Our Allies in the Balkans/My coming to Islam (Warning! Islamic 5th columnist propoganda exposed!)

First my comments. It seems the Balkan posts linking al-Qaeda and 9/11 to elements of the Balkan Jihad has been noticed. See the paragraph were Stephen Schwartz aka Suleyman Ahmad writes about the propaganda that continues to be spread against Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. Who else could he mean but the Freeper posters and others who did some digging and shed some light on the Chechen, Bosnian and Albanian links to al-Qaeda? (Check out his loving words on the Chechens too)

It also seems that this once liberal (during Clinton) and now neo-con (just in time for Bush) 5th column columnist Stephen Schwartz keeps avoiding using his adopted Islamic name of Suleyman Ahmad when he writes to us "infidels". When the opposition is forced to do damage control spin articles like this it means we are winning.

First Stephen Schwartz aka Suleyman Ahmad's article about his Islamic faith and his links to the Balkan Muslim cause and then his damage control spin article on the Balkan Muslims whose cause is now rightly in trouble and out of favor with Washington.

I am always grateful for an opportunity to speak of Sufism to a Bosnian Muslim. First, because Bosnia is a major force in the education of Europe and the world as to the reality of Islam as a faith and as a civilization. Second, because the history of Sufism in the Balkans -- especially in Bosnia -- is very distinguished and inspiring.

I am a new Muslim, and cannot comment on matters of doctrine. But I can speak about my own life. My road to Sufism, as represented by the Naqshbandi-Haqqani tariqat to which I belong, comes from three streams in my own personal experience.

To begin with, I spent almost 20 years, starting in 1979, studying kabbalah -- the mysticism of my Jewish heritage -- according to the interpretation of Spanish Jews and their heirs, who had lived in Muslim countries and who saw in kabbalah something very close to Sufism. Indeed, anybody who studies kabbalah historically, and who understands its origins in Spain and its continuity in the Ottoman domains -- including in Bosnia -- sees that there is in kabbalah what I call "Islamic directness'' in the relationship between man and God. Then there is what I call "Islamic ecstasy," that is, the attainment of a beautiful merging with the presence of Allah in the universe, which leads in turn to eloquent speech in praise of Allah, through poetry and song. Both these factors reach their ultimate point in Sufism.

Then, while studying kabbalah and its origins in Arab Spain at great length, and reading Torah, the Jewish scripture, I began traveling to Bosnia as a reporter. I made three trips to Bosnia, one to Croatia, and one to Romania during the 1990s. For the first time, in Bosnia, I found myself in a Muslim country, and began to share ideas with Islamic intellectuals. For the first time, I walked into a mosque, namely the Careva dzamija in Sarajevo.

A third experience that strengthened the other "tendencies" in me involved my encounter with an Albanian Catholic holy man, Gjon Sinishta. Beginning in 1990, I worked with this man, an exiled leader of Albanian Catholics, in producing a bulletin. I assisted him in documenting, translating, and editing, all with the hope of assisting Albanian believers in rebuilding their religious life after nearly 50 years under the most severe and god-hating of the Communist regimes. The Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha, had ordered the closing and destruction of hundreds of mosques, churches, and the tekkes of the Bektashi dervish order.

Gjon Sinishta, a true Albanian, taught me that for him, a Catholic, Muslim Albanian believers were no less dear to his heart. He taught me that Balkan Catholics and Muslims are equally threatened by Christian Orthodox imperialism -- "Yugoslav," Macedonian, Greek. He instructed me in the tradition of mutual respect and friendship between believers of the two faiths, with Albanian Catholics joining their neighbors in celebrating Bajram, and Muslims honoring Christmas.

I also learned something really significant from Gjon: he showed me that Catholicism in the Balkans has a spiritual intensity generally missing elsewhere (except, notably, in Spain!), and he ascribed this great quality to Muslim influence, especially to Sufism. Gjon taught me that in regions like the Balkans, ruled by the Ottomans for centuries, the praise of God and fear of God of Muslims had saturated the social life of all believers, greatly influencing Christians. I came to understand, as well, the influence of Balkan Islam on Jewish spirituality in the region. I thus closed the circle that had begun in my encounter with kabbalah.

Finally, thanks to Gjon, I encountered and examined the Bektashi dervishes, through the work of the Albanian Baba Rexhebi of Detroit, who died recently.

