Global Politician, NY
Dec 6 2007

Why We Should Oppose Independent Kosovo

Fjordman – 12/7/2007

Hans Rustad runs Document.no, the largest independent weblog in my
country. A recent post there contained criticism of me, and I have
already answered some of it. However, Mr. Rustad also claimed that I
support a revisionist view of the Balkan wars of the 1990s which is
"just as factually wrong, immoral and politically dangerous as David
Irving’s Holocaust revisionism." I consider that statement to be too
awful to ignore, and decided to write a reply in English.

I have said repeatedly that I believe the Balkan wars were far more
complex than we are led to believe by the political establishment,
and I fear that we out of ideological blindness have come to support
some pretty dangerous Muslim forces. I respect Mr. Rustad for
exposing the bias against Israelis in the mainstream media, and I am
sad to see that he accepts uncritically a similar bias against the
Serbs. My point is that you cannot understand recent history in the
Balkans without taking the previous seven centuries of Islamic
oppression into account.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote
this about dhimmitude, the humiliating apartheid system imposed upon
non-Muslims under Islamic rule: "The conversion of the entire
population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is
the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in
the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional
period only. (…) A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the
State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified
form of slavery. He lives under a contract (dhimma) with the State.
(…) In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest
of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and
property made subservient to the cause of Islam."

This "modified form of slavery" is now frequently referred to as the
pinnacle of "tolerance." If the semi-slaves rebel against this system
and desire equal rights and self-determination, Jihad resumes. This
happened with the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, who were
repressed with massacres, culminating in the genocide by Turkish and
Kurdish Muslims against Armenians in the 20th century. This same
pattern is now used against the state of Israel. Israelis are not
only attacked because they are Jews, but because they do not meekly
disarm and accept the status of servitude that they should have
according to Islamic law. They are disobedient dhimmis, just as the
Armenians were.

According to Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, editor of the excellent book The
Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, even
the Turcophilic 19th century writer Ubicini acknowledged the
oppressive burden of dhimmitude in this moving depiction:

"The history of enslaved peoples is the same everywhere, or rather,
they have no history. The years, the centuries pass without bringing
any change to their situation. Generations come and go in silence.
One might think they are afraid to awaken their masters, asleep
alongside them. However, if you examine them closely you discover
that this immobility is only superficial. A silent and constant
agitation grips them. Life has entirely withdrawn into the heart.
They resemble those rivers which have disappeared underground; if you
put your ear to the earth, you can hear the muffled sound of their
waters; then they re – emerge intact a few leagues away. Such is the
state of the Christian populations of Turkey under Ottoman rule."

Bostom asks, "Why has the quite brutal Ottoman devshirme-janissary
system, which, from the mid to late 14th, through early 18th
centuries, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam an estimated
500,000 to one million non-Muslim (primarily Balkan Christian)
adolescent males, been characterized, reductio ad absurdum, as a
benign form of social advancement, jealously pined for by
‘ineligible’ Ottoman Muslim families?"

Writer Vacalopoulos describes how Jihad-imposed dhimmitude under
Ottoman rule provided critical motivation for the Greek Revolution:

"The Revolution of 1821 is no more than the last great phase of the
resistance of the Greeks to Ottoman domination; it was a relentless,
undeclared war, which had begun already in the first years of
servitude. The brutality of an autocratic regime, which was
characterized by economic spoliation, intellectual decay and cultural
retrogression, was sure to provoke opposition. Restrictions of all
kinds, unlawful taxation, forced labor, persecutions, violence,
imprisonment, death, abductions of girls and boys and their
confinement to Turkish harems, and various deeds of wantonness and
lust, along with numerous less offensive excesses – all these were a
constant challenge to the instinct of survival and they defied every
sense of human decency. The Greeks bitterly resented all insults and
humiliations, and their anguish and frustration pushed them into the
arms of rebellion. There was no exaggeration in the statement made by
one of the beys if Arta, when he sought to explain the ferocity of
the struggle. He said: ‘We have wronged the rayas [dhimmis] (i.e. our
Christian subjects) and destroyed both their wealth and honor; they
became desperate and took up arms. This is just the beginning and
will finally lead to the destruction of our empire.’"

As scholar Reuben Levy noted: "At Constantinople [Istanbul], the sale
of women slaves, both negresses and Circassians [likely for harem
slavery and/or concubinage], continued to be openly practiced
until…1908."

In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha
Hurshid the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers were built in a
tower on the way to Constantinople. 3 meters high, Skull Tower was
built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbs not to challenge
their Muslim rulers.

