the battle of the Field of Blackbirds alone, they should be praised as heroes that should stand alongside Charlemagne and the boys who stormed Normandy, on opposite ends of the temporal octave of late Western Civilization.
And I’m Croatian!
[Posted by: Knight4AO at May 15, 2006 1:53 PM]