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| Europe |
| Bosnian Muslims Anti American - Support Terrorists In Iraq |
| 2005-05-24 |
| Those Ungrateful Bosnians We liberated them. Why are they still against us? By Yaroslav Trofimov Posted Monday, May 23, 2005, at 10:00 AM PT ...Bosnia is often held up as proof that the United States—despite a deepening belief to the contrary among many Muslims—hasn't embarked on an evil crusade against Islam. After all, here is one place where Americans actually fought to help Muslims, against Christian Serbs.... after several months of training, a multiethnic Bosnian mine-clearing unit numbering about 30 soldiers is slated to begin its Mesopotamian stint next month....In a Friday sermon at Sarajevo's Begova Mosque, the second most senior cleric in the country, Ismet Spahic, decried American actions in Iraq as "genocide."... Kemal Bakovic [editor of a Bosnian paper], met me over a fruit juice in a grim neighborhood of Soviet-style housing blocks, still pockmarked by shrapnel. An Arabic-speaker, he had studied in Zarqa, in Jordan—the hometown, he was pleased to remind me, of the man described by the United States as al-Qaida's chieftain in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.... Some other Bosnian Muslims, he added, had already joined the war...I met Mustafa Ceric, the reis ul-ulema, or chief religious leader, of Bosnia's Muslims. A former ambassador with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he is known as a rare voice of sober, European Islam. But, as our conversation drifted to Iraq, he abandoned the detached professorial tone with which he had greeted me. Muslims everywhere, Ceric said, are losing the ability to think rationally. "You see every day the scenes of your relatives being killed, and no one is doing anything about it. ... Muslims feel that they are threatened, that the West is trying to enslave them, literally." I asked Ceric whether he shared his deputy's description of American actions in Iraq as genocide—a loaded word for Bosnia, which itself experienced the real thing so recently. Ceric wouldn't endorse or disavow the imam. Nor would he condemn those Bosnians who head off to join the Iraqi insurgents. |
| Posted by:mhw |
| #34 Lott didnt represent a big constituency like Pat Robertson did. Jim Moran, a Democrat, also lost a leadership position for his borderline antisemitic statements. Yet Al Sharpton doesnt get disavowed. Lott vs Robertson. Moran vs Sharpton. You see the pattern? |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 16:59 |
| #33 has Pat Robertson been disavowed? |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 16:57 |
| #32 By bloggers, who have nothing to lose. Not by pols. Wrong. Politicians criticized him, too. And you conveniently ignored the Trent Lott example. Wasn't bloggers that made him give up the Speaker's chair. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-05-24 16:05 |
| #31 Muslims everywhere, Ceric said, are losing the ability to think rationally. One cannot lose what one never had. |
| Posted by: BH 2005-05-24 14:51 |
| #30 you know why I like Bush and you know why he is great? Cause he tries to do what is right. He doesn't go in an conquer - not caring about the innocent who die. He's the president of the free world and he is willing to use his power to protect us but he tries his best not to abuse it. He's just a person like you and me. But he's a good person. Is this article puff? Who cares if you have a bigger plan that tries to do what is right - regardless what the shrill little harpies and paid propagandists say. Bush is great because he rises about the meaningless epileptic attacks over the handling of a book and keeps the bigger goals in mind - freedom, democracy and what's right in the long run - as best as is humanly possible for him to do. The little bitch fest by some anit-american muslim puffed up in the AP and Reuters press is meaningless. who care when you keep your eyes on a bigger and brighter goal. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 14:18 |
| #29 LH, you're missing the point. Of course I don't justify atrocities. I'm not even excusing them. I'm speaking to the issue of how much attention and media exposure we should give to them when they occur. IMO the coverage of Abu G has been excessive and fully merits Hitch's description of it as "masochistic." nb in my analogy I could also have chosen any of dozens of other atrocities committed by the Allies, including executing hundreds of German captives pointblank in North Africa. Would it ahve made sense for the NY Times in 1945 to have been banging constantly on these atrocities, the state of internal investigations of them, other acts of official coverup or malfeasance? If not in 1945, why now? Let me be clear. I'm not arguing for a coverup concerning Abu G, or for letting Bush off the hook. I condemn it and share Hitch's view