On May 1, at a hearing on the future of Kosovo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrat Tom Lantos of California, made a truly remarkable statement:
Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe. This should be noted by both responsible leaders of Islamic governments, such as Indonesia, and also by jihadists of all color and hue. The United States’ principles are universal, and in this instance, the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.
“Yet another example” means that, before Kosovo, we created Bosnia—and America is paying the price on both accounts. Mr. Lantos’ jihadist friends are, indeed, taking note and expressing their gratitude in predictable ways.
On May 8, four Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, one Turk, and one Jordanian were arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey with AK-47s and “to kill as many soldiers as possible,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
It was not easy to discern their identity from media reports, however. The word Albanian was nowhere to be found. “Four of them were born in the former Yugoslavia,” reported the New York Times. “One of the suspects was born in Turkey and four in the former Yugoslavia,” the AP confirmed. And that’s how the story was reported in the key early hours, when the angle and frame of an event’s public perception are determined.
The names of those four “Yugoslavs” were eminently non-Slavic: Dritan, Eljvir, and Shain Duka (three brothers, all of them here illegally), and Agron Abdullahu. Those are Albanian names, of course, but not one in a hundred Americans knows that. In fact, grasping that they are Albanians and knowing that “ethnic Albanian” plus “Muslim from the former Yugoslavia” equals “Kosovo” is the privilege of experts. It is but one of many Balkan equations that mainstream-media editors are determined to keep hidden from their consumers. Furthermore, the fact that there was nothing in the federal complaint about the four suspects’ ethnic origins was almost certainly the result of political interference.
The urge to conceal the identity of Fort Dix plotters has the same roots as Mr. Lantos’ appeal to jihadists to take note of our benevolence. The plotters are in the United States because of Washington’s support for the Balkan Muslims, and that support is continuing because—by now—the creators of the Balkan debacles of the 1990’s are afraid of them and hope to appease them. It was subsequently revealed that Mr. Abdullahu was a “KLA sniper.” This piquant little detail further illustrates the idiocy and wickedness of those who still believe that they can forge a partnership with “jihadists of all color and hue,” or use them to achieve some other, unrelated objectives. As we have seen over the past decade and a half, to continue encouraging the Muslim sense of victimhood embodied in the myth of the “genocide in Srebrenica” or “Kosova” is to feed would-be G.I. killers with a political pap that nourishes their hate. If the “War on Terror” is to accomplish something good, that idiocy must stop. Pandering to Islam’s geopolitical designs—in the Balkans or anywhere else—and sacrificing Christians in the process is not only bad but counterproductive.
Yet White House spokesman Tony Snow hastened to assure us that there is “no direct evidence” that the men arrested in the Fort Dix plot have ties to international terrorism. His message is clear: The Bush administration knows it cannot keep the Albanian identity of four “Yugoslav” suspects concealed forever, but it wants to preempt any suspicion that an independent “Kosova” would be a black hole of jihadist terrorism in the heart of Europe. Of course, a victim of Islamic terrorism does not care whether the attack is orchestrated from Bora Bora or the result of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, but hastily denying the “Yugoslavs’” link to Al Qaeda and other global networks is a political maneuver for the proponents of Kosovo’s independence that necessarily turns a blind eye to reality.
Having been assured ad nauseam over the years that Kosovo’s Albanians are not really serious about their Islam—that, even when they desecrate Christian churches and joyously rip crosses from church domes, they do it for “nationalist” rather than jihadist reasons—the powers that be are doing their utmost to ensure that the public remains anesthetized. Asking when and how Albanian “secularists” became Islamic radicals is a no-no. Being so audacious as to wonder what this transformation bodes for a new, independent Muslim state in the heart of Europe is simply not on. Asking questions about major KLA figures’ documented links to terrorism (including ties to Osama bin Laden) is verboten. In the meantime, cadres, cash, and ordnance linked to jihadist outrages all over Europe have been traced back to Kosovo, including the bombings in Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005), and a rocket attack on the U.S. embassy in Athens last year.
Exactly the same pattern of mendacity and denial on the part of U.S. officialdom was evident last February, after the shooting spree by a 19-year old Bosnian Muslim, Sulejman Talovic, left five people dead and four wounded in a Salt Lake City shopping mall. Five months later, the authorities still claim to be clueless about his motives. From what we now know about the case, however, it appears that the rampage in Utah was yet another “lone wolf” attack by a Muslim-as-Muslim—in other words, yet another outbreak of the deadly Sudden Jihad Syndrome that is erupting across America with increasing regularity.
Not surprisingly, Talovic’s family and a “shocked” Bosnian Muslim community were quick to reject any possibility of a jihadist connection. “We are Muslims, but we are not terrorists,” the killer’s aunt, Ajka Omerovic, told the media. She rejected out of hand any religious motive for the shooting and claimed the family “can’t explain it”; but this may not have been the first case of SJS in the family: Amir Omerovic, apparently Talovic’s cousin, threatened to spread anthrax in 2002. Omerovic admitted sending letters to the offices of Gov. John G. Rowland, the U.S. Coast Guard and Marines in Connecticut, and the Judicial Review Council in Hartford. “This is only the beginning,” Omerovic’s letters said. “Americans will die. Death to America and Israel.”
