May 22, 2007

The "Pro-American" Terrorists

The "Pro-American" Terrorists

By Julia Gorin

FrontPageMagazine.com | May 22, 2007On cue, within minutes of news that four Albanians were involved in a plot to attack American soldiers in New Jersey,
we were treated to the familiar disclaimers of Albanian
pro-Americanism, meant to keep us on program — lest the American people
finally demand a reevaluation of our self-destructive 1990s alliances
which still dictate current policy.



“3 Brothers implicated in Fort Dix plot had roots in fiercely pro-U.S. region,” rang out an International Herald Tribune headline of a widely printed AP story:


 


Three
Muslim brothers who allegedly helped plot to kill soldiers at a U.S.
Army base have roots in one of Europe’s most pro-American corners — a
region that remains grateful to the United States for ending the Kosovo
war.



Albania was among the first countries to answer Washington’s call for troops to help support U.S.-led military offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Pristina, the capital of Kosovo…U.S. flags are commonplace…


 


A Washington Post article began: “They hail from one of the most pro-American and secular parts of the Muslim world — the ethnic Albanian regions of Macedonia, where gratitude for U.S.
assistance in Kosovo during the 1990s still runs high.” The same week,
an Albanian-Canadian broadcaster assured Canucks, “No one loves
Americans more than Albanians do” -- something that one Albanian
spokesman after another repeats.  


 


Albanians
are the most pro-American people in the world! everyone proclaims as
Albanians burn churches, kill nuns and behead monks in Kosovo, the
“most pro-American state-in-progress.” Ah yes, this is who loves
America. A dubious endorsement indeed. Everywhere else, we are hated for trying to beat back jihad. In Kosovo, Albania
and the Albanian Diaspora, they love us for enabling it. Any time you
help Muslims kill Christians, just like any time you help one
nationality clean out its ethnic rival, it’ll thank you. For a little
while.


 


Don’t be fooled. Albanian love is conditional. And it’s waning fast.


 


This was the overnight bus ride from Pristina to Montenegro that Weekly Standard contributor and longtime champion of Balkan Muslims Stephen Schwartz described last year for a site called FamilySecurityMatters.com:


 


A
man behind me began speaking almost immediately and without stopping,
in Albanian — which I understand…insistently focused on the nature of
God…[and on] the evil intentions of Americans,
Iraq,
and bloodshed. I was startled because it is rare to hear Albanians,
after the rescue of Kosovo, badmouth Americans…”God is one, who are
these people like this American who come and try to tell us how to be
Muslims? What about
Iraq? Why is this American here with his friend?”


 


Schwartz then described a rest stop:


 


I
did not find out where I was until I asked a waiter in the restaurant,
because none of the Albanians crowded in the back with me and my Sufi
companion and the whisperer in darkness would speak civilly to me. When
I asked one man, in Albanian, the name of the town, he answered in
Serbian: “ne znam,” “I don’t know.” Another said it was the Montenegrin
capital, Podgorica (it wasn’t). And finally a thin punk who could not
have been over 20, and who, I soon realized, had been encouraging the
voice behind me, said in perfect English, “I don’t understand English.”
At the end of the rest period all three people filed back into the bus
and avoided looking at me.


 


Muhammad
woke up and asked me what was going on. I told him, “Someone back here
is making Wahhabi speeches.” He grinned as if in disbelief, but said,
“I’m not surprised.”


 


The
befuddled Mr. Schwartz continued: “But I am known in the Balkans as an
opponent of radical Islam…I had repeatedly been recognized during this
trip on the streets and in mosques in
Albania and Kosovo, and was previously warmly greeted.”


 


When
good will is acquired by doing someone’s bidding, pro-Americanism is
won for the wrong reasons, and the gratitude will turn the moment we
stop furthering that party’s agenda. In Kosovo, it began happening as
early as 2000, when the Kosovars started calling for the UN and NATO
“occupiers” to get out. Nor do the American and British flags
hanging upside-down
from Pristina’s Victory Hotel bode well for the future of
pro-Americanism in “Kosova”. Meanwhile, the Wahhabi Muslims who started
flooding Kosovo upon our intervention have been making sure that young
Albanians sour on us anyway. In an article titled “
Behind Kosovo’s Façade,” Balkans observer Russell Gordon writes:


 


In
many areas young Kosovo Albanians are being converted to the Wahabist
faction, and are highly visible in their telltale short haircuts,
beards, and ankle-length pants. As well, many Arabs are present from
the
Middle East
and France….Moreover, anti-Western jihadist sermons are now a regular
feature at many of the new mosques. Western military intelligence
officials have stated that the findings of their investigations into
the jihadist terror networks is routinely ignored or blocked by NATO,
UN and US officials.


