Bush to Visit Europe This Week - Pro-US Sentiment Peaks in Kosovo

VIENNA, Austria — Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Haditha. America's problems with Iraq are casting a long shadow over President Bush's meeting with European Union leaders this week.

The gathering is restricted to U.S. officials and the European Union leadership, and the agenda focuses on Iran's nuclear ambitions, agricultural subsidies and the West's dependence on imported oil and gas.

But the United States' precarious world standing will be the unspoken theme of Wednesday's session in Vienna.

Ahead of the visit, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said he doubted Bush would have much to say about the U.S. prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq and alleged killings of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha.

For millions of Europeans, however, these are the issues that matter — and their concerns are shared by politicians.

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, plans to urge Bush to close Guantanamo. Peter Pilz, a senior member of Austria's Green party, says Schuessel should tell Bush "that the criminal actions of his government will not be tolerated in Europe."

Pilz is one of Austria's more outspoken public figures. Still, his sentiments — that the U.S. is breaking the law in Iraq and in its larger fight against terror — are shared by many Europeans angry over the Iraq invasion, recent suicides at Guantanamo and the reported existence of secret CIA prisons worldwide.

Newspaper editorials reflect Europe's dismay with a partnership most here see as has having gone wrong.

"Those who came as liberators, those who wanted to bring the rule of justice ... lost their moral credibility in Iraq," wrote the German weekly Die Zeit. "Not just a few soldiers have 'lost their control' as they like to say. America's entire Iraq policy is out of control."

In France, the newspaper Le Monde wrote of the Guantanamo suicides: "We continue to ask by what heavenly decree America holds itself above the rule of law."

Young people, like Andrej Mantei of Berlin, are even more scathing. "I don't think it's possible that anybody could make worse foreign policy than Bush," he says.

And even many older people are critical, unlike a few decades ago, when they equated America with the war against Nazi Germany, postwar reconstruction and the shield against the Soviet Union.

"I think Bush was wrong, and he should have remorse," said Rosa Sarrocco, 80, of Rome. "The recent events ... have had a further negative impact on my opinion of America."

America's image problems in Europe are reflected by a survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and released last week. Favorable opinions of the United States ranged from a high of 56 percent in Britain to a low of 23 percent in Spain.

Even in Britain, support for Bush was only 30 percent, and 60 percent of British respondents said the Iraq war has made the world less safe.

Pro-U.S. sentiment is stronger in much of formerly communist eastern Europe, where Washington's contribution to toppling Soviet dominance lingers in many minds. It peaks in Kosovo, whose ethnic Albanian majority gratefully remembers the U.S.-led bombing in 1999 that forced Serb troops from the province.

"Till I die, I will support whatever America does, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere," says Arben Shaqiri, a 25-year-old bartender in Pristina, Kosovo's main city.

But "Old Europe" is more critical. There have always been trans-Atlantic rivalries, but the divide has grown: The end of the Cold War removed the threat that had united America and Europe since World War II.

It's partly a reflection of two societies drifting apart as the continent seeks to preserve its model of free college education, universal health care, seven-week holidays and other social programs that reflect a different emphasis from the American work ethic.

In his book, "The European Dream," author Jeremy Rifkin outlines characteristics that push the two peoples apart. "The American Dream puts an emphasis on economic growth, personal wealth and independence," he writes. "The new European Dream focuses more on sustainable development, quality of life, and interdependence."

A recent addition to the differences is widespread European dislike not just of the Iraq war but Bush's blunt style. Editorials often talk of the Texan as the "cowboy president."

Washington's decision to work in concert with other world powers as it tries to engage Iran over its nuclear program shows America may have learned some lessons about the benefits of diplomacy.

"Whatever the Bush administration does, it is automatically viewed with suspicion by the European population," says Steven Casey of the London School of Economics, an expert on American public opinion.

Cicero, you may want to read this article:

Roman Catholicism Supplanting Orthodoxy in Kosovo

Excerpts:

PRIZREN, Yugoslavia, Aug. 22 (RNS)--Throughout Kosovo, there are two major kinds of churches, Roman Catholic and Serbian Orthodox. It is easy to tell the difference. The Serbian Orthodox churches are notable for the NATO tanks parked outside, for the rows of coiled razor wire, for the sandbagged guardposts, and for the soldiers with automatic weapons who demand identification from visitors.

Roman Catholic churches in Kosovo are unguarded and unfortified.

Kosovo's 60,000 Catholics, who make up about 4% of the province's population, are enjoying a period of long-awaited freedom and growth. At the same time, the once dominant Serbian Orthodox Church is under steady attack from ethnic Albanian Muslims here who identify the Serbian church with decades of government discrimination.

Because the vast majority of Kosovo Catholics are ethnic Albanians, there is little of the ethnic animosity that divides Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians.

Bishop Sopi, a genial man with an authoritative bearing, said in an earlier interview that local Serbs' flight from Kosovo was a natural process.