Similar Jihad massacres were committed against the Greeks, the
Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who slowly rebelled against the
Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian
and others have clearly identified Jihad as a critical factor in the
Armenian genocide in the early 20th century. As Efraim Karsh, author
of the book Islamic Imperialism: A History points out, "The Ottomans
embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist
aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence
of the 1820’s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant
Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870’s, the Greco-Ottoman
war of 1897–all were painful reminders of the costs of resisting
Islamic imperial rule."

In his book Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer quotes a letter
from Bosnia, written in 1860 by the acting British Consul in
Sarajevo, James Zohrab: "The hatred of the Christians toward the
Bosniak Mussulmans is intense. During a period of nearly 300 years
they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other
law but the caprice of their masters existed….Oppression cannot now
be carried on as openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed
that, because the Government employés do not generally appear as the
oppressors, the Christians are well treated and protected."

According to writer Ruth King, "during the bombing of Serbia on
behalf of Moslem Albanians in 1999 Saudi Prince Khaled Bin Sultan,
commander of the allied Saudi troops during the first Gulf War,
called on the US to do the same against Israel on behalf of
Palestinians. The fate of Jews and Serbs, which has intersected in
the past, is doing so again. The jihadist effort to expunge Jews from
Palestine mirrors the Moslem goal of incorporating Kosovo into a
‘greater Moslem Albania’ while expelling Christian Serbs. When Serbia
became independent of Byzantine rule in the 12th century, its
economic, cultural, social and religious institutions were among the
most advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a bridge between
Greco-Byzantine civilization and the developing Western Renaissance.
The center of the Serbian Orthodox Church was in Kosovo where
churches, monasteries and monastic communities were established. A
form of census in 1330, the ‘Decani Charter,’ detailed the list of
chartered villages and households, of which only two percent were
Albanian. The Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389 and consolidated their
rule in 1459, propelling major parts of the Balkan peninsula and
adjacent southeast Europe into a Koran-dictated Dark Ages."
Early in the twentieth century Serbian Christians were roughly
two-thirds of the population of Kosovo. After WW2, Communist dictator
Tito did not allow Serbs who fled from their homes to return and did
not enforce border controls as thousands of Albanians moved into
Kosovo.

As King says, "Initially, the media reported the situation in Kosovo
fairly. For example, in July 1982 The New York Times noted: ‘Serbs
have been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the
region. The Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform, first to
establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and
then to merge with Albania for a greater Albania. Some 57,000 Serbs
have left Kosovo in the last decade.’ Five years later, in 1987, the
Times was still reporting the persecution of Serbs within Kosovo.
‘Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, wells poisoned, crops
burned, Slavic boys knifed. Young Albanians have been told to rape
Serbian girls…. Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian
challenge as imperiling the foundations of the multinational
experiment called federal Yugoslavia….Ethnic Albanians already
control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province of
Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools, and
factories.’"

It was this situation that led to the rise of Serb nationalist leader
Slobodan Milosevic. However, instead of reporting about the advancing
Jihad to make some sense of the situation, Western media, according
to Ruth King, "went into a frenzy of accusations against the Serbs,
much as it has against Israel and with similar distortions. The media
depicted the armed, violent and jihadist Moslem Albanians as ‘unarmed
civilians’ despite the fact they called themselves an army and
perpetrated assaults, bombings, murder of civilians and targeted
assassinations of Albanians loyal to Serbia. President Clinton
outrageously referred to a ‘holocaust’ perpetrated by Serbia and
compared the Moslems of Kosovo to the Jews – this, even though the
Serbs had behaved well toward the Jews during the real Holocaust and
Clinton himself was pressing Israel’s Jews to accept the ‘peace
partnership’ of Arafat, a brutal terrorist far worse than Milosevic,
admittedly a dictator and a Communist thug."

Moreover, "While the brutality of the Milosevic regime was indeed a
complicating factor, he is long gone, but the KLA [Kosovo Liberation
Army] continues its assault on Serbs, on their churches, priests,
homes, even on civilians sitting in cafes, this under the nose of the
U.S. and UN troops."

Bosnia’s wartime president Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, hailed as
a moderate Muslim leader. Little was said in Western media about his
1970 Islamic Declaration, where he advocated "a struggle for creating
a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia, from the
tropical Africa to the Central Asia," and that "The Islamic movement
should and must start taking over the power as soon as it is morally
and numerically strong enough to not only overthrow the existing
non-Islamic, but also to build up a new Islamic authority."

