Re: Christian Extremists execute Muslims on Video!
So 100,000 men ROTATING through a hell hole away from their families for up to a year at a time for over a decade means so little to you? Here is a fine sysnopsis:
The Arab Betrayal of Balkan Islam
by Stephen Schwartz
In the wake of the atrocities of September 11, many American and other Western commentators have asked a perplexing question. They point out that the aim of the last three wars fought by the United States and its allies was to rescue Muslim or Muslim-majority peoples from aggression. Thus, the Kuwait war of 1991 saved Kuwait from Iraqi invasion. The 1995 intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina halted Serbian attacks in which some 200,000 people, the majority of them Muslims, were killed, and thousands of more people were raped, tortured, and driven from their homes. And the 1999 bombing of Serbia prevented the expulsion from Kosovo of two million ethnic Albanians, of whom at least 80 percent were Muslims.
Why then, the commentators ask, should so many Arab Muslims hate America? Have they forgotten these acts? A disregard among certain Arabs for U.S. protection of the Kuwaiti rulers, and by extension the Saudi monarchy, is perhaps understandable. Even pious Muslims among the Arabs have been known to admire Saddam Husayn, or to think that his invasion of Kuwait paled in comparison with Saudi corruption. But don’t Arab Muslims care that the United States saved the Balkan Muslims and Albanians from extermination or exile? Weren’t the Balkans a clear-cut case of massive U.S. military and humanitarian intervention on behalf of Muslims in distress?
Yet it is a fact that no credit was given where credit was due. Fouad Ajami confirmed the point in an interview with the Washington Post:
Ajami asked why … no Arab or Muslim leader has given the United States thanks or credit for taking military risks on behalf of two Muslim populations in Europe: the Bosnians and Kosovars. "I have heard no one acknowledge any gratitude for that … It’s a mystery."1
The mystery seems to deepen when one hears or reads what many Arabs do say about the U.S. intervention. These Arab assessments tend to be overwhelmingly negative—so much so that Usama bin Ladin himself denigrated of the U.S. intervention in the Balkans part of his standard repertoire. In a 1996 interview, the terrorist chief denounced America for “withholding of arms from the Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina” during the 1992-95 war there.2 Many of his Arab listeners would have known the truth: that it was Europe and the United Nations, not the United States, which erected and maintained the embargo on arms to the Bosnian Muslims. The U.S. intelligence community cooperated with other countries, including Iran, to arm the Bosnian Muslims in secret.
Bin Ladin, under U.S. attack in Afghanistan in November 2001, thought it useful to return to this theme, in a manifesto broadcast on Al-Jazira television. There he referred to
a war of genocide in Bosnia in sight and hearing of the entire world in the heart of Europe. For several years our brothers have been killed, our women have been raped, and our children have been massacred in the safe havens of the United Nations.3
It was a claim whose efficacy relied on Arab ignorance. For it was a plain fact that there had been no mass rapes or massacres in the country since U.S. intervention in 1995 and the imposition of the Dayton agreement; that the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague had indicted the Yugoslav leadership for genocide; and that even as bin Ladin spoke, Milosevic himself sat in prison in The Hague awaiting trial.