 


And yet, just one year before his eye-opening bus ride, Mr. Schwartz wrote what many Albanians still claim:


 


There
are not now and never have been, in recent times, ‘Muslim militants’ in
Kosovo, aside from a handful of individuals and some Saudi and other
Gulf Arab-state cells operating through relief agencies…No
‘international Islamist factions’ are present in Kosovo or presently
involved with Kosovo. No ‘international Islamist factions’ were
involved in the Kosovo war…Kosovar Muslims are extremely anti-Islamist
and pro-American.


 


Kosovo is the most heavily-policed, militarily-occupied region in Europe.
It does not now and has never had a ‘fundamentalist minority’ in the
sense the term is now understood, and no serious evidence to the
contrary can be produced.


 


So
what happened? Did the Albanians whom Mr. Schwartz encountered on his
bus trip turn fundamentalist overnight? Not according to a 1992 report
by the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, as Insight
Magazine
reported:


 


…Islam
experienced an unexpected renaissance in communist Yugoslavia in the
mid-1970s…According to a TFTUW report, the Yugoslav government in
Belgrade was concerned about what it saw as evidence that within its 40
percent Muslim population there were ‘’Muslim terrorists operating
against the West'’ and that ‘’Yugoslav Muslim youths were drawn into
cooperation with and emulation of Arab terrorists.'’


 


Our
NATO invasion only sped up a process that was already well underway.
Here was the scene in 1980s Kosovo, as reported by almost every major
paper at the time. From a 1987
New York Times article:


 


…Slavic
Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down.
Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been
knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders
to rape Serbian girls.



The goal of the radical nationalists among them, one said in an interview, is an ‘’ethnic
Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania
itself.'’



As
Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic
Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially
strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in
1981 — an ‘’ethnically pure'’ Albanian region, a “Republic of Kosovo”
in all but name.



Last summer, the authorities in Kosovo said they documented 40 ethnic Albanian attacks on Slavs in two months…Officials in
Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called federal Yugoslavia
, which consists of six republics and two provinces.



The
federal Secretary for National Defense, Fleet Adm. Branko Mamula… said
ethnic Albanian subversives had been preparing for ‘’killing officers
and soldiers, poisoning food and water, sabotage, breaking into weapons
arsenals and stealing arms and ammunition, desertion and causing
flagrant nationalist incidents in army units.'’



Ethnic Albanians already control almost every phase of life in the autonomous
province of Kosovo
,
including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools and factories.
Non-Albanian visitors almost immediately feel the independence — and
suspicion — of the ethnic Albanian authorities.



The hope is that something will be done…to exert the rule of law in Kosovo while drawing ethnic Albanians back into
Yugoslavia’s mainstream.


 


We certainly precluded that.


 


Between
the plan to kill American soldiers in New Jersey and the Bosnian
jihadist in Utah earlier this year — police still don’t have a motive,
which usually means it’s jihad — the reevaluation of our Balkan
policies almost began. (The Kosovo and
Bosnia connections to the Madrid and London
bombings apparently weren’t enough). But the reevaluation and the
turning of the Kosovo independence tide that it could bring threaten to
once again recede into oblivion, as Americans are coaxed into accepting
the ubiquitous explanation that the Ft. Dix four were an exception, a
fluke, an aberration, and that the genesis of their act has nothing to
do with Albanianism, but with a scourge that Albanians, like everyone
else, suffer from and are averse to: militant Islam.


 


“Few ethnic Albanians embrace militant Islam,” assured the aforementioned AP report. “Most are moderate or secular.”


 


That
line, present in every news item about Albanian or Bosnian Muslims for
the past decade, has been repeated ad nauseum by the many Albanians
interviewed for various follow-up articles to the
Ft. Dix
story, with many insisting that this kind of religiousness is “not
Albanian.” But when you cast your lot with the radicals who help your
land grab, when you accept help from them and align your early goals
with theirs, do you really think they won’t come to collect?


 


When Albanians object to depictions of them based on events in recent years, their sentences start with “Albanians have never been…”, or “Albanians historically
are not…” — without understanding that they should be speaking in the
past tense. However this “nominally” Muslim population started out,
there is only one direction for it to go  from here. (Besides, the
long-existent mosques serving the Albanian communities of
Staten Island and New Jersey, not to mention the Albanian-American Islamic Cultural Centers that dot the American landscape, belie the “nominal” claim.)


 


Not
being religious, and not being even a “cultural Muslim”, didn’t keep
former Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj (currently on trial for
war crimes) from meeting with
bin Laden in Tirana in 1995, along with his fellow non-religious Christian-killer (and Albright darling) Hashim Thaci – at the Albanian president’s offices (Sali Berisha, who is now the Albanian prime minister).