All of this came together for me last September. I went to Bosnia for a month, as a representative of the International Federation of Journalists, and this time I took my Quran with me. I read Quran in Bosnia -- visiting Tuzla among other places -- and when I came back I was ready to go back into a masjid with a different attitude. I went to masjid and felt, more than any other time in my life, that I was in the presence of God. I saw that Islam is the closest way to God's love. Then I met Shaykh Hisham of the Naqshbandi order, and, within weeks, had made shehadeh, hamdilullah. I was immensely inspired by the role of the Naqshbandi tariqat in the freedom struggles of the Chechens.

Regarding my Jewish background: I read in our generous Quran the beautiful, beautiful surah 28, about the life of Musa. I cry when I read the Quran's description of Musa's life, because although the account in Torah, in Jewish scripture, is very beautiful and moving -- it also makes me cry -- Quran has something extra: that when Musa had killed the Egyptian oppressor, and was then forgiven by Allah swt, that he said to Allah swt."Oh my Lord! For that thou hast bestowed Thy Grace on me, never shall I be a help to those who sin!" That is, as Muslims, we must never aid oppressors; we are, as Muslims, the children of freedom.

This is why I am so glad to have become Muslim, and am especially glad to have encountered this distinguished Naqshbandi tariqat.

So if you ask me, what is Sufism to me? I can only say: it is utter love of God, and it is the defense of God's freedom.

Of course I am only beginning in my path with the tariqat. Perhaps if you have some special questions I can pass them on to my shaykh.

If the U.N. will let them, some Muslims want to join us in the war on terror. by Stephen Schwartz

IF YOU'VE BEEN WONDERING where to find wholehearted Muslim support for the war on terrorism, consider the Balkans.

Last week, the authorities in predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina took further steps to assist the U.S.-led campaign. On June 3, Bosnian police raided seven offices of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, including two in Sarajevo and one in the old Turkish town of Travnik. Based in Saudi Arabia, Al-Haramain is deeply implicated in the transfer of funds to al Qaeda. On March 11, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill--acting jointly with the Saudi government--froze transactions with Al-Haramain in Bosnia and Somalia. The foundation's offices in Sarajevo had fallen under the control of the Egyptian Islamic Group, the terrorist outfit that spawned Osama bin Laden's lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri and carried out the Luxor massacre of 62 people, 58 of them foreign tourists, in 1997.

Despite O'Neill's acknowledgment of Saudi cooperation, the Saudis' response to the problem of Islamic charities' role in terrorism has been ambivalent. Thus, the Saudi embassy in Washington finally issued a press release on February 5 declaring that the Saudi government would "take every measure possible to prevent use of these charitable efforts for any unlawful activities"--only to turn around the very next day and issue another statement bound to stir up doubts. This time, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) denied it was monitoring the bank accounts of any individuals and stated that, although the United Nations Security Council had provided the names of 150 suspected terrorists, only 53 had had dealings with Saudi banks, and only 4 accounts had been frozen. As recently as May 14, SAMA went further when its vice governor, Muhammad al-Jasser, declared that "not even a single bank account has been frozen in Saudi Arabia" in connection with terror funding. SAMA added to this admission the impudent charge that Israel, rather than "most Arab states," had refused to comply with international recommendations to prevent money laundering.

The Bosnians, by contrast, are being genuinely helpful. On March 19, for example, Bosnian officials executed raids in Sarajevo and the central Bosnian town of Zenica, seizing evidence that formed the basis for perjury charges filed on April 30 in Chicago against one Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian confederate of bin Laden and the head of the Benevolence International Foundation, a fake Islamic charity used as a front for terrorist funding.

The Bosnians, however, like the predominantly Muslim Kosovars, face a surprising obstacle in their efforts to assist the United States. Both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo remain under the political control of a dismally inept United Nations. After seven years of U.N. administration, Bosnia-Herzegovina still has no real economy or legal system in place, nor is the end of foreign occupation in sight. Paradoxically, the situation is better in Kosovo, where the U.N. has been on the scene for only three years, and where the Kosovars are determined to build a new and modern society, even if they have to work around the foreigners to do it.

Strange as it may seem to Americans, U.N. officials in Sarajevo have tried to bar U.N. war crimes investigators from cooperating with the United States in the campaign against Saudi-backed terrorists and their funders. Last October, for example, when Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, turned over to U.S. authorities some information found in Bosnia relating to one of the September 11 hijackers, U.N. representatives were displeased. They complained that the United States was throwing its weight around in the Balkans. U.N. functionaries clearly want the world to forget that the U.N. presided over atrocities in the Balkans, including the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, without even attempting to prevent them, and that the bloodshed ended only when the United States intervened militarily, resulting in the Dayton Accords.