on it. Punish the perps, change the procedures, apologize and pay restitution where necessary. The point is that these screwups cannot and must not be put on the same plane as the overriding military objective. The 24x7 internet age fishbowl is not helping, but neither does it help to apply some kind of foolish evenhandedness to Abu G and battles like Fallujah. The latter have far more impact than the former for anyone except western intellectuals and simpletons who, like Andrew S, conceive of this struggle as some kind of grand morality play. It's not. It's a war. In this war, it makes no sense to counterbalance every utterance of support for Bush with a perfunctory criticism of Abu G. Criticize it, sure, but then get back to the job at hand. |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 14:12 |
| #28 oh..well.. I guess if Hitchens says that, then it's ok then. You don't need to show me any proof before you print. Hitch says Isadumkof is a good guy - so it's ok that people die. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 14:06 |
| #27 GREAT comments, all! In the midst of all this though, I've gotta wonder, like LH in #11, if this is just another puffed up, MSM story? How many moose limbs are there in Bosnia (vs. Christians), and of that number, how many are actually following this imam? I've gotta say there's a fairly large (and growing) population of Bosnians here in my neck of the woods (majority of which are Christian, from what I can tell) and they seem to be pro-US. Just wondering if this is truly a non-story (puffed up) or is there more of a following to this guy than I believe? It is surprising to hear (no good deed goes unpunished), but if it's just 1 raving loonatic, I feel more comfortable. I'd be more worried about this going on (in droves) in the ME around Iraq than just a few Bosnian hard boyz looking to be target practice for our guys. |
| Posted by: BA 2005-05-24 14:04 |
| #26 Robertson was one of the first candidates for the term "idiotarian"; when he says something boneheaded, he's called on it. By bloggers, who have nothing to lose. Not by pols. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 13:57 |
| #25 read the whole Hitch article. He also says "For whatever it's worth, I know and admire both John Barry and Michael Isikoff, and I can quite imagine that—based on what they had already learned about the gruesome and illegal goings-on at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib—they found it more than plausible that the toilet incident, or something like it, had actually occurred. " Gruesome and illegal. Doing things that are gruesome and illegal does NOT help us in this war. I fully think we should keep our eyes on the prize, and I agree that bloggers like Sullivan have over focused on this. But lets not be confused. These abuses hurt us. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 13:56 |
| #24 lex, you will note, that whatever the history books said, the Soviets atrocities in 1945 were remembered in east central Europe, where they were chased out in 1989 and 1991. And where they still hated to this day. They managed to hang on in those places, which had a total population of under 100 million, with occupation armies in the hundreds of thousands. The muslim world is over 1.2 billlion people. Are we prepared to occupy them with an army of millions? Tens of millions? If not, we had better pay attention to how we treat them. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 13:52 |
| #23 ps..re: my cryptic post above. I had a long winding thoguth that seemed to rambling so I shortened it to that. Consider it a good thing. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 13:51 |
| #22 oh ...and a stitch in time saves nine. :-) Seriously..I've often wondered if we someone had just put a bullet in Castro's head early on..or even tomorrow - would the people of Cuba soon live in a free and prosperous economy? Would Che even be on the tee-shirts of liberals had Castro not been around to fund his memory? The same for Osama and Zarqawi. Is it just the sooner the better? Or are we better off letting the Iraqi people get sick and tired of them and look elsewhere on their own. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 13:47 |
| #21 they are rabid dogs who need to be put down. Most people are sheep. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 13:42 |
| #20 Niall Ferguson also notes the weird asymmetry between OTOH our ruthlessness in overthrowing Saddam and ruthless treatment of certain detainees, and OTOH our refusal to intervene massively to crush Zarqawi. As a strategist, he's a pretty good armchair bullshitter, but the point is that we Americans need to be utterly uncompromising when it comes to military victory. These are not Iraqi "insurgents." They are slaughterers, period. As a nation we need to urge our leaders to spare nothing in finding and killing every last one of them. I believe that, to the extent we wail over slights to muslim sensibilities, we distract our leaders from job 1. The historians will not care about PissKoran and will give only glancing mention to Abu G. What matters to history is whether we destroy Zarqawi and the ba'athist deadenders - period. |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 13:01 |
