"The Wahabi movement has slowly been taking roots in Muslim populated areas of the Balkans, increasingly resorting to violent acts."
Funny how that keeps happening. "Macedonia: Islamists blamed for attack on Skopje mufti," from AdnKronos International, July 2:
Skopje, 2 July(AKI) - Three people have been detained by police in Macedonia after local mufti Ibrahim Sabani was expelled from a mosque during religious services, local media reported on Friday. Islamists linked to the fundamentalist Wahabi movement have been blamed for the attack on the mufti and police said three suspects had been charged with disorderly conduct.
The Macedonian Islamic community said the incident occurred last Sunday and had been reported to police.
Sabani told Skopje media that "criminal Wahabi bands" were active in the Macedonian capital and were trying to take over the mosque in which he conducted services.
He said Wahabis had slapped him and a man who tried to defend him before they were expelled from the mosque.
The Wahabi movement, originated in what is now Saudi Arabia, and advocates a form of fundamentalist Islam.
It was brought to Bosnia by mujahadeen fighters who came from Islamic countries to support local Muslims in the 1992-1995 civil war.
Last week Wahabis bombed a police station in the Bosnian town of Bugojno, killing one police officer and injuring six others.
One in four of Macedonia's two million people are ethnic Albanians, who are Muslims.
The Wahabi movement has slowly been taking roots in Muslim populated areas of the Balkans, increasingly resorting to violent acts.
W was completely and totally ignorant about Islam back in September 2001.
As were we all.
I agree, GM; islam produces some really heartless and soulless people, as demonstrated not only through the daily headlines on JW, but through the numerous posters we've had over the years. The "fruit" of islam can be really rotten.
Republic of Macedonia: Wahhabist Muslims expel local mufti in bid to take over mosque
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Funny how that keeps happening.
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Funny indeed. How many times have we heard of "Wahhabist" or "radical" or "Islamist" Imams forcibly taking over—sometimes violently taking over—more moderate mosques?
It's happening all over the Muslim world, and is now occurring in Dar-al-Harb as well.
Mosque invasions because you are not Muslim enough...
Konechno Aleksandr Makedonskij geroj no zachem zhe vsyu stranu lomat'?
I was there for a time during the war, and I have a lesson to relate to those who approach this problem the world's people are having (to this day) with jihad:
As George Santayana said, (not Plato,) "Only the dead know the end of war." I think of the statement as a pseudo-profundity, but still, there is real sense behind it, and I wish to address it briefly in terms of what I learned in that Balkan War back then. There is no end to war, nor an end to history. We will always have struggles, and we might even come to accept them as normal if unfortunate, struggles to be lessened but not eliminated, a part of the innate being of humanness. How do we deal with it? Thomas Sowell, a decent guy and good thinker, points out that we might accept trade-offs rather than seek solutions. (See "Intellectuals and Society.) Struggles, conflict, war, this will always be with us so long as we are human. But it need not be worse than it is. I saw in Skopje and other areas of Jugoslavia some genuine horror, which might not be what kind you expect to read.
I saw the defeat of the spirit of Man. I've seen it before and perhaps I'll live to see it again, but I will never live so long as to live to accept it as anything other than horror. I can live with blood and pain and death, and so too can you, but to live with the memory, with the life of defeat from internal collapse of the Will is a horror we cannot live with without trembling and fearing for our being as men. Death, bad as it might be, is far better than living with the loss of Will.
I've seen men flee from battle in defeat. I've seen captured men begging for their lives. Yes, I've even seen resignation. Those are states of being I wish on my enemies. In spite of what some might think, I am not a psychopath; I wish the harsh penalties of war visited upon my enemies because I have some deep sympathies for the average man, and, unfortunately, sometimes mercy means inflicting a scarring wound on those who will carry on, a punishing lesson all must learn if there is to be our relative peace for a time, till next time. But punishment is not horror, hard as it might punishment be. Horror is what men do to themselves. That horror, in this case, is the self-inflicted murder of ones own spirit in battle. I saw men stand stone-still waiting for death at the hands of an inferior force, strong men paralysed by mass fear emanating from the mass itself. They didn't even run away or beg for mercy. They gave up without a fight.