 


And as we know by now, one doesn’t need to be a practicing Muslim to feel aggrieved when Muslims are arrested for plotting or committing terrorism:


 


“We all have been supporters of America. We were always thankful to America for its support during the wars in Kosovo and Macedonia,” a cousin, Elez Duka, 29, told The Associated Press.


 


“These
are simple, ordinary people and they’ve got nothing to do with
terrorism. I expect their release and I expect an apology,” he said,
waving his hands. “I see injustice. These are ridiculous charges.”


 


His
indignation captured the mood among Muslims in Kosovo, Macedonia and
Albania — places that have repeatedly expressed gratitude to the United
States for intervening in the 1998-99 Kosovo war and a 2001 ethnic
conflict that pushed Macedonia to the brink of civil war.



“I don’t see that they committed any act or that (the authorities) have facts,” he said. “They live in
America
and grew up in the American culture. How can you say they are
anti-American? These accusations are totally unfounded. They have
recordings of words, not deeds.”


 


As
this report illustrates, even nominally Muslim pro-Americanism is a
brittle thing. And as soon as you deviate from the agenda, the
honeymoon is over.


 


The
same report quotes Kosovo “Prime Minister” Agim Ceku, who wrote a
letter to the U.S. mission in Pristina, “expressing the ‘extraordinary
feeling that Kosovo’s people have for the U.S.’ Ceku also denounced
what he called ‘the disgusting idea’ that Albanians could be involved
in an attack ‘against a nation that has been very generous so far.’”


 


So far.


 


That means more is expected, and when those are the terms of “friendship”, the future for a pro-American Kosova doesn’t look bright.


 


When
the architects of our Kosovo war continually boast that not a single
American life was lost in their “successful” war, the appropriate
response is “Not yet.” The Albanian strategy in Kosovo in fact has been
a replay of the Oslo accords: Accept Western/infidel help for as long
as it furthers your territorial ambitions; then, once the great powers
are no longer willing to carry you to the next stage, revert to
“traditional” methods and take up arms against them. This has been the
modus operandi of Islamic conquest for the past several decades. So
either we’re looking at a striking confluence of methodology between
Islam and “Albanianism” -- which is strongly bound by nationalist and
clan loyalties --  or its’ no coincidence at all.


 


Those
Albanian weapons, meanwhile, have been turned against the area’s
Western benefactors for some time already. When shot at by Albanians in
trying to protect Serbs, KFOR troops are
directed
to flee rather than return fire, which would draw attention to the
region and beg the question, “Why are the people we went to war for
shooting at us?”


 


In addition to the intermittent threats to go to war against NATO (which is in addition to actually shooting
at peacekeepers since 2001), it turns out that both KLA and its
mujahideen accomplices were fighting Americans at the same time that
Americans were fighting the Serbs for them. As one American peacekeeper
who was deployed to the area admitted last week in an article meant to
defend
Albanians, “One of our central missions was to protect ancient
Christian churches that the Mujahideen were blowing up. Our area
experienced the occasional IED and drive by shooting almost never aimed
at US forces.”


 


This would help explain how an Albanian applicant to al Qaeda could claim, “I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. I need no further training. I recommend (suicide) operations against (amusement) parks like Disney.” (Emphasis added.)


 


And, writes Serbianna.com’s Mickey Bozinovich:


 


[The]
recent beating of an American peacekeeper by local Albanian Muslims
illustrates the fragility of the American military position in that
province if Muslim Albanian drug interests are threatened: an unnamed
American soldier was found off duty at a gas station and beaten silly
by Muslim Albanians because his unit took part in foiling an
unidentified illegal plot.


 


During
a February mission to Brussels, after getting the usual empty
assurances of protections for Kosovo’s non-Albanian minority, American
Council for Kosovo Director Jim Jatras asked a Hungarian member of the
European Parliament, “Isn’t all this talk of protections for Serbs a
tacit admission that among the Kosovo Albanians are a lot of violent
and intolerant people? Why would you reward their violence with state
power?”


 


Looking Jatras in the eye, the parliamentarian replied, “Because we’re afraid of them.”


 


Afraid…of pro-American people?


 


If
pro-Americanism is what we so desperately seek, what about the
pro-American deed of rescuing 500 American pilots shot down in
Yugoslavia
during WWII? The airmen were rescued by the Serb Draza Mihailovich and
his anti-Axis guerillas. The late U.S. Major Richard Felman wrote:


 


A
few days after the Germans had seen us bail out and counted ten
parachutes, they sent an ultimatum to the Chetnik [Serb] Commander in
the hills to either turn over my crew of ten to them or they would wipe
out an entire village of 200 women and children…But Gen. [Draza]
Mihailovich would hear none of it… He told us how life is just as
precious to the Serb as it is to the American.


