How Kosovo Created Its Own Liberal Islam - With Video
When I went into our site archives for previous Kosovo independence stories there were so many posts we did on this country and the continuing violence there. For background search Kosovo in the top right corner box on the page. I am linking to this one with John Bolton’s thoughts on it …
I am NOT so inclined to find something … anything … even remotely redeeming about the world’s most vile and deadly religious and political ideology that, besides Communism, is responsible for more deaths across the globe in the 20th Century … and as a whole, throughout history.
My immigrant former-Serb neighbors shake their heads at such “Pollyanna” reports of Kosovo independence with modern and peaceful and ‘liberal’ Muslim influence. THEY will never trust the religion, culture, and by that the people, who live under and abide by such teachings and beliefs that are extremely contrary a civilization.
According to comments on the site of this story, that don’t seem to make it in the MSM news unless it is something done against the Muslims in the area, atrocities continue in the region:
1) Could you please address the issue of the alleged torching of Orthodox churches and of the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and other minorities.
2) Michael, On many Orthodox websites, one reads continually of the oppression, annexation, and abuse of Orthodox Christians in Kosovo and Albanian. You mention Catholics but not Orthodox, which is interesting because Albania was part of the Orthodox world in the past. As the Orthodox-Catholic divide has involved worse abuses than the Catholic-Protestant, I’m curious. The claims include the confiscation of monasteries, rape of nuns, and forcible relocation of people.
When my Hungarian Grandparents repeatedly warned me, “Never trust a Turk“, they didn’t just mean people from the country Turkey …
by MICHAEL J. TOTTEN (Standpoint Mag) - from PRISTINA
On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Some are concerned about what NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union have nurtured there since the military and humanitarian intervention in 1999. James Jatras, a U.S.-based advocate for the Serbian Orthodox Community, put it bluntly last year when he said Kosovo was a “a beachhead into the rest of Europe” for “radical Muslims” and “terrorist elements.” It’s an assertion without evidence. “We’ve been here for so long,” said United States Army Sergeant Zachary Gore in Eastern Kosovo, “and not seen any evidence of it, that we’ve reached the assumption that it is not a viable threat.”
Nine in 10 of Kosovo’s citizens are ethnic Albanians, and more than 90 per cent of them are at least nominal Muslims. Most are so thoroughly modern and secularised that moderate doesn’t quite say it. The only word that can fairly describe Islam as practiced by the majority of Albanian Muslims is liberal. No nation can be entirely free of extremists, but Kosovo is one of the least religiously extreme Muslim-majority countries on Earth. Radical Islamists aren’t there in significant numbers now, and they aren’t likely to be in the future. Some places may be fertile ground for radicalism in the future, but Kosovo isn’t one of them for many of the same reasons that Christian theocracy isn’t coming to Western Europe.
I arrived here shortly after the declaration of independence, and the first thing I looked for – as always when I visit a Muslim-majority country – was the treatment and status of women.
Women who dress with their hair, ankles, and sometimes even faces showing in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan are often beaten or worse.
In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.
“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”
It would be wrong to suggest Kosovo has no Islamists at all, but in the last election in late 2007, the country’s single Islamic party gained only 1.7 per cent of the vote. Kosovo is not the Middle East, and Albanians are not Arabs. The majority converted to Islam relatively recently under Turkish Ottoman rule, and Albanian culture was first solidly Christian. “We Albanians,” Dom Lush Gjergji recently wrote, “descendants of the Illyrians, are Christians from the time of the Apostles… Without Christianity there would be no Albanian people, language, culture, or traditions… Albanians consider Christianity their patrimony, their spiritual and cultural inheritance.” Gjergji is a Catholic priest, but I heard similar comments from many who self-identify as Muslims. “Albanian people are not very religious,” said Agron Rezniqi, of the Friendship Association between Kosovo and Israel “We come from Catholicism, and for that, we are not such strong Muslims.”