As Hugh Fitzgerald says, "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.
But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to
anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. 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." Yet, "In all
of Europe, only a few French journalists and the Austrian writer
Peter Handke tried to explain Serbian fears and Serbian history."

Alija Izetbegovic received money from a Saudi businessman, Yassin
al-Kadi, who has been designated as a financier of al-Qaeda
terrorists. Evan F. Kohlmann, author of Al-Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe:
The Afghan-Bosnian Network, argues that the "key to understanding Al
Qaida’s European cells lies in the Bosnian war of the 1990s." In
1992, the government of Izetbegovic issued a passport to Osama bin
Laden. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2001 that "for the past 10
years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans:
The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has
operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction
factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout
Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia."

Yosef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism
and Conventional Warfare in Washington, has stated that the Balkans
was a "springboard for Islamic extremism" in Europe and that Iran was
the main driving force behind it. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia supplied
funding, weapons and men to the Bosnians during the war. Saudi Arabia
has invested more than $1 billion in the Sarajevo region alone, for
projects that include the construction of 158 mosques. Terrorist
organization Al-Qaeda gained a strong foothold in the Balkans during
the 1990s.

Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and later Chief United
Nations negotiator for Kosovo, caused anger when he stated that
"Serbs are guilty as people," implying that they would have to pay
for it, possibly by losing Kosovo. I disagree. It is one thing to
criticize the brutality of the Milosevic regime. It is quite another
thing to claim that "Serbs are guilty as a people." If anybody in the
Balkans is guilty as a people, it is the Turks, not the Serbs.

Dimitar Angelov elucidates the impact of the Ottoman Jihad on the
region:

"…the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks over
the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin of
material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of a
great part of the population – in a word, a general and protracted
decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was
occupied by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is all
the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth
century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula,
the States that existed there – Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia – had
already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural
development….The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially
those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia,
Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of a
particularly devastating character."

Author William Dorich states that "The Serbs lost 52% of their adult
male population fighting in the First World War as American allies.
Twenty-four years later the Serbs were the only people in the Balkans
to declare war on Nazi Germany. Hitler bombed the ‘open city’ of
Belgrade on Palm Sunday in 1942, killing 17,000 Serbs in one day.
Surrender followed ten days later as the Nazis invaded. The Serbs
lost another one-third of their population in the Holocaust again
fighting as American allies, especially against their own Croat,
Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Nazis."

Serge Trifkovic, author of the books The Sword of the Prophet and
Defeating Jihad, documents how Yasser Arafat’s uncle Mohammad Amin
al-Husayni cooperated closely with Nazi Germany in recruiting Bosnian
and Albanian Muslims for Waffen SS units. Serbs had to wear blue
armbands, Jews yellow armbands. For Muslims, this was a Jihad against
disobedient dhimmis, and thus a continuation of the genocide against
Armenians a few years earlier, which was one of the inspirations for
the Holocaust. More than a quarter of a million Serbs, Jews and
Romani people (Gypsies) were killed by Muslim troops in Nazi service.

Trifkovic cites James Jatras as claiming that Washington’s irrational
Balkan policy is to a significant extent the product of the ignorant
and misguided notion that the U.S. can curry favor in the Islamic
world by sacrificing Kosovo’s Christians to the violent Jihad-terror
elements that dominate Kosovo’s Albanian leadership: "Such an
unfounded notion shows a breathtaking incomprehension of the
worldwide jihadist threat. International opposition and the Bush
Administration’s failing domestic credibility put a weight on the
policy, however, which can be dealt a fatal blow if enough Americans
raise their voices against it."

Miroljub Jevtic, professor at the Belgrade University and author of a
number of books on the topic of Islam and politics, believes the
Western world is in favor of detaching Kosovo from Christian Serbia
by fiat and making it into an independent (Muslim) state. The main
argument of those supporting this scenario, notably in the United
States, is to improve their image in the eyes of the Islamic world
and "co-opt the influence of Islamic ‘extremists.’"

However, Jevtic notes that "the fact that since the arrival of NATO
to Kosovo over 150 Christian churches have been destroyed and some
400 mosques have been built, or are under construction, is for the
Muslims a proof that if there is a faith which is supported by true
God — it is Islam! Because, why would the Christian God, why would
Jesus, permit the destruction of churches, where He, Jesus, is
glorified? Why would He, at the same time, permit the construction of
mosques, where His existence as God is denied? Why would He permit
it, moreover, in the presence of men who bear arms and who claim to
be Christians?"

