In "Ground Zero Mosque: Americans Get a Taste of Serbdom" at Republican Riot, June 13, Julia Gorin exposes some chickens that are coming home to roost in Kosovo, and that may soon be laying eggs at Ground Zero:
Last week I blogged about the radical Islam that, thanks to our interventions in the Balkans, has entrenched itself in Kosovo and is now proceeding according to plan. That is, targeting not the Christians whom we helped them target originally, but the ultimately intended victims: the area’s non-radicalized Muslims. I also mentioned the connection of this trend to the participation of Albanians on the Gaza Flotilla.The very day that I posted these items, there was a new blog acknowledging the same problem — from none other than the Weekly Standard’s Stephen “Suleyman Ahmad al-Kosovi” Schwartz. Schwartz spent the 1990s making radicalization of the Balkans inevitable by shilling for the “national” interests of the nominal Muslims there — who surely would be immune to the radicals we were infesting the region with!
An excerpt:
From Kosovo to Gaza
BY Stephen Schwartz, June 9, 2010Kosovo media have reported that an Islamist ideologue from that country, Fuad Ramiqi, was among the participants in the ill-fated attempt to break Israel's naval blockade at Gaza. Ramiqi was joined by three Albanian Muslims from Macedonia — Sami Emini, Jasmin Rexhepi, and Sead Asipi.Fuad Ramiqi is the representative in Kosovo of the European Muslim Network, a fundamentalist organization…Ramiqi, a soldier in the Yugoslav army who joined the Bosnian army during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, runs his own Brotherhood franchise, the Muslim Forum of Kosovo (MFK), created in 2006.…
Late in May, local police rounded up five Wahhabis…in the environs of the Kosovo city of Prizren. The Islamist suspects included three Bosnian Muslims…and two Kosovars…According to a Bosnian Islamist web report, the police action was officially described as a response to an assault by the five Wahhabis on a Kosovo government employee who distributed the Bible to his neighbors during his off hours…Wahhabi attacks on individuals, including another Christian, have made headlines across Kosovo throughout the past two years.
Confrontations between Wahhabi intruders and local Muslims have been visible in all the Western Balkan countries, including Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. The presence of three Macedonian Albanians at the scene of the Gaza bloodshed is unsurprising to observers of Islam in the Balkans, since Macedonian Muslims have succumbed almost totally to the influence of Arab money. The pattern of unwanted radical immigration into the Balkans continues. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last month reported…that Wahhabis have disrupted Islamic religious life in the resort town of Ulcinj, on the Montenegrin coast near the northern border of Albania…Leaders of the official and moderate Islamic religious community in the town complained to local media as well as RFE/RL that Wahhabis had threatened and physically attacked local imams, and invaded administrative meetings…
Mustafa Canka, a Muslim journalist from Ulcinj, blamed Islamic officials for “institutional weakness, idleness and neglect, based on personal interests and selfishness.” He described the local Muslims as afflicted by “disorientation, inadequate response to contemporary problems, and ignorance.”…He said the radicals now have many supporters, but that their influence will not endure. He repeated his criticism of local Muslim religious functionaries, who he said were trained in the local form of Islam and did not recognize the danger when they “opened the door wide” to radical newcomers. […]
In response to this Jewish Muslim and patron saint of Balkans Islam, Jim Jatras questioned why radical Islam only becomes a problem when the local Muslims start suffering from it — but not while we’re helping to put the local non-Muslims under the rule of the Muslims? Indeed, what we were doing to Balkans Christians while furthering the Muslim causes in the region was never of any concern to the shameless al-Kosovi Schwartz.
Jatras added:
What’s amazing is that he can peddle this swill to dumb-ass Americanos who will read it, nod their heads about all this worrying “Islamism” (imported, mind you) without ever asking:1. How come nobody worries about importing “Islamism”…among non-Muslims — just Muslims?
2. Might this be less of a problem if the West (mainly the US) had not placed Muslims in political power in Bosnia and Kosovo, at the expense of their Christian neighbors?
3. [Weren’t] people like Mr Schwartz, now gravely warning of the “Islamist” danger, enthusiastic advocates of Item 2, above?
Even more richly, in a Tuesday debate about the Ground Zero mosque on “Russia Today,” Stephen Schwartz was listed as a moderate Muslim who has publicly voiced his opposition to the mosque. Opponents of the Ground Zero mosque view it as a sort of flag marking an area of conquest.
Ah. So as usual, it’s good for the Serbs but not good for Americans.
Because if the subject is monuments to conquest — and on sacred ground — please consider the countless statues, monuments and street names dotting the landscape of the conquered Serbian holy land of Kosovo — tributes to the killers of Serb civilians and Albanian “collaborators” who merely sold groceries to Serbs or were married to them. These fallen KLA “heroes” and fathers of a Muslim Albanian Kosovo are memorialized everywhere, along with international politicians who helped make it happen (streets are named after Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Bob Dole, Eliot Engel, Wesley Clark, George W. Bush, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and ex-ambassador/CIA operative William Walker). [...]
If the Ground Zero mosque goes ahead, Americans will get the slightest sense of what it feels like to be a Serb living on Serbian land, occupied by one’s tormentors. Some might call it poetic justice. I call it the logical conclusion of Western policies in the Balkans, where the demise of the Free World was sealed by our own hand. What we did to Balkans Christianity when we joined the jihad against it on five fronts was the beginning of the end for all of us.
Indeed. Read it all.
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Leaders of the official and moderate Islamic religious community in the town complained to local media as well as RFE/RL that Wahhabis had threatened and physically attacked local imams, and invaded administrative meetings."
Those who are truly "moderate" Muslims and want to foreclose the possiblity of their children or grandchildren ever becoming "immoderate" Muslims, and those who are merely "Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims and have been alarmed by the appearance of Arabs aggressively, and even violently, bringing The Real Thing, have a possiblity: recognize that your own non-Muslim ancestors -- Serbs and Croats -- were forcibly converted to Islam by the Ottoman Turks, and by forcible conversion one naturally includes the cases of those who converted in order to avoid the pains of being non-Muslim dhimmis in a Muslim-run state. And once you have recognized that, make the choice to give up Islam. What, after all, does Islam mean for the mental and moral development of your own children? The Muslim Turks no longer rule; why continue in the faith imposed on your ancestors?
The model should be Emir Kusturica, who a few years ago had himself baptized in the Serbian Church because, he said, why should he stay with Islam just because, 250 years ago, some ancestor had been forcibly converted? To him it made no sense.
Why should it make sense to advanced, and therefore unenthusaistic and largely unobservant, Muslims in the Balkans today. No need to stick with it. Why be loyal to a totalitarian belief-system, instead of being loyal to one's ancestors -- the ones who came before those who were forcibly converted?