Similarly, in late May, Madeline Rees, boss of the U.N. human rights office in Sarajevo, renewed her denunciations of the Bosnian authorities' "unlawful handover" of six Algerian terror suspects to the United States back in January. Repeating her call for the extradition to be investigated, she asserted that the removal had "damaged" the Bosnian legal system. The deportation of the Algerian suspects was carried out in defiance of a U.N. human rights body staffed by foreigners--but at the order of the elected government in Sarajevo.

On May 1, Bosnian foreign minister Zlatko Lagumdzija reiterated his country's bold stand on these issues. "The world has split into a modern civilization and one of barbarism and terrorism," he said. "Bosnia-Herzegovina has chosen to ally itself with the civilized world. It has decided to be part of the solution, not part of the problem." He added, "For our own sake, we have done the best we could in the past seven months" to locate and arrest terror suspects. On September 11, he declared, "we chose sides."

A Bosnian official who recently visited Washington emphasized the commitment felt by Muslims like him. "This is not negotiable," he said. "Sometimes we Bosnians are slow to engage with a cause. We did not want to admit the inevitability of war in the 1990s, and we were unprepared when the Serbs attacked us. But this time, we knew exactly where we stood and we will see this through. We are stubborn, and we will be stubborn in our friendship with America."

This friendship should continue to bear fruit in the war on terrorism. After the Dayton Accords brought peace to Bosnia in 1995, money and operatives pushing the Wahhabi extremist brand of Islam flooded into Sarajevo from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. For this reason, investigations in the Balkans are expected to continue yielding documents as well as suspects. Late last month, reputable sources in Sarajevo reported that Bosnian secret service chief Munir Alibabic has proof that $800 million had recently been moved to al Qaeda from Saudi Arabia.

The eagerness of Muslim leaders in the Balkans to support the war on terrorism--in the face of opposition from U.N. and other foreign meddlers--is the biggest unreported story from the European front. This journalistic failure is not surprising, considering the propaganda that continues to be spread against Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, as well as Western European coolness toward the U.S.-led campaign.

The ethnic Albanians of Kosovo are, if anything, even more avid than the Bosnians to be counted in the anti-terror coalition. "Every Albanian in Kosovo knows that without the help of the United States we would have been devastated by Serbian imperialism," says Daut Dauti, a Kosovar journalist completing a fellowship in the United States. "Muslim Albanians are no less pro-American than others. Our Islamic traditions are pluralist and antiextremist. We will never turn against the United States." A veteran of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) recently suggested that he and his troops would be thrilled to join in a U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. "We're ready to go in with the first battalion," he said.

This zeal was discernible as soon as the NATO bombing of Serbia stopped and Albanians returned to Kosovo in 1999. In late March 2000, a KLA commander discovered a group of Saudi "aid workers" spying on American diplomats in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, presumably as part of their planning for a terrorist attack. Word that the KLA was preparing to kill the Saudis reached U.N. officials, who warned the Saudis as well as U.S. diplomats. The U.N. and the Americans seemed more outraged at "Albanian lawlessness" than Saudi terror plotting.

By mid-2002, however, the Saudi troublemakers had failed in their elaborate attempt to impose Wahhabism on the Albanians, and they seemed to have had enough of dealing with the Kosovars. "The Muslims here behave like Christians," said Hadi, leader of the Saudi workers involved in the Pristina episode, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "They have accepted living like in Europe. I think in 10 years it will be worse. . . . We will not stay." This was an admission that in Kosovo, the Wahhabi-Saudi jihad has failed.

American leaders seem to agree that the anti-terror cause needs Muslim supporters. Balkan Muslims--like Iraqi Kurds, Turks, and recently liberated Afghans, to name a few--are ready to join in.

Stephen Schwartz's "Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror" will be published at the end of the summer.

"Sometimes we Bosnians are slow to engage with a cause. We did not want to admit the inevitability of war in the 1990s, and we were unprepared when the Serbs attacked us."

F*** you, a$$hole! The Serbs "attacked" you (in fact, they started defending themselves against an Islamofascist 'government' bent on extermination/subjugation of the country's Christians) only after you had declared 'independence' in direct breach of both the Bosnian and Yugoslav Constitutions. Inevitability?!? Like, are we supposed to believe that the muslims weren't the main cause of the civil war in Bosnia? They knew what they were doing from Day 1. They wanted the war because they could've never gotten away with a country had the problem been solved in a civilized way.