Miroljub Jevtic warns that the European Union support for Albanian
Muslim demands could backfire badly: "Granting the independence to
Kosovo will be taken as proof of Europe’s own wish to cease to exist,
as it not only allows the expansion of Islam but is actively
promoting it by aiding those who are destroying churches, raping
nuns, spitting on crosses and daubing with excrement holy images of
Christ."

In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed
following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs by the predominantly
Muslim Albanians, all under the auspices of NATO soldiers, and
Muslims are not ungrateful. Kosovo Albanians plan to honor their
"savior," former US President Bill Clinton, by erecting a statue of
him. At the same time, in 2007, four Albanians from Kosovo along with
other Muslims were arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a
military base in New Jersey, in order "to kill as many soldiers as
possible."

The House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) called
upon "jihadists of all color and hue" to see Kosovo as "yet another
example that the United States leads the way for the creation of a
predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe." But a
video of Osama bin Laden meeting with two 9/11 hijackers revealed
that the mass murderers were motivated by a desire to avenge
Muslims… in Bosnia, where the USA intervened on behalf of Muslims.
Meanwhile, no Christian Serbs have staged any terror attacks against
the United States or Western European countries in retaliation for
the NATO bombings. So who are really the bad guys here?

In a commentary, "We bombed the wrong side?" former Canadian UNPROFOR
Commander Lewis MacKenzie wrote, "The Kosovo-Albanians have played us
like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported
their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo.
We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence
in the early ’90s and we continue to portray them as the designated
victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve
independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of
bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement
this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around
the world."

Western governments are pushing for independence for a group of
Jihadist thugs who recently wanted to create the Osama bin Laden
mosque in Kosovo. This name was eventually changed for public
relations reasons since the Albanians knew they needed American
political support. In June 2007 the visiting US President George W.
Bush was hailed as a hero by a group of Albanians, who also
apparently stole his watch. "Sooner rather than later you’ve got to
say ‘Enough’s enough – Kosovo is independent,’" Bush told cheering
Albanians. As German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung later commented,
"Why should the Albanians settle for autonomy when George W. Bush had
already promised them their own state?"

President Bush declared a "war on terror" after the Jihadist attacks
on the United States in 2001. Six years later, all he has achieved is
bleeding American tax payers financially and American soldiers
literally while overseeing the eradication of non-Muslim communities
in Iraq. Now his administration supports independence for
terrorist-sponsoring Muslims in the Balkans and in the Palestinian
territories. Unless he does something very substantial in 2008,
George W. Bush risks being remembered as one of the worst presidents
in American history.

I listened to a speech by Patrick Sookhdeo, a former Muslim who
recently launched his latest book, Global Jihad: The Future in the
Face of Militant Islam. Sookhdeo had done a lot of excellent – and
frightening – research regarding the Islamization of Western Europe,
especially Britain. He recalled having a conversation with a senior
Western official regarding what would happen if Muslims in a region
of, say, Britain or the Netherlands, should declare that they would
no longer accept the laws of the central government and would form a
breakaway Islamic Republic. This official then stated that they would
probably just have to quietly accept that. When witnessing the Muslim
riots in France, which more and more resemble a civil war, this
question is no longer just hypothetical.

As writer Julia Gorin has warned, "An independent Kosovo will serve
as a nod to secessionists worldwide," and "history will show what no
one cares to understand: the current world war began officially in
Yugoslavia."

Granting Jihadist Muslims independence in Kosovo after they have
conducted ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims will establish an extremely
dangerous precedent. Not only is it immoral to sacrifice the freedom
or perhaps existence of smaller nations, be that the Serbs or the
Israelis, in order to save your own skin. As the example of
Czechoslovakia demonstrated during WW2, it is also counterproductive.
Supporting independence for Muslim Albanians in Kosovo will not lead
to stabilization of the Balkans; it will rather lead to the
Balkanization of the West. The new thug state will serve as a
launching pad for Jihad activities against non-Muslims, just like an
independent Palestinian state would do in the Middle East.

In the case of Kosovo, the Russians are right and Western leaders,
both in the European Union and the United States, are wrong. The
Serbs have suffered enough. Give them a break!

In a conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims, other infidels should
always support the non-Muslim side. That goes for Kosovo as much as
it goes for Kashmir or southern Thailand. It’s time to end the
demonization of the Serb people and support their struggle against
the global Jihad. We are all next in line.

Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many
conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the
past, but it is no longer active.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress