Posted on 06/29/2008 5:50:12 AM PDT by forkinsocket
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a “a beachhead into the rest of Europe” for “radical Muslims” and “terrorist elements.” It’s an assertion without evidence. “We’ve been here for so long,” said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, “and not seen any evidence of it, that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat.”
Nine in 10 of Kosovo’s citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn’t quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren’t there in significant numbers now, and they aren’t likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn’t one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn’t coming to Western Europe.
I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for – as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country – was the treatment and status of women.
Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.
In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.
“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”
It would be wrong to suggest Kosovo has no Islamists at all, but in the last election in late 2007, the country’s single Islamic party gained only 1.7 per cent of the vote. Kosovo is not the Middle East, and Albanians are not Arabs. The majority converted to Islam relatively recently under Turkish Ottoman rule, and Albanian culture was first solidly Christian. “We Albanians,” Dom Lush Gjergji recently wrote, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles… Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions… Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.” Gjergji is a Catholic priest, but I heard similar comments from many who self-identify as Muslims. “Albanian people are not very religious,” said Agron Rezniqi, of the Friendship Association between Kosovo and Israel “We come from Catholicism, and for that, we are not such strong Muslims.”
Perhaps the best evidence available that Albanian Muslims, in both Kosovo and Albania proper, differ radically from their Arab world counterparts is their relationship with Jews and with Israel. Jews in Albania had an almost 100 per cent survival rate during the Nazi occupation. The country was known as a safe haven where Jews could find protection under the noses of the German authorities. According to Dan Michman, chief historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there were three times as many Jews in Albania at the end of the Second World War as there were at the beginning.
Both Albania and Kosovo have excellent relations with Israel, and Israelis are more than welcome to travel and even live among Albanians. An Israeli from Tel Aviv named Shachar Caspi opened a bakery and a bistro bar in Pristina. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he told me. “[Kosovars] had good relations with Jewish people even back in the old days. And nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, the way they react, they react very warmly.”
Much of the angst about Kosovo’s alleged radicalism centres on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organisation that no longer even exists.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.
There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.
The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.
There's far more danger to liberty and Christians right here in the US than in Russia.
The commies have been neutralized by the God fearing Russian People.
They are in the ascendancy in Eurabia and here. They, along with the Muslims, are the new enemy...you are too blinded by the stereotypes created by the leftist media to
see beyond your preconceptions.
One correction: albo-criminals, church-arsonists and american-presidents-watch-stealers apologist.
Sure, we learned enough from albanian apocryphal history books and I wrote about that before:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2012544/posts?q=1&;page=101
Yes you can always count on Russians as your “argument”, just to remind you Russians refused to help Serbia 1908. among other things. Big bear is always “spare” enemy for people like you.
And here is my mirror, my family:
Nothing more to say.
How do they move drugs in/out of Kosovo?
Either you are dumb as a doorknob or worse...
German Federal Police among many others have reported over and over that Kosovar Albanians import 80 percent + of Europe’s heroin. The drugs in general are known as “Albanka,” or Albanian lady.
How do they ship?
The Albanian Kosovar traffickers ship heroin exclusively from Asia’s Golden Crescent, an inexhaustible source. It then goes through Afghanistan, and then the the heroin base passes through Iran to the parastate genocide state of Turkey, they refine it, and then to the 15 Families, operating on lawless border towns linking Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia.
According to the State Department, “four to six tons of heroin move through Turkey every month.”
“Not very much is stopped,” says one official. “We get just a fraction of the total.”
My Greek sources tell me about the war zone in the north with albanian mobsters importing albana...what they apprehend is tiny amount of the total.
“albo-criminals, church-arsonists and american-presidents-watch-stealers apologist.”
serbian-criminals, rapists, ethnic cleanser, mass murderer, war monger, concentration camp running, american hating apologists. That took a while to write.
Are you happy now with name calling?
the watch was not stolen. Bush was greeted as e hero. Obama or McCain or whoever will also be greeted as hero.