| #19 sadly...you have a valid point. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 12:58 |
| #18 I hear you, 2b. I'm not arguing that we should not have intervened in Kosovo, only that what Hitchens rightly calls our "masochism" in wanting to be liked is distracting us from the main task at hand. Put it another way: there's a good reason that the history books pay far more attention to the Red Army's crushing of the Wehrmacht than to its soldiers' rapes of nearly 2m German women in 1944-45 (cf Robert Conquest's study). Only if we are winning on the battlefield will the vast majority of muslims pay any attention to our fine words. |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 12:55 |
| #17 Sung to "Mother" I is for idiots that you played us for N is because we were just too nice G is for the ground troops that we sent there R is for the ruse that we fell for A is for the assholes we know you are now T is for the trust that was misplaced Put an E on the end and you have INGRATE. And we hope that you all rot in HELL... |
| Posted by: Ogeretla 2005 2005-05-24 12:51 |
| #16 lex - you've been on a roll lately, but I disagree with you on this one. The strength of America is the willingness to be charitable and for each and every one of us to attempt to take the log out of our own eyes before they complain of the speck in anothers. For some it may be popularity or wanting to be liked, but for most it is the desire to do good and to help others to help themselves. That's what our country is based on and that's what makes it strong. Muslims are weak cause they spend their time blaming and shaming and refuse to look inward or to extend the hand of charity just because it might get bit. To many people confuse forgiveness with weakness. Forgiveness implies the letting go and extending charity to those willing to move beyond. Don't lose sight of that just cause so many liberals are saps. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-05-24 12:36 |
| #15 ya know, people dont like to disavow people who are politically important to them over words. Spoken like a true modern Democrat. Robertson was one of the first candidates for the term "idiotarian"; when he says something boneheaded, he's called on it. By Republicans. By conservative Republicans. By conservative Christian Republicans. Trent Lott had to step down from being Speaker because of stupid comments he made. He was pressured out by Republicans. Oddly, I still can't think of an equivalent on the Democrat side. The closest I can come is Barney Frank's rebuke towards Dean a week or two ago... not the same league. It's nice to hear that the Bosnians are sending troops to help. It'd be a lot nicer if their so-called religious leaders would stop fomenting hatred. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-05-24 12:05 |
| #14 Kosovo should have taught us the above lesson, in spades. It seems that Americans who are taught from the cradle to be nice, to care intensely what others think of them and to seek popularity as the greatest of all compliments, cannot grasp the logic of a punitive war aimed above all at crushing a fascist kamikaze movement. |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 11:41 |
| #13 Whether Russia's hostility comes from "realpolitik" or from injured feelings of brataslavanstvo ("brother-slav" solidarity) is mainly a semantic issue. My lesser point is that our intervention in Kosovo demolishes at one stroke all the idiotic lefty and muslim conspiracy explanations for US foreign policy, as that intervention was entirely, 100% altruistic and devoted to saving muslim lives. My larger point is that our national obsession with understanding whether the muslim "street", ie some mystically uniform muslim world populace, is completely counterproductive. There is no worldwide muslim moderate movement. There are a few prominent muslims in a few critical nations who happen to have significant influence. Karzai, Talabani, Sistani come to mind. We should work closely with them and help them materially and politically to the extent prudence allows. But the notion of a PR campaign to win the "hearts and minds" of the vast majority of the world's muslims is a loser's game. The sad fact is that most of the world's muslims are not only immoderate; they're not even rational. There is no good deed we can do them that will not be punished severalfold. |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 11:38 |