Perhaps the best evidence available that Albanian Muslims, in both Kosovo and Albania proper, differ radically from their Arab world counterparts is their relationship with Jews and with Israel. Jews in Albania had an almost 100 per cent survival rate during the Nazi occupation. The country was known as a safe haven where Jews could find protection under the noses of the German authorities. According to Dan Michman, chief historian at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, there were three times as many Jews in Albania at the end of the Second World War as there were at the beginning.
Both Albania and Kosovo have excellent relations with Israel, and Israelis are more than welcome to travel and even live among Albanians. An Israeli from Tel Aviv named Shachar Caspi opened a bakery and a bistro bar in Pristina. “Nobody has given me any problems or been against Israel,” he told me. “[Kosovars] had good relations with Jewish people even back in the old days. And nobody here is radical. On the contrary, people are very warm, they are very nice, they have taken Islam to a beautiful place, not to a violent place. When they hear I am Israeli, the way they react, they react very warmly.”
Much of the angst about Kosovo’s alleged radicalism centres on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an organisation that no longer even exists.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing. The KLA was always thoroughly secular and in no way resembled a Balkan Hamas or Hezbollah.
Its leaders also distinguished themselves from their Bosnian counterparts when they flatly refused assistance from Arabic mujahideen who wanted to fight a holy war there against Serbs. Albanians don’t fight religious wars, not against themselves, and not against others.
There has been no fighting or even tension between Muslim and Christian Albanians, only between Serbs and Albanians.
The danger in Kosovo isn’t that international peace keepers are nurturing a jihad state. Rather, a premature withdrawal may lead to a resumption of the fighting between Serbs and Albanians that they moved in to stop in the first place.
Go to yuotube and search Serbian churches desecration … Here is just one I found there. BTW, were they Mosques they would be ALL OVER the MSM news, print and airwaves.
Be respectful of others and their opinions. Inflammatory remarks and inane leftist drivel will be deleted. It ain’t about free speech, remember you’re in a private domain. My website, my prerogative.
If you can't handle using your real email address, don't bother posting a comment.
While Totten is one of the “good guys” he is one of those self described, “spiritual but not religious” types which means he really doesn’t understand the ease with which a religious fervor can sweep people up. I doubt he has even experienced the personally radical but outwardly mild revolution of a good old Gospel revival…
June 27th, 2008 at 7:39 pmTotten is a “good guy”, however he should have done a better job of correlating the lessening of Islamist extremism with the increase of same in Iraq.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:55 pmI was with the SFOR (second unit in) of the 1st Cav and worked in a sensitive area that tracked any changes in immigration and population in the AOR. The number of Islamist’s streaming into the country back in 1996 was comparable to what we see today in Iraq. Of course we could not engage back then.
My point is, the jihadi’s flow to where they think they can be martyred and kill Americans.
There is a real story here, Totten, though, has glossed over that story. The jihadi’s that flowed into Kosovo in the 90’s have now gone to Iraq and been eliminated without prejudice. That’s the story, if I had the resources that Totten has I would do a better job of getting my point across.
Is it any wonder the 9-11 attacks were planned and logistics were handled out of Germany? That’s where they were at the time.
Hey TB,
June 27th, 2008 at 9:02 pmI’m in StL until the 3rd of July. Wanna have a beer and shoot some guns, or we could just cling to our Bible’s and our guns and our racism.
I usually just sit in my hotel room and cling, but I’d be willing to meet a fellow Dollard-ite for a malted beverage.
packfan61@hotmail.com
Kosovo is the center of narco-terrorisn and arms smuggling, and the heart of mujaheddin movement in Europe. It’s so called independence is a testament to the ignorance of the UN and the EU, and the levels to which these organizations seek to appease Islam for the sake of appearing fair. Indeed many muslim Albanians are happy converts from Ottoman times, and carry on a tradition of pogroms against Christians as their Turkish muslim brothers have for centuries.
