Food for Thought - "A Balkan Base for Al Qaeda?"

Were we manipulated into removing the traditional buffer between the West and the Muslim world?

The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened when the people of this democracy were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia--over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false. In so doing, we put the final touch on delivering the Balkans to al Qaeda.

Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, whose repercussions seven years later are only escalating as those we “rescued” turn their weapons against UN and NATO forces. While NATO spends most of its time rooting out terror cells in Kosovo and Bosnia—which served as the logistics bases for the London and Madrid bombings--the 2006 deadline to complete our eagerly forgotten debacle and determine the province’s final status is fast approaching. To persuade the international community that only one final status will be acceptable, our Albanian "rescuees" have been stepping up the violence, a message to the West that it has only one possible exit strategy: grant unconditional independence--without border compromises with Serbia and without protection guarantees for what’s left of the non-Albanian minorities.

If we allow this to happen, the peacekeepers will have to leave, and with them our eyes and ears in this terror haven and thruway. Still, congressional, State Department and UN sentiment seems to be tilting toward self-determination and the logic that if you’ve dug yourself into a hole, keep digging.

Read it all.

It must be drummed into our dear little heads that the present "War on Terror" isn't the beginning of our conflict with Islam in spite of the pronouncements to the contrary of our fearless leader and protector.

Neither Desert Storm nor the conflict in the Balkins, our subject, certainly weren't the first. Most Westerners think of The First Crusade called by Pope Urban f as the beginning of conflict, of "the struggle." The word "struggle" is appropriate as jihad really means struggle. There had been many struggles beginning with Mohammed and his cohorts who mounted hundreds of skirmishes and battles of conquest with surrounding tribes to force them to accept "monotheism," the "religion" that Mohammed received from Allah in a cave. Over the centuries, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions eventually gave in to the efforts of the "strugglers," the jihadists who moved in all directions.

Europeans felt the wrath of Islam as it jihadists swept through the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkan Peninsula only to be thwarted and pushed back to Africa and the Middle East. Western Europeans forgot what it was like to live on Islam's bloody borders, but those in the east, in the Balkans lived in an uneasy "state of peace" with their Muslim neighbors until the late twentieth century when NATO and the United States were convinced that removing Milosevic and neutralizing Serbia would solve the regions ethnic problems and bring "real peace" to the region.

Was the world duped? Do we now realize that that Clinton and NATO were convinced to remove the buffer, once again unlocking Europe's Eastern back door, throwing Euorpe back centuries to relive the same nightmare? The war to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing of Muslims has has an ironic opposite effect: instead of the expulsion of Muslims from Serbian lands, non-Muslims have been forced to move as they can no longer hold Islam and Muslims in check.

Another irony exists on the Iberian Peninsula, where one jihadist' bomb brought and the threat of others brought down a government and Muslims immigrants are flooding in from Africa into Europe over barbed wire and off of leaky boats at a rate, if unabated, with natural increase, within decades will realize Eurabia, a piece of the Islamic state called for by Islamists all over the world.