The willful self-deception about U.S. actions in the Balkans expressed by bin Ladin had a surprisingly wide echo among Arab Muslims, and especially among certain of bin Ladin’s fellow Saudis. An “Open Letter to President Bush” penned by the Saudi Islamic cleric Safar ibn ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-Hawali, a leader of the country’s extremist opposition, taunted the Americans: “One of your smart missiles infuriated the Yellow Giant [China] by destroying its embassy in Belgrade.” Incredibly, al-Hawali failed to mention the obvious: that the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy to Yugoslavia had taken place during the Kosovo intervention, and that China had sided with Milosevic in the U.N. in order to block action to save the Albanians.4
This myopia has been peculiar to the Arabs. Turks, for example, know better. The Turkish journalist (and former diplomat) Gündüz Aktan provided a typical Turkish assessment of the U.S. role in the Balkan wars, in the midst of the Afghan bombing:
The United States, [after] it could not convince our European friends, stopped the Serbian aggressions with a military intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina … the forces of the United States constituted 90 percent of the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] forces which brought Yugoslavia to heel, after it (repressed) the Kosovar Albanians and (sought to expel them); and it is observed that the United States also played an important role in the recognition of extensive rights for the Albanians in Macedonia.5
Even more telling was the pro-American position taken by many Balkan Muslims as the “war on terror” unfolded. The Albanian government, which had been extremely active in helping the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency break up a pro–bin Ladin cell composed of Egyptians, put bin Ladin in the same category as Milosevic:
Enemies of civilization like Milosevic or bin Ladin should end up in the defendant’s dock … bin Ladin will soon be held accountable alongside the "Butcher of the Balkans."6
The Islamic leaders in Albanian-speaking territories, including Kosovo and western Macedonia, were even more outspoken in support of the United States. The day after the September 11 attacks, Haxhi Dede Reshat Bardhim, world leader of the Bektashi sect, which is headquartered in Tirana and has at least two million Albanian adherents, sent a message to President George W. Bush referring to America as “the pride of this world” and declaring, "May Allah be, as always, on the side of the American people and the American state!"7
On October 12, in the Kosovo capital of Prishtina, the grand mufti of Kosovo, Rexhep Boja, prayed for the American dead at a commemorative meeting organized by the U.S. diplomatic office. (Washington has no official ambassadorial or consular representation in Kosovo.) The prayer service was led jointly with the Albanian Catholic bishop of Kosovo, Monsignor Mark Sopi. Chief imam of the Kosovo Islamic community Burhan Hashani commented: "The people of Kosovo will never forget America and its assistance."8
The day after the start of the Afghan bombardment, a Tirana daily offered a stirring headline for the military offensive, showing that some Muslims eagerly wished for the punishment of Islamic extremists: "Nobody Veils the Statue of Liberty’s Face."9 The Kosovapress news agency, established by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), printed statements from the two political formations that emerged from the KLA, the Kosovo Democratic Party (PDK) headed by Hashim Thaci, and the Alliance for Kosovo’s Future (AAK) led by Ramush Haradinaj. Thaci and Haradinaj are the two public figures most identified with the armed Albanian struggle against Serbia. They criticized the refusal of the Taliban regime to hand over the leaders of al-Qa‘ida, as demanded by the U.S., and affirmed that “the people of Kosovo bear a natural and special responsibility to the United States and its allies,” promising to render “conscious and unlimited support” to the global fight on Islamic terror.10
There was nothing surprising about the enthusiasm for U.S. global leadership expressed by Albanian Muslims. They know the lengths to which the United States has gone to protect them and other Balkan Muslims. The resentments they harbor over betrayal by false friends are directed not against America but against the Arabs, who either sided with Milosevic or treated Balkan Muslims with supreme condescension.
Milosevic’s Arab Friends
As someone who has lived in Sarajevo, I have been struck by the hostile attitudes of Muslim politicians and intellectuals toward Arab states. They are bitter that these states watched passively as thousands of indigenous European Muslims were slain in the Balkans, offering no assistance aside from press releases, aid donations, and religious propaganda. In addition, conspiracy theories about Arab behavior abound among Balkan Muslims. Some believe that there existed a clandestine alliance between Milosevic’s Yugoslavia and the Arab states—an alliance resting on the role of the Arab Orthodox Christian churches in Palestinian nationalism, historic links between Arabs and the former Soviet Union and other Communist states (including former Yugoslavia), and a common anti-Americanism. Others point to an alleged Arab resentment of the cultural association between Balkan and Ottoman Islamic traditions, both of which are despised by the followers of the Saudi Wahhabi sect.
There can be no doubt that Milosevic found many bedfellows among radical Arab states and movement, which rallied to his defense during the NATO operations against him. Iraq and Libya both described the NATO action in Kosovo as an anti-Yugoslav aggression, while Syria and Lebanon registered no reaction to events there. Earlier, Libyan foreign minister ‘Umar al-Muntasir had announced, after a meeting with the Yugoslav ambassador to Libya, that Libyan leader Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi supported “dialogue” between Belgrade and the Kosovars without foreign intervention.11 This amiable exchange came one month after the first pitched battle between Serb forces and the KLA, in the Kosovo town of Rahovec, on July 19, 1998. At Rahovec, up to 150 Albanians died; the Serbs buried their victims in two mass graves in the area of Prizren.