Talovic’s Bosnian-born girlfriend, who lives in Texas, and who knew him only through daily hours-long telephone conversations, says that his favorite film was Malcolm X—the same movie that set John Walker Lindh on the path to jihad. Contrary to the family’s assurances, she also revealed that he had a contact at the local mosque, a man he met while attending services there. The mosque in question is just two blocks from the scene of the carnage. It is the same mosque attended by U.S. Marine Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, the deserter now safely back in his native Lebanon.
On the eve of his attack, Talovic told his girlfriend that something was going to happen the following day, an event that she might find unforgivable; yet he added that it was going to be “the happiest day of his life,” and that “it could only happen once in a lifetime.” The statement seems mysterious, and, if pondered outside the framework of Islamic imagery, it would be indicative of mental instability. If we assume that Talovic was motivated by jihad, however, the meaning of “the happiest day” that could “only happen once” becomes clear. The Koran vouches that “those who are slain in the path of Allah” are not dead (3:169); they are granted immediate entry to paradise, “to rejoice in the bounty provided by Allah.” This assurance is elaborated in Islamic tradition, and it is reiterated by countless orthodox Islamic sources. Furthermore, Talovic took a shower before going to the mall with the intention of killing and being killed: He was practicing tahara, the ritual Islamic washing before battle.
A particularly intriguing revelation by Talovic’s girlfriend concerns a vision that he told her he had experienced while still in Bosnia: One evening, he heard a horse outside of his family’s home. He walked out, and standing before him was a white horse “with two beautiful eyes.” He alerted his aunt, but she could not see the animal. The incident nevertheless made young Talovic “very, very happy.” To understand the meaning of this episode, and the reasons for the killer’s happiness, we need to turn to the Islamic Imagery Project compiled by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center:
The white horse is inextricably tied to conceptions of the prophet, martyrdom, and paradise (heaven). It is most often associated with . . . Muhammad’s miraj or night journey to heaven, when the Prophet ascended to heaven on the back of a white horse. In this regard, the white horse most specifically evokes notions of the afterlife and the heavenly paradise awaiting pious Muslims (or jihadi martyrs) upon their death . . . [I]n both Sunni and Shiite traditions, the white horse is strongly associated with martyrdom and the expectation of heavenly paradise. . . .
[T]he white horse evokes the righteousness of these individuals’ martyrdom, and reminds the audience that these men have been granted the martyr’s promised reward of ascension to heavenly paradise.
If it walks like a jihadi, and kills like a jihadi . . . and yet the media refuse to connect the dots from New Jersey to Utah to the Balkans, and the authorities claim that there are no dots to be connected anyway. We’ve seen it all before, of course. As I noted in these pages almost two years ago, the pattern is almost boringly predictable: A Muslim commits an act of violence, or is caught plotting to commit one. The local Muslim community responds with a mix of indignation and denial—the Albanians did so less than a day after the Fort Dix case blew up—even as non-Muslim civic leaders are reassuring the Muslim community that it is loved and appreciated and are calling on their fellow citizens to be warm and supportive of their Muslim neighbors. The media report heartwarming stories of the Muslims’ sense of rejection and alienation, or dwell on the perpetrator’s history of woe—in Talovic’s case, by blaming the bloodthirsty Serbs for his childhood traumas.
To understand the incidence of sudden acts of random extreme violence by Balkan Muslims against Americans, it is necessary to unmask the web of lies and distortions that has guided U.S. policy in the Balkans for years.
In the aftermath of the Fort Dix conspiracy, the first step should be to demand answers to some specific questions: Why and how were Muslim Albanian terrorists from Kosovo able to plan an operation here on our soil? What are they doing here? Didn’t the U.S. military fight the Serbs for 78 days in 1999 so that they could have their ethnically clean, Serbenfrei statelet? As James G. Jatras, president of the American Council for Kosovo, points out,
For almost a decade the U.S. government (or more precisely a handful of State Department bureaucrats and a few Congressmen) have placed the U.S. firmly on the side of the KLA and have helped create a haven for their operations. Even worse, KLA supporters in the United States have operated with virtual impunity, collecting money and weapons to support KLA operations not only in Kosovo, but in neighboring areas of southern Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and northern Greece.
He reminds us that, in 2004, Dutch television broadcast a documentary of Kosovo Albanian Muslims legally buying weapons in the United States and shipping them to Kosovo in support of their “liberation war”—violating numerous U.S. laws, including the Neutrality Act. The documentary then showed the same Albanians at a fundraiser in New York City writing hefty checks to American politicians of both parties—and, three years later, there is no public indication that any action was taken by federal or state law-enforcement agencies.
It cannot be otherwise—as long as Kosovo Albanians continue controlling the global heroin trade and we continue having the best Congress money can buy.
Leave a Reply