There are far too many accounts of Christian persecution to list here. A recent example of such persecution is happening in Turkey where the Turkish govt is denying fresh water to Churches, while mosques are by law granted free water all year round. The animosity towards Christian populations (what little is left of them) is beyond terrible and deeply rooted in Islam.
The video above is another example of the fundamental hate for Christians muslims have in that region. One can go back to the Eastern Christian genocides in Asia Minor and Armenia also. In Smyrna in 1922, as a fleet of Western naval ships stationed off its harbor, Turkish madman Enver Pasha went about wiping off the map a beautiful old city and its rich culture of three thousand years in just 3 days. It is well known amongst Islamist that Osama holds Enver Pasha highly, and even likens himself to him. It’s with little wonder then that the KLA allied themselves early on with Al’Queda.
US Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau - “And for centuries the Turks simply lived like parasites upon these overburdened and industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems, took Christian male infants by the hundreds of thousands and brought them up as Moslem soldiers. I have no intention of describing the terrible vassalage and oppression that went on for five centuries; my purpose is merely to emphasize this innate attitude of the Moslem Turk to people not of his own race and religion—that they are not human beings with rights, but merely chattels, which may be permitted to live when they promote the interest of their masters, but which may be pitilessly destroyed when they have ceased to be useful. This attitude is intensified by a total disregard for human life and an intense delight in inflicting physical human suffering which are not unusually the qualities of primitive peoples.”
One of the most harrowing accounts that I have read concerns the slaying of Metropolitan Bishop Chrysostomos who was offered refuge in the French embassy but refused it to stay with his flock:
“On 9 September crowds were rushing into the cathedral for shelter when Chrysostomos, pale from fasting and lack of sleep, led his last prayer. The Divine Liturgy ended as Turkish police came to the church and led Chrysostomos away. The Turkish General Nouredin Pasha, known as the “butcher of Ionia”, first spat on the Metropolitan and informed him that a tribunal in Angora (now Ankara) had already condemned him to death. A mob fell upon Chrysostomos and tore out his eyes. Bleeding profusely, he was dragged through the streets by his beard. He was beaten and kicked and parts of his body were cut off. All the while Chrysostomos, his face covered with blood, prayed: “Holy Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Every now and then, when he had the strength, he would raise his hand and bless his persecutors; a Turk, realizing what the Metropolitan was doing, cut off his hand with a sword. Metropolitan Chrysostomos was then hacked to pieced by the angry mob.”
US Diplomat George Horton’s own first hand accounts of the systematic extermination of Christians is well documented in his book “The Blight of Asia”, a must read for anyone wanting to know the Islam’s true hostile nature of and utter contempt for Christians.
Almost a century on the international community has not learned anything, rewarding these same primitive people and Islamic terrorists a state of their own within Europe. This is beyond blissful ignorance, it’s stupidity of the highest order and outright shameful!!
June 27th, 2008 at 9:41 pmThere is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds
The Saudi, bomb them !
Kosovo is the center of narco-terrorisn and arms smuggling, and the heart of mujaheddin movement in Europe. It’s so called independence is a testament to the ignorance of the UN and the EU, and the levels to which these organizations seek to appease Islam for the sake of appearing fair. Indeed many muslim Albanians are happy converts from Ottoman times, and carry on a tradition of pogroms against Christians as their Turkish muslim brothers have for centuries.
no Americans policy there of course ! wasn’t Bush one of the firsts who acknoledged the independance ? (could be to damn Putin’s dices there, nah ?) you also forgot Clinton’s interventions, that he provided arms to the muslims there. The aims were to demonised the Serbs, but we, Europeans were fooled in following the “All bright” policy conception. The EU Nato nations didn’t see the point there : keeping a conflict alive in the EU inside borders, so that the US could still control EU armies and define their objectives.
As far as Turkey integrating the EU, this is also an american idea, though one sees in Turkey, 2 faces, the europen one, yeah, their soccer team was great in the EU championship ! and the islamist one, that is well described above. Though, just for that one, we can’t trust Turkey.
June 28th, 2008 at 2:17 am