The incident was among the most traumatic of the Kosovo conflict, but came during a season of horrors. In August and September 1998—while the Libyans and Serbs were chatting familiarly—Serb mass executions were recorded in Ranca (eleven people killed, eight of them children), Galica near Vushtrri (fourteen dead, mainly young men), and Golluboc (eight child victims), while in Abria e Epërme, a whole family of twenty-two persons was wiped out. By the end of 1998, half a million Albanians had fled their homes. Yet on May 3, 1999, with the NATO bombing of Serbia underway for weeks, Qadhdhafi called for a halt to all military operations in Kosovo, the withdrawal of Serbian and NATO troops, a peace agreement drawn up with Yugoslav participation, and continued Yugoslav sovereignty over Kosovo.12
Libyan involvement with the Milosevic regime and its defense was not merely rhetorical. Throughout the period of NATO bombing in Serbia, and as far as may be determined, up to the present, Libya has maintained firm trade and economic relations with Serbia. Serbian management cadres have participated in running Libyan industry, and Serb officers assisted in training Qadhdhafi’s personal guards.
Many Palestinians also nurtured a similar sympathy for Milosevic. What may be considered the most surrealistic gesture during the entire decade of recent Balkan wars occurred six months after NATO’s bombing of Serbia: on December 1, 1999, the Palestinian Authority ¶ invited Milosevic to Bethlehem to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas. News of this invitation, although more or less ignored in the West, was reported with banner headlines in the Balkans. An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said that if Milosevic accepted the invitation he would be arrested on arrival, since Israel, as a U.N. member, is obliged to fulfill arrest orders issued by The Hague tribunal, which had indicted him. The PA, not being a U.N. member, was under no such obligation.13 And the PA was not the only Palestinian element to vacillate over Kosovo. Earlier in 1999, the Palestinian Islamic extremist Hamas movement issued a statement, denouncing U.S. intervention to settle the Kosovo crisis as "hiding under the slogans of human rights to impose its power in the Balkans."14 Hamas thus echoed the allegations of Milosevic’s own media, as well as the Russians and various leftists worldwide.
Islamists in Arab lands likewise did immense damage by making the false claim that the KLA was fighting for an Islamic state. In fact, the Kosovo Albanian struggle was ethnic, not religious, and the KLA included Catholic commanders as well as Muslims and persons with no strong religious affinities. But foreign Islamists announced that the struggle was some sort of jihad, a claim previously advanced by Milosevic, his government, and his apologists to label the Albanians as religious extremists. The KLA had to work overtime to refute the misinformation regularly disseminated about its objectives.
And of course the supporters of bin Ladin did all they could to provoke hostility toward the U.S. role in Kosovo, even after U.S. power ended the mass slaying of Muslims. In January 2000, a bin Ladinite website in the United States posted articles falsely claiming that NATO troops had introduced prostitution into Kosovo,15 and attempting to exploit a fatal sexual assault on an 11-year old Albanian girl by a deranged U.S. soldier.16 Other extremist websites purveyed the anti-NATO arguments that use of depleted uranium had polluted the soil in Kosovo, and that the real aim of the NATO intervention was to secure control of the Trepca mining complex (a facility that is a decade behind the rest of the world in extractive technology, while the commodities it once produced are all subject to a world glut).
In sum, while the rest of the world regarded the sufferings of Bosnian Muslims and Albanians as heart-rending and the basis of a great moral challenge to global policy makers, Arab states and Islamic extremists took a different view. They seemed to regard ethnic cleansing in the Balkans as secondary to their own complaints against the West and Israel, and as some sort of conspiracy of the West to infiltrate the Balkans. But their posture cannot be explained only by their obsession with Israel and their anti-Americanism. It owed much to the views of Wahhabi clerics who dominate religious life in Saudi Arabia and strongly influence it throughout the Arab states. Arab indifference to the fate of Balkan Muslims cannot be understood without an appreciation of Wahhabi ambivalence toward Balkan Islam—a very acute clash within Islamic civilization.
http://www.meforum.org/article/166