Serbia has given the world more criminals probably than anyone else since WWII. Serbia has destroyed many more churches than Albanians ever did (can a Croatian provide some numbers? I know it’s in the 100’s)
Everything you have is from RUSSIA. With no Russia you would have never gotten Kosovo, and you know it. Just because Russia played Serbia and Bulgaria doesn’t mean they weren’t there for you. So look in the mirror first.
New meaning of word untouched:
http://www.spc.yu/Genocid/genocide.html
http://www.spc.yu/Genocid/Dalmatinska/dalmatinskae.html
I will not quote what you wrote about my family, because this was probably the same what their killers accused them.
The Arvanites are helping ;)? The 80% figure is outdated (more like 20% and going down; I’ll post the UNDOC link when I find it).
As law and order get stronger it will drop even more, just as murder rate dropped to 3 per 100,000.
As I said, Albania was the route to transport immigrants, drugs, and you name it. Berisha outlawed boats, despite the “civil rights” grumblings.
No problem....the Partizans from the Kozara were the most bloodthirsty butchers during the war (and after). No wonder that even the Serbian Chetniks under Radic helped the Ustashe and Germans remove the Partizans from the Kozara.
“Sure, we learned enough from albanian apocryphal history books and I wrote about that before”
Are you suggesting that Albanians are new to the Balkans????? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=E3b1a2+kosovo+8000 Try at least 8000 years. We know how today’s borders came about, don’t we? Serbs are newcomers to the Balkans, very recent ones too.
Now we get to the cold heart of the matter...Nazis as “liberators”...makes me sick to even repeat this trash.
Hey Nutjob...the only trash that saw the Nazis as liberators were nazi psychopaths themselves...the worst sort of garbage that would make even a stalin blush.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2012544/posts?q=1&;page=101
post 101
Maybe in Asia 8000, on Kosovo 80.
‘Better the Prophet’s turban than the Pope’s tiara’
does that ring a bell?
Plus, you should read on Serbia’s colonization, forced emigration and land confiscation in Kosovo. They were farmers, they didn’t even know how to read, let alone know about the Nazi ideology or what was going on 6500 km away. To judge them based on what we know now is stupid. They only wanted their land back. Once the Nazis told them to fight they said no, just as they said no to Tito when he asked the Albanians to fight the Chetniks outside Kosovo.
How many Al Qeda attacks on us have occurred there?
try again. I actually answered there. Albanians have their own branch of Indo-European language, and are 100% European, despite Serbian propaganda.
DNA study: http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v8/n7/abs/5200443a.html
Here you go comparing countries: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/290/5494/1155/F3
ancient.
BabaYaga, was it really cold in Russia or you forgot it?
Only a fool would post such juvenile and ridiculous rubbish..a twisted view of the facts...
I can only pray for such as you.
what? Didn’t the Greek church get rich under the Sultan? The were in his “divan” and many of their wives came from Greek phanariots. How many millions of acres does the Greek Church own (thanks to kissing up to the Sultan)?
“The Greek Orthodox church, which has about 100,000 followers in the holy land, is the richest church in the region and the second largest landowner in Jerusalem after the Israeli state. Among its holdings is the land on which the Israeli parliament and Ariel Sharon’s official residence stand.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/22/israel
Truth hurts, huh? Only the Albanians are evil your church told you.
Total and complete moronic revisionist history BS you spout there speedo. What —did you take a crash course from Ankara U?
Hysterical lapdog reading of history...you know nothing as is apparent from the trashy propaganda you post.
Go hide.
Too bad for you but not all the partizans were communists (especially not 14-year old boy like my grandfather was in 1942.), on contrary till 1945. less then 10% of army of about 800 000 people became communists and most of them those who sayed in the army.
I`m not in the profession that can help you Diocletian. So much hate is bad for health.
Albanians are basically into gangsterism just like Slick KKKlinton. Too serious an approach to Islam could get in the way of that and create friction.
Our resident mafioso apparently read all of dictator’s Enver Hoxha’s revisionist history lessons about the “Illyrian” origins of the Albanians...LOL
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