"this once liberal (during Clinton) and now neo-con (just in time for Bush) 5th column columnist"

I once met Stephen Schwartz, I think about 15 years ago, one evening in North Beach, San Francisco. I happened into one of the coffee houses on Columbus Ave. and made my way up to the counter to order. I noticed the man seated at a small table by himself right next to me because he was reading The American Spectator and this was quite conspicuous because in those days it was a broadsheet, quite large. I was already a staunch Conservative (in most respects) and a devoted reader of the Spectator. I was surprised and amused to see someone in effect flaunting a right-wing (I mean that affectionately) paper in the heart, not just of notoriously Liberal San Francisco but its Bohemian-Beatnik heart. I spoke to him, shared my amusement and he identified himself. I recognized his name as a San Francisco Chronicle writer and asked him what it was like to work in the belly of the beast, so to speak. I vaguely recall that he indicated that he was marginalized, to put it mildly. In fact it was rare to see his name on substantial articles, but I noticed it fairly often in the Obits. I think we joked about internal exile and how they were probably hoping he would take the hint and quit. He then told me some anecdote about another Chron writer he felt was a deceptive lefty and went into some arcane recounting of local Vietnamese expatriate politics, pro- and anti-communist, and the other writers alleged misrepresentation of it.

Based upon this experience, as well as considerable reading of his work since then, I feel you have mischaracterized him as a recent (post Clinton) convert to conservatism. I believe he was thoroughly transformed quite long ago, comparable to David Horowitz (the hardest working man in conservatism and most valuable player, in my book). Similarly I believe Schwartz was a red-diaper baby.

Only about a year or 2 ago I read a lengthy profile of Schwartz, maybe on Salon, full of fascinating details about Schwartz but demonizing him from a Leftist vantage point. I think that article may have mentioned Sufism or perhaps just the prior Jewish mysticm. In any case I only learned of his full conversion to Islam in the article here posted. I am no Islam expert but am under the impression that Sufism is about as far as you can get in Islam from the terrorist strains.

I have been reading his articles in The Weekly Standard, as well as National Review, for some time now and am a fan of his writing. He may be a little eccentric and eclectic but the most interesting people are.

What I meant is that during Clinton's era he wrote loving articles praising Clinton policies. I guess there is a fine line between liberal and neo-con. Stephen Schwartz aka Suleyman Ahmad may expose the Sufi brand of Islam but so what that is not his point. He is a useful idiot to the Islamists in the Balkans who ARE NOT Suffists in any great number.

Stephen Schwartz aka Suleyman Ahmad made his fame and his recent career championing the Islamits' cause in the Balkans and now as the links of those Balkan and Chechen Muslims to 9/11 (veterans of Bosnia and Chechnya were among the 9/11 terrorists and at least one of them held Bosnian citizenship) have come back to haunt him.

Stephen Schwartz aka Suleyman Ahmad attempt at damage control is very clear.

You may shoot the messenger if you like, but please don't just dismiss his message.

The Wahhabi network inside the US is alive and well and needs to be dealt with dead on. Much as I regard Andrew Sullivan as an excellent source of information on the war but a lousy expert on many of the finer points of Catholicism, I tend to view Schwartz through the same light (i.e. right on what happened here in the US, wrong about what's going on Europe).

A lot of what he says about the Wahhabis here in the US is quite true and should not just be dismissed out of hand. I simply feel that he is adopting a selective judgement position based on emotion for those causes he views as "good" and those he views as "bad." I feel this makes him misinformed (especially since I know that his mentor's sidekick, Sheikh Palazzi, has more than a couple of strong words against the Chechens), but not evil.

For example, he sees Ayatollah Khomeini as a good guy at heart (I guess all of the executions and the storming of the Embassy were just the result of some REALLY bad days) because he fought against the Wahhabis. He seems to have definite blind spot when it comes to the evils of Khomeinism (which may actually explain his refusal to condemn the Balkan al-Qaeda, given the level of Iranian assistance flowing in there), but this doesn't change the fundamental truth about what he says about the House of Saud or Wahhabism inside the US.

So while I think his comments should be viewed critically in light of these setbacks, he's still a great source for information about Wahhabism in America.

Just my $0.02

I'm sure we will never hear the details and I can't recall where I read it. Muslims were conducting terrorism against Serbia and they tired of it, I would love to know the details if anyone else has material on the subject, along with alot of other bits that have filtered through.

1) The Serbs were under terrorist attacks from Muslims

2) The only mass graves discovered contained not Muslims but Serbs.

3) The leader of the Muslims is an animal to both his own and Serbians.

4) Clinton attacked Serbia to draw attention from his Monica scandal, and if that is true it should be he, not Maloshvic (sp) standing in front of the criminal court.

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