 


Mihailovich’s
resistance to Nazi forces “would have far-reaching implications for the
outcome of the entire war,” explained Aleksandra Rebic, a military
daughter who lived down the street from one of the rescued men. Of the
500 Americans rescued, she
wrote:


 


They
would be nursed back to health by the Serbs loyal to Mihailovich, who
at great risk to themselves, would shelter, feed, and protect these men
who were foreigners on their soil. 500 American young men would return
home to become fathers and husbands and later grandfathers who would
tell their children and grandchildren the story of how their lives had
been saved so many thousands of miles away by a man named Draza
Mihailovich.


 


Writes author William Dorich:


 


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.


 


Then there are always pro-American acts of omission. While we see more and more reports of terrorism being plotted against the U.S. from the “unlikely” Balkan quarters of Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania,
there seems to be a lack of anti-U.S. Serb terror in the works. Except,
of course, in the movies and TV shows we write about them.


 


But
no, we preferred, and prefer, to cast our lot with the Balkans’ most
primitive elements — sacrificing friends to make friends of our
enemies. Men who severed Christian heads, killed federal employees who
were Albanian for “collaborating”, and violently
purged
their own ranks are the “statesmen” whom Condoleezza Rice and Nicholas
Burns meet with regularly, the men we’ve set up as the legitimate
rulers of an ethnically pure pro-American Kosovo, and who were honored
guests at the 2004 Democratic Convention.


 


Rather
than rule of law, religious freedom, ethnic diversity, equal justice
and civil rights, Kosovo is governed by lawless, tribalistic,
blood-code-following, clan-oriented mob justice. While reports out of
Serbia concern debates in public schools over Evolution versus
Intelligent Design theory — similar to our own — a typical report out
of Kosovo concerned a debate over
whether to kill the KFOR (NATO) mascot because the dog was Serbian.


 


“We’re
defending our way of life,” our leaders told us in 1999. Perversely
enshrining those ‘common values,’ a crude replica of the Statue of
Liberty overlooks our mono-ethnic handiwork from atop the Victory Hotel
where the American flag hangs upside-down just a few yards below.
Nearby are
Bill Clinton Boulevard and Wesley Clark Avenue
— tributes cited recently as examples of the area’s pro-Americanism.
(There are also streets named for Eliot Engel, Bob Dole and Madeleine
Albright.) Meanwhile, the former terrorists whom we installed as the
“Kosovo Protection Force” and as the legitimate government of the
province attend annual July 4th celebrations at the U.S. Consulate in
Pristina. One proposed banner for the competition to design “Kosova’s”
new flag mimics the American flag, with the two-headed black Albanian
eagle in the corner where the 50 stars would be, plus red and white
stripes.


 


Great.
The narco-terrorist gangster state we created is pro-American. Are we
so desperate for an endorsement that we must grasp it even if it comes
from a terror-friendly horde, our support of whom is already coming
home to roost?


 


Here is a description of the lifestyles of the families of the Ft. Dix suspects from The Washington Post:


 


…Living
among those varied families for the past seven years were the Dukas, a
three-generational clan of ethnic Albanians. Their Muslim religious
garb, repeated minor run-ins with the law, and a brood of up to 20
children, grandchildren and other relatives…


 


And from the AP:


 


…the
women in the ethnic Albanian family wore head scarves. They kept farm
animals in the backyard until others in the neighborhood of tidy
two-story houses complained…Neighbors there said four or five families
appeared to be living in the house...


 


Among
Albanians, Bosnians, Croats and Serbs — even with all the documented
and imagined crimes attributed to the Serbs — the Serbs were the
Balkans’ most civilized element. Add up Serb crimes, multiply them by
10, and they’re still not as scary as the people they were fighting.
(Or do we need to get into the
skull-crushing, eye-gouging, bloody-knife-licking,  using the “Serb-cutter”, raping-and-burning, neck-sawing, beheading and disemboweling
that Bosnians, Croats and Albanians engaged in?) So now ask why Serbs
were so hated by those they were fighting. And ask why KLA targeted
Americans and Serbs together.


 


Before
you accept Albanian pro-Americanism, you must first ask what made
Albanians anti-Serb. Then you must look at photos of what the KLA did
to its enemies, so that when you’re exchanging niceties and recipes
with your Albanian neighbors, keep in mind that, by and large, the KLA
terrorists remain their national heroes.



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