The Challenge of Kosovo

Well, they have done it. And three permanent members of the Security Council have recognized them. Kosovo is one of the worst candidates outside of Africa to become a viable state. It is unbelievable that the disastrous consequences to a world order that depends on nation-state stability are not recognized by these countries upon whom that order depends. The message of such a successful manoeuvre is that every ethnic minority on the planet can declare themselves sovereign with no consideration to their ability to manage as mature states. In the case of Kosovo (from Caroline Glick):

• Its forty percent unemployment is a function of the absence of proper economic and governing infrastructures.
• In November 2007, a European Commission report detailed the Kosovo Liberation Army's failure to build functioning governing apparatuses. The report noted that "due to a lack of clear political will to fight corruption, and to insufficient legislative and implementing measures, corruption is still widespread... Civil servants are still vulnerable to political interference, corrupt practices and nepotism." Moreover, "Kosovo's public administration remains weak and inefficient."..."The composition of the government anti-corruption council does not sufficiently guarantee its impartiality," and "little progress can be reported in the area of organized crime and combating of trafficking in human beings."
• The prosecution of Albanian war criminals is "hampered by the unwillingness of the local population to testify" against them. This is in part due to the fact that "there is still no specific legislation on witness protection in place."
• In 2006, John Gizzi reported in Human Events that the German intelligence service, BND confirmed that the 2005 bombings in Britain and the 2004 bombings in Spain were organized in Kosovo. Furthermore, "the man at the center of the provision of the explosives in both instances was an Albanian, operating mostly out of Kosovo...who is second ranking leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Niam Behzloulzi."

As Glick points out, supporters of Kosovo claim that as victims of "genocide," Kosovar Muslims deserve independence. But if the Muslims in Kosovo have been targeted for annihilation by the Serbs, then how is it that they have increased from 48 percent of the population in 1948 to 92 percent today? Indeed, Muslims comprised only 78 percent of the population in 1991, the year before Yugoslavia broke apart. In recent years particularly, it is Kosovo's Serbian Christians, not its Albanian Muslims that are targeted for ethnic cleansing. Since 1999, two-thirds of Kosovo's Serbs - some 250,000 people - have fled the area.

There have been clearances and massacres in that area ever since the Ottomans moved into the neighbourhood in 1389, taking over in 1455. What is needed here is a period of healing and normalization, supported by the international community, not a demonstration of the principle of the Wakf, the belief that any land that has been in Muslim hands belongs to Islam into perpetuity. Ask Spain. They know that they are on the Radar for the loonies to re-establish Andalusia. God help us if this goes much further.

Spain cathedral shuns Muslim plea

I was looking over some letters I have written in the last few months about the double standard by which the Dar al-Islam and the West are judged. While conversion to Islam is encouraged of South Korean Christian prisoners of the Tabiban as they wait to be murdered and an Egyptian former Christian is denied permission to convert back to his original faith. Christians and Jews - in fact all non-Islamic religions - are forbidden to build places of worship in Saudi Arabia. Muslim authorities routinely deny that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a Jewish Holy site, seeming to claim that it came into existance with the onset of Islam or that the kings, prophets, and patriarchs of the bible were Muslim.


Within this environment the BBC lambasts the Roman Catholic bishop of Cordoba in southern Spain for the religious insensitivity of his rejection of an appeal from Muslims for the right to pray in the city's cathedral, a former mosque.


The BBC discussed at length the request of Spain's Islamic Board to share the Mezquita, the Cathedral in Cordoba, as "an ecumenical temple where believers from all faiths could worship". While this might seem to be a reasonable request to someone who does not consider the worship of a different religion within the confines of a Catholic Cathedral to be a desecration it should be considered within context, which the BBC story does not provide.
While the the short article noted three times, the history of the Cathedral as a former mosque, it doesn't mention even once the name of the Cathedral, officially the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin.


Nor did the story address the Islamic practice after conquest of desecrating existing religious sites and replacing them with mosques. Such notable examples are the Tejo Mahalaya, a hindu temple-palace which is now known as the Taj Mahal, the most holy site in Judaism which is the site of the Temple of Solomon but is now the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Visigothic cathedral of St. Vincent which was razed to build the Aljama Mosque - the very site of this story.


Most interestingly, the Aljama Mosque episode began with a determination by Tariq ibn-Ziyad, who occupied Cordoba in 711, that the Cathedral would be used as a shared place of worship. This was eventually determined to no longer be acceptable, the Christian portion was expropriated and St. Stephen's was destroyed.


Within the context of history the hesitation of the Bishop of Cordoba is understandable.

Islamic Responsibility

Islam as a peaceful religion? Certainly there is a lot of peace taught in the Quaran and I believe that most Muslims are peace loving people who just want to live in peace and harmony with the non-Muslim world. It is also true, however, that the Prophet slaughtered an entire tribe of Jews near Medina before he Conquered Mecca - without a fight because of his demonstration of ruthlessness. It is also true that most of the terrorists currently active in the world proclaim a bastardization of Islam.

A lot of regular Muslims have called for the death of Danish cartoonists in some sort of Islamic Justice because they have "blasphemed" Islam. These are the same people who would blaspheme Christianity's central tenet of the Trinity without trying for a moment to understand it. This is the same people who descrated the most sacred place in Judaism - the Temple Mount - by building a mosque over it. Read what the Bible and see what God (Yahweh) thinks of other religions building altars on his sacred sites. This is the same people who similarly descrated Hindu temples in India by building mosques over their levelled foundations. Muslims have nothing to say about others "blaspheming" their faith.

With respect to World War II, have you ever heard of Haj Amin al-Husseini? He was the Grand Muffi of Jerusalem. He spent much of the war in Berlin as an honoured guest of the Third Reich where he had a significant part in the development of the "Final Solution" - all for the right of Palestinian Muslims to take care of the "Jewish Problem" in Palestine themselves. He developed Palestinian Nazi units for the Balkans and the Yugoslavs wanted him prosecuted for war crimes after the war but, because of his immense popularity in the Middle East they were denied. Middle Eastern Muslims were significant collaborators and partners in the Holocost and, as such, bear as much responsibility for their history as anyone in Europe.

The Holocost was not a European event separate and apart from a peaceful world of the Prophet. It is time that Islamic apologists own up to that and quit spouting lies that place themselves on a pedestal they don't deserve. Only after that - not the abandonment of Israel by the West - will there be a peaceful co-existance. I am not, however, holding my breath waiting for this mass weaning of from the addiction to self-righteousness.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/616