“Conservative” Joseph DioGuardi’s “sensational” election as the GOP Senate candidate in New York has shaken up the Republican Party, gloats the Tropoja-based Albanian Minerals President M. Mujaj in the Wall Street Journal Blog. “The American people have spoken,” this self-styled compatriot of ours is telling us. “The American way of life needs to be rebalanced. Households need to stop spending what they don’t have. Local and state governments need to slash their budgets to live off whatever tax revenues they generate […] The American people voted for change.”


What Mr. Mujaj does not mention is that former Congressman DioGuardi is the founder and well-endowed president of the Albanian American Civic League, a lobby group for the KLA-run “independent” province of “Kosova.” This is a significant fact, crucial to the funding of his candidacy, which he curiously does not mention on his campaign website. Even more curiously, the League’s aacl.com site—full of information on DioGuardi’s KLA connections—has been mysteriously dormant for weeks. There is, nevertheless, ample evidence out there that DioGuardi and his wife have been, for years, key fundraisers and apologists for the terrorist KLA in this country. It is unsurprising that he omits this aspect of his career from his pitch to the voters of New York, but it is curious that no one has called attention to the fact thus far.

As for Tropoja, it is a town in northern Albania best known not as a hub of mining in general, or as the HQ of DioGuardi’s friend Mr. Mujaj’s Albanian Minerals in particular, but as the gruesome site of a “clinic” known as The Yellow House in which hundreds of Serb civilians kidnapped in Kosovo by the KLA in 1999 were brought to be murdered for organ harvesting. As my friend Julia Gorin wrote two and a half years ago,

For perhaps the first time in history, the mainstream media have deemed the dismemberment of Serbs newsworthy. More accurately, they have deemed newsworthy the dismemberment of the Serb and non-Serb victims of our friends, and almost all living Albanians’ great heroes, the KLA … The new information is revealed in the forthcoming book The Hunt by Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor for the Hague Tribunal. A few reports, starting with—gasp—the AP (which both the International Herald Tribune and Fox News deigned to carry), Albanian trafficking in organs of killed Kosovo Serbs investigated… Del Ponte said her investigators had been informed that some 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking.

Del Ponte—not known as a friend of the Serbs by any token—was the first to reveal that the imprisoned Serbs were taken to a camp in Tropoja where the younger ones were picked out, and their organs were later sold abroad. Even high KLA members were involved in the operation of smuggling of organs, Del Ponte explained. She attested that her investigators and UNMIK officials were made aware that in mid-1999 the KLA moved some 300 abducted non-Albanians to Tropoja’s “yellow house” where in one room that was used as an operating theater, the surgeons were removing organs from the victims. The organs were transported by air from Tirana to clinics abroad for clients and medical institutions that paid for them. The victims left with one kidney were kept locked, and later on killed for other organs. “Other prisoners in the barrack knew what was to happen to them,” Del Ponte added.

The horrors of Tropoja and the KLA are light years away from DioGuardi’s New York State audiences and his usual sales pitch … standard fiscal conservatism, family values. No mention of the KLA anywhere, of course.

Had another Joseph, Dr. Mengele, decided to run for the U.S. Senate sixty years ago, he too would have kept quiet about certain medical pursuits, and certain political affiliations, similar in kind and moral depravity to DioGuardi’s. But he did not, wisely preferring to stay in Brasil. DioGuardi’s ability to do so today is a sad testimony on the decrepitude of the GOP and on the state of this country’s politics.