| #12 Sadism vs Masochism (er, em) We should our interests with force, as need be. We shouldnt harm ourselves. But we also need to live up to our own standards. I dont know if anyone up the ranks was responsible - but I am quite sure that what happened at Abu Graib did NOT help us one bit. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 11:28 |
| #11 ya know, people dont like to disavow people who are politically important to them over words. Jesse Jackson didnt want to disavow Farrakhan. Republicans dont want to disavow Pat Robertson. Lots of Orthodox Jews dont run around disavowing Meir Kahane. Judging people by who they fail to disavow is a fools game. Second, my impression is that what makes Bosniacs different is NOT so much that they follow more moderate Imams, but that they arent all that interested in Imams - that they are a relatively secular people. I think we were right to go into Iraq. But i doubt that every Sunni Muslim who opposes us on it, and is even willing to toss around the word genocide, is a Wahabi. I must note that we didnt quite lose the entire Orthodox world over Kosovo. In particular Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia have been supportive of us, more so than many non-Orthodox countries in Europe, I might add. One might counter that Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia have realpolitik reasons to support us. I would respond that Russia has plenty of realpolitik reasons to oppose us, and I rather suspect they have been much more important than Kosovo. That leaves Greece, which was already at odds with US policy in the mideast long before Kosovo. |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 11:26 |
| #10 One more thought: the cause of our difficulties with muslims' opinion of us isn't American "sadism". It's our own masochism. Zarqawi must be laughing at us. |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 11:15 |
| #9 Two further observations: 1) the planning for 911 began a couple of moths after we saved some 50,000+ muslim lives in Kosovo 2) our idealistic intervention in Kosovo incurred the wrath of the entire Orthodox Christian world, from Athens to Moscow |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 11:12 |
| #8 Two further observations: 1) the planning for 911 began a couple of moths after we saved some 50,000+ muslim lives in Kosovo 2) our idealistic intervention in Kosovo incurred the wrath of the entire Orthodox Christian world, from Athens to Moscow |
| Posted by: thibaud (aka lex) 2005-05-24 11:12 |
| #7 Remember Izbekovitch, the president of Bosnia during the war? Rumor was that he was a member of the Hanschar division (a non-Aryan SS formation famous for its atrocities against Serbs and Jews). That is the rumors but what is not a rumor ois that the Hanschar name was resurrected in the Bosnian army or that in Izbekovitch pre-war meetings there were paints showing Muslim horsemen trampling serbs. You thought people like Itzbekivitch would show you gratitude? Perhaps, foot citizen Bosnians but not the activists from Itzbekovitch's party. |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-05-24 11:08 |
| #6 Seems to me if a biggie cleric (not just any cleric) accuses the US of Genocide in Iraq (not just says I don't like Bush) and the biggest guy in the clerical education system refuses to condemn it (even in a non official capacity) and goes on to provide more islamonuthouse comments, that this is pretty significant. At the very least, it shows that over the past decade or so that extensive and Wahabi influence extends to the very top of the Bosnian religious community. I don't think the high level clerics, etc. in Kuwait are saying anything like this. |
| Posted by: mhw 2005-05-24 11:03 |
| #5 Gratitude is unIslamic |
| Posted by: gromgorru 2005-05-24 10:57 |
| #4 the Bosnian govt supports us. this disgruntled Serb(?) has found ONE senior cleric who says anti-American things about Iraq. The other senior cleric, who does NOT support those statements, nonetheless refuses to disavow the Imam (i presume he has more pressing issues with his hierarchy than statements about Iraq) And somehow this shows Bosnian Muslims are anti-American. Feh! |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2005-05-24 09:36 |
| #3 SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina – As a platoon of Soldiers from the Bosnian Armed Forces prepared for their first major mission outside of Bosnia in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers supported them with some medical training that could eventually save their lives. more |
| Posted by: Theaper Angaimble1231 2005-05-24 09:09 |
| #2 Same in Kuwait. There are radical thug elements in all Islamic societys and countrys. But most Bosnians (and I know a bunch from Sarajevo)are very strong America supporters. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2005-05-24 09:09 |
| #1 Heh. No good deed goes unpunished. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-05-24 08:55 |