The Israel of the Balkans?
I have discussed several times my fears regarding the implications for Israel of Kosovo being carved out of Serbian territory as an independent state. This article by Michael Totten in Commentary is making me think again.Many in Kosovo are well aware that they have more in common with Israel than with the West Bank and Gaza. "Kosovars used to identify with the Palestinians because we Albanians are Muslims and Christians and we saw Serbia and Israel both as usurpers of land," a prominent Kosovar recent told journalist Stephen Schwartz. "Then we looked at a map and woke up. Israelis have a population of six million, their backs to the sea, and 300 million Arab enemies. Albanians have a total population of eight million, our backs to the sea, and 200 million Slav enemies. So why should we identify with the Arabs?"Read the whole thing.
“Many Palestinians also nurtured a similar sympathy for [genocidal Serbian dictator Slobodan] Milosevic,” Schwartz himself wrote in Middle East Quarterly. “What may be considered the most surrealistic gesture during the entire decade of recent Balkan wars occurred six months after NATO’s bombing of Serbia: on December 1, 1999, the Palestinian Authority (PA) invited Milosevic to Bethlehem to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas. News of this invitation, although more or less ignored in the West, was reported with banner headlines in the Balkans. An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said that if Milosevic accepted the invitation he would be arrested on arrival, since Israel, as a U.N. member, is obliged to fulfill arrest orders issued by The Hague tribunal, which had indicted him. The PA, not being a U.N. member, was under no such obligation. And the PA was not the only Palestinian element to vacillate over Kosovo. Earlier in 1999, the Palestinian Islamic extremist Hamas movement issued a statement, denouncing U.S. intervention to settle the Kosovo crisis as ‘hiding under the slogans of human rights to impose its power in the Balkans.’ Hamas thus echoed the allegations of Milosevic’s own media, as well as the Russians and various leftists worldwide.”
Palestinians weren’t the only Arabs to side with Milosevic against their fellow Muslims. Milosevic also had close ties to Saddam Hussein, as did Vojislav Koštunica’s democratic government that replaced him. Ed Bradley reported in 2003 that as much as three billion dollars worth of weapons, explosives, and equipment – including equipment that would bolster Iraq’s arsenal of Scud missiles – was shipped by the Serb-controlled Yugoslav arms export agency to Iraq before interception by Croatian authorities.
Israelis and Kosovars don’t merely line up on the same Western side geopolitically. They share a moral and ethical temperament with each other, one they also share with the Kurds of Iraq. All are ethnic minorities in their respective regions that wish to be left alone on their own land, untroubled by regional ethnic majorities that wish to suppress or eject them.
90 percent of Kosovars are ethnic Albanians. They lay no claim to proper Serbian land. They have no wish to seize Serbia’s capital Belgrade and ethnically cleanse it of Serbs, nor to rule over Serbs. They want sovereignty over themselves, not over others. They merely want what the other countries of the former Yugoslavia have managed to hammer out for themselves.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:02 AM
8 Comments:
the proclivity to analyze things by saying A is like B is a sure sign the analyst is DUMB - as is Totten.
A is A, not B.
A is NOT LIKE B - not in any meaningful way.
leftists are especially prone to conflate things which are unrelated.
totten is a hawk, but a lefty - and he is especially prone to logical errors like this, and idiotic analysis.
Kosovo presents many unique challenges and most are NOTHING like Israel at all.. totten is a 1/2way decent reporter and a lousy analyst.
yes: he is a well-traveled idiot.
Carl - the Israeli Arabs represent an undigested fifth column within the Jewish State. They openly identify with Israel's enemies.
At some point in the future, its not too difficult to imagine the Arab majority Little Triangle in the Galilee seceding from Israel for good. The Kosovo precedent is dangerous in the sense that every country with a significant minority can engineer its disintegration in the name of self-determination.
There are no "Kosovars", this is just propaganda. In Kosovo there are Albanians (around 50% of them illegal immigrants from Albania), Serbs and some other minorities.
Albanians were welcome to live in peace, but their goal was to conquer their neighbors' lands (Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro) and create "Greater Albania". Protected by communist regime in Yugoslavia, they terrorized non-albanians in Kosovo for decades and succeeded in growing from 50% of population to 90% in fifty years.
Here they are:
http://kosovo.net/default2.html
http://www.ex-yupress.com/evnovosti/evnovosti13_kladecapit1.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMs8IfxSCt4
Million of Serbs were killed with Jews in Nazi death camps, Albanians had their own "Skanderbeg" SS division. If there is "Israel of the Balkans" this is Serbia.
lazar is correct.
And reliapundit is here correct.
It's also worth noting the article's source: Commentary! (they mean well, but if ever there were such a counterproductive, disaster of a foreign policy agenda, there's is it)
"They merely want what the other countries of the former Yugoslavia have managed to hammer out for themselves."
Yeah, just like the Paleostinians "just want to rule over themselves" in Gaza, AFTER ETHNICLY CLEANSING IT OF JEWS. And it's the same in the Balkans. The Muslims purge the land of Serbs, then say, "We are the majority and it is no fare allowing foreigners to rule over us."
How long before they do that in Mishugan?
Toten is tote wrong.
No comment:
http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=1524
"Israelis and Kosovars don’t merely line up on the same Western side geopolitically. They share a moral and ethical temperament with each other"
That's funny, I don't remember Israeli Jews looting, burning and urinating on Christian churches, like Kosovo and Metohija Albanians did only 4 years ago. Totten's article is anti-historical, full of factual distortions and even fabrications(such as the claim that the Koštunica governement having ties with Sadam Hussein's Iraq).
Why doesn't Totten mention the demographics 60 years ago, when Kosovo and Metohija was roughly 50-50 Serb-Albanian? Why does he not mention how the ethnic disparity was achieved in the 1941-1945 period? Why does he not mention that the communist authorities after the war banned those expelled from returning? Why does he not mention several separatist demonstrations even while Tito was still alive? There is so many that would shoot down his simplicistic analysis and I haven't even touched the Ottoman period where Albanians served as punitive expeditions against the Christian peoples(not only Serbs, but Slavic Macedonians and Greeks as well) in the Balkans.
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