THANK YOU BILL CLINTON!
THANK YOU MADELINE ALBRIGHT!
THANK YOU WES CLARK!
THANK YOU FOR CREATING A MUSLIM TERROR STATE IN THE HEART OF EUROPE. THANK YOU FOR EXTENDING THE REACH OF AL QUEDA'S WORLDWIDE JIHAD!
GREAT WORK!
Part of Mr. Bush Kosovo Speech to the troops in Kosovo
It's a long list. It speaks volumes about why you are so good at your mission. You come from many nations, many cultures and many continents. Just like amongst the U.S. military personnel, many races, there are many faiths, many traditions represented. Your diversity and close cooperation, General, in the cause of peace is an example to the people of this region and is a rebuke to the ethnic intolerance and narrow nationalism that brought us here in the first place.
As we head into the 21st century, we must not allow difference to be a license to kill and vulnerability, an excuse to dominate. We will pursue a world of tolerance and freedom. From Kosovo to Kashmir, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, freedom and tolerance is a defining issue for our world. And your service here has set an example for the whole world to see.
We're making good progress. Thanks to you and those who served before you, the people of Kosovo are able to buy food and find shelter, go to school and get medical help. Thanks to you, there will be elections here in November, elections where we want to see the widest possible participation.
Thanks to you, there are fewer arms flowing into Macedonia and a hope for peace in that land. Thanks to you and the service of our forces throughout the Balkans, the region is growing closer to the rest of Europe, but there is still a lot of work to do.
Civil institutions must be put in place and made stronger. Organized crime must be brought under control. War criminals must face justice, and Kosovo must not be a safe haven for insurgents elsewhere.
America has a vital interest in European stability and therefore peace in the region. That's why I've recently taken steps to cut off outside support for the rebels in Macedonia. That's why we need you to keep patrolling the border and cutting off the arms flow.
Each and every day, your work is important to the people of this region. America and allied forces came into Bosnia and Kosovo. We came in together and we will leave together. Our goal is to hasten the day when peace is self-sustaining, when local democratically elected authorities can assume full responsibility and when NATO forces can go home.
As well, you not only need to have a clear mission here, but you need to have a commander in chief with a clear vision who sets clear goals for our military.
THANK YOU BILL CLINTON!
THANK YOU MADELINE ALBRIGHT!
THANK YOU WES CLARK!
THANK YOU FOR CREATING A MUSLIM TERROR STATE IN THE HEART OF EUROPE. THANK YOU FOR EXTENDING THE REACH OF AL QUEDA'S WORLDWIDE JIHAD!
GREAT WORK!
This is NOT a religious clash, it's an ethnic clash -- the Slavic serbs and the Illurian Albanians.
from www.cia.gov
Things aren't quite that cut and dried. Most Albanians are atheists and radically so. This is more an ethnic clash with the Albanians being the descendents of the Illurian tribes who were the original occuapants of the land. The only slamic radicals there and in Bosnia are imports sponsored by Saudi A or Iran.
The Ottoman Turks divided the Albanian-inhabited lands among a number of districts, or vilayets. The Ottoman authorities did not initially stress conversion to Islam. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, economic pressures and coercion produced the conversion of about two-thirds of the empire's Albanians.
The Ottoman Turks first focused their conversion campaigns on the Roman Catholic Albanians of the north and then on the Orthodox population of the south. For example, the authorities increased taxes, especially poll taxes, to make conversion economically attractive. During and after a Christian counteroffensive against the Ottoman Empire from 1687 to 1690, when Albanian Catholics revolted against their Muslim overlords, the Ottoman pasha of Pec, a town in the south of present-day Yugoslavia, retaliated by forcing entire Albanian villages to accept Islam. Albanian beys then moved from the northern mountains to the fertile lands of Kosovo, which had been abandoned by thousands of Orthodox Serbs fearing reprisals for their collaboration with the Christian forces.
Most of the conversion's to Islam took place in the lowlands of the Shkumbin River valley, where the Ottoman Turks could easily apply pressure because of the area's accessibility. Many Albanians, however, converted in name only and secretly continued to practice Christianity. Often one branch of a family became Muslim while another remained Christian, and many times these families celebrated their respective religious holidays together
The Balkans are a region of multiple ethnicities -- Slavic SErbs, croats, slovenes, Greeks, Macedonians and Illyrians (moern day Albanians). Trying to whitewash the problems as merely christian versus muslim is incorrect when you know that there are Muslim and Christian Albanians.
As early as the eighteenth century, a mystic Islamic sect, the Bektashi dervishes, spread into the empire's Albanian-populated lands. Probably founded in the late thirteenth century in Anatolia, Bektashism became the janissaries' official faith in the late sixteenth century. The Bektashi sect contains features of the Turks' pre-Islamic religion and emphasizes man as an individual. Women, unveiled, participate in Bektashi ceremonies on an equal basis, and the celebrants use wine despite the ban on alcohol in the Quran. The Bektashis became the largest religious group in southern Albania after the sultan disbanded the janissaries in 1826. Bektashi leaders played key roles in the Albanian nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century and were to a great degree responsible for the Albanians' traditional tolerance of religious differences.
How did this defenseless minority that is being brutally attacked and murdered became a defenseless minority?
Because Slobo's goons (and I won't insult the Serbs by considering that anything but a small minority supported Slobo's genocide) decided to kick out the ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and threw tanks and heavy artillery against a defenseless people, propelling a mass exodus into Albania.
Genocide against any ethnicity is WRONG, but let's not potray this as a religious clash, but more correctly as an ethnic one.