"One thing must be clear: The Serbs did not just run to Serbia because the Albanians were driving them out," he said, adding that the Serbs "behaved themselves very badly for the last 10 years and especially during the war, so they have reason to fear for their lives."

During 78 days of NATO bombing and Serb attacks on Albanian Kosovars, Sopi remained in Kosovo along with the vast majority of his 36 priests and 70 nuns.

He said Catholics were not subject to discrimination for their faith.

According to Andreas Szolgyemy, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's religion adviser in Kosovo, Catholics and Muslims have long enjoyed close relations in the region. He related his experience attending two religious holidays last winter in Pristina, Kosovo's capital.

"At midnight Mass Christmas, in the Catholic church, I would say that half the 2,000 or 3,000 people were Muslims"

It's a nice story, and possibly true, but I doubt it. Belief.net is a very checkered source.

It's true that Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians have a long history of mutual hatred, since they have been fighting for hundreds of years, ever since the Turks tried to conquer Europe. But the record for any kind of Christians in Muslim lands is not favorable, over the centuries. Whether Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, or Copt, Christians living in Muslim countries tend to be killed or forcibly converted more or less at whim.

The same might be said about anyone who is a "religion adviser" for the Euros or the UN. The only reference I can find to Andreas Szolgyemy is another posting of this article that you added to another thread. I think you are citing leftist, politically correct propaganda here, frankly, about as "Christian" as the World Council of Churches. Frankly, I think this is a load of eyewash.

The rest of the story...the real one ----that naive people should be aware of:

WASHINGTON, June 6, 2006 – As part of its mission to promote a better American understanding of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, the American Council for Kosovo supports dissemination of accurate information concerning Muslim Albanian violence against Christian Serbs and their churches and monasteries. The American Council for Kosovo commends Cliff Kincaid for his essay “Christians Under Siege in Kosovo” (June 1, 2006), in which he explains a “foreign policy disaster in the making,” as jihad terrorist and criminal elements push for an independent Islamic state.

In his essay, published by Accuracy in Media, an independent media watchdog organization unconnected to any side in the dispute over Kosovo’s future, Mr. Kincaid quoted Fr. Keith Roderick of Christian Solidarity International, a Christian human rights organization for religious liberty. Fr. Roderick, who visited Kosovo following the March 2004 riots during which Muslim Albanians destroyed and desecrated 35 Orthodox Christian churches, serves on the Advisory Board of the American Council for Kosovo.

As soon as Mr. Kincaid’s essay was published it was subjected to what appears to have been an organized effort to discredit the accurate information contained in it. Specifically, it has been suggested in mass e-mailings that Mr. Kincaid was incorrect in asserting that by indicating their possible support for Kosovo independence “the U.S. and the United Nations are helping allies of Muslim terrorists come to power in Kosovo.”
In an effort to discredit Mr. Kincaid’s accurate description of the jihad terror that threatens Kosovo’s Christians, it has been asserted that “Catholics [in Kosovo] are not endangered by Albanians (who themselves are more than 15% Catholics).”

The testimony of Kosovo’s late Roman Catholic Bishop, Mark Sopi, is cited.

However, Mr. Kincaid is entirely correct in his observations and his critics are wrong. According to the same Bishop Sopi, as of 2001* Kosovo’s Roman Catholics numbered only 60,000 out of a population of some two million Albanians – and of these (again, according to Bishop Sopi) some 40,000 were living abroad! That is, even if all of the remaining 20,000 Roman Catholic Christians in Kosovo were Albanians, they would constitute only one percent of the total ethnic Albanian population in the Serbian province. (In fact, there are still a number of Catholic Croats living in Kosovo, almost all of them living in Serbian enclaves to avoid attacks by Muslim Albanians, so the percentage of Albanian Catholics in Kosovo undoubtedly is well below one percent.)

Criticism of Mr. Kincaid by citing Albanian Muslims’ alleged tolerance of Albanian Catholics, while justifying violence perpetrated against Orthodox Christian Serbs and their holy places, is unfortunately all-too-typical of some minority Christians in majority-Islamic countries and ethnic groups who seek protection by adopting the radical agenda of their Muslim compatriots. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Palestinian movement was primarily nationalist and even communist, Palestinian Christians were often even more extreme than Muslim Palestinians in their terrorist zeal against Israel. This phenomenon was epitomized by the founder and leader of the ultra-radical terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Habash, who was from an Orthodox Christian family. But as the Palestinian movement evolved in the 1980s and 1990s from secular nationalism to jihadism, the relevance of such efforts was ceded to Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The end result has been a growing emigration of Palestinian Christians, who in many places are nearing extinction.

The almost complete disappearance of Albanian Catholics in Kosovo fits the same pattern. The fact that some Albanian Catholics (including some who are not from Kosovo at all) suggest that an independent Kosovo, illegally detached from Serbia, would be anything but a jihad terrorist rogue state are engaged in a deception. Or perhaps they are only fooling themselves.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/2006/06/011719print.html

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