Some men fight, and they risk loss of limbs or life, and they die or they get mangled or they might win and then live with the result of what they've done. That can all be hard to look forward to. If one finds it too hard, then one should accept St. Augustine's moral: that if one cannot win, and if defeat is certain, then the moral act is to surrender before anyone is killed. If one realises that one is not really committed to winning, then one is little better than, if at all better than, a murderer. Killing ones enemies just for the satisfaction of taking a few as one goes is criminal. Just die. Get it over with and do less harm.
There is no end to war, and if one must wage it, then doing so as gently as one can is simply to prolong the agony of those one must eventually defeat anyway, emboldening them, giving them false hopes of victory, causing resentments and hatreds that will linger and fester till a new generation rises up hoping to do better than their fathers. Any better man than I would call it a sin. Conflict needs resolution, as brutal as it must be, though not worse than that. Not worse, but not less. either fight to win or do not fight at all. But do not begin to fight and then lose faith even in life itself. There is no lack of men willing to fight, and one need not fear that struggles will cease if one doesn't do ones part. Stay home, run away, die in a ditch, take drugs.
Jihadis have a distinct advantage over us, in a way: they have seemingly no end of volunteers committed to fighting to the death. All that spirit, all that Will; and yet they don't win. I think there's a relatively simple explanation for that: that jihadis cannot win because they have no attainable goal that would define victory. Instead, they have a vision of the End of History in which there will be no more war. They seem to have a utopian vision of perfection toward which they act. But it cannot happen, the purity they seek forever being out of reach, only the pursuit of it as it is out of reach being their motivation to continue. They must forever seek out impurity to justify the failure of the imperfect now. It means they can't stop killing and dying. Ever. Their only hope of satisfaction is in death, thus their own struggle is over, perfectly so, and they know the end of war. The living can only strive for such perfection in death as well. Seeing the mediocrity of the material, imperfect, unperfectable world is to see the lack of faith that will cause them to stand stone-still and die in a state of existential horror. So jihadis volunteer for the perfection of death rather than for the mediocrity of daily living. They cannot stop without having to confront the idiocy of Islam and its hollow core. To understand that their lives at base are false is to lose faith if there is no other faith, and these "true believers" have nothing to believe in but a greater lie.
They won't stop of their own accord. We can't talk them into reason and mediocrity in the material world. We must fight them, and either we fight so they are defeated and know it, till they stop begging for mercy and start demanding of others that they beg for mercy, the former adversaries now identifying with the victors, or we should stay home and watch soap operas and munch chocolate bon bons.
My girlfriend at the time asked one night why we dropped bombs on her own. "Why do you hate us so much?" I casually explained that we don't hate hers at all, it's just technicians in jets pushing buttons and watching video screens. There's no hatred involved at all. This is not a stupid girl, but it took a moment for that to sink in, at which point she screamed: "WE'RE BUGS!"
That woman will hate me forever, and rightly so.
If we are going to bother struggling against jihadis at all, we have to do so man to man so they know they were defeated by better men than they. It means fighting real men in the flesh and beating them in combat. We have to fight them till the spirit leaves them and they have no option but to confront the cosmic emptiness of their lives without hope. It does not mean nuking them on the sly. It means hurting real people who look back at us as they hurt.
We too have to pay a price for our victory, if we intend to win at all, which I have my doubts about. It's not just about risking the loss of an eye or a limb or even life itself: we have to risk far more than that; we have to have so much faith in our righteous cause that we are willing to lose our very souls for the cause.
It's a trade-off. Then it starts all over again, an endless agony of mediocre living in an imperfect but satisfying world. One must have faith to risk so much for so little. One might gladly accept the horror for the trade-off of others living-- if one has faith.
Go ahead. Read it again. Even where you may differ, it will provoke thought.
Where is Phillip of Macedonia and his well traveled son when we need them?