Ivan Babanovski, a former security studies professor, is quoted below saying that these ralliers "misuse Islam." Yet those who use it properly, in his view, and abhor jihad terror, never seem to rally. Now, why is that?
"Macedonia protests signal surge of radical Islam," from EurActiv, May 14 (thanks to Twostellas):
Ethnic Albanians rallied in several Macedonian towns on Friday (11 May) to protest against a police operation that saw suspects arrested in the deaths of five people. The regional press saw the protests as a sign of rising radical Islam in the country.Thousands of ethnic Albanians demonstrated against the arrest of three men charged over the killing of five Macedonians last month.
Photos from the scenes showed that many of the protestors waved Saudi flags and that some wore T-shirts with inscriptions such as “Islam will dominate the world”.
On 13 April five slain Macedonian fishermen were discovered beside a lake in the village of Smiljkovci north of Skopje. Four of the victims were in their late teens or early 20s. The fifth was a man in his 40s. On 1 May, police arrested 20 people, including radical Islamists who reportedly fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as suspects in the murders.
Demonstrators shouting slogans such as "UCK" (the now-defunct liberation movement in Kosovo in the late 1990s), "See you in the mountains" and "Greater Albania", threw rocks at police, the SETimes reported. The news site also reported that protestors attacked the offices of Skopje's Chair municipality whose mayor, Izet Medziti, belongs to the ruling Albanian party Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). "Clearly they do not want co-existence - their slogans betray the goal to misuse Islam to create an ethnically pure state, which means conflict in the region. Slogans in support of the Democratic Party of Albanians also betray the involvement of some political parties to benefit from such an abuse of religion," Ivan Babanovski, a former security studies professor, told SETimes....
