A NEWLY "REVIVED" ISLAMIC BOSNIA

Check this out in, of all places, the paper of the jihad, the New York Times. The article employs the same pathetic dhimmi excuses that the NY Times if infamous for, but read between the lines.The facts are all there.  Clinton's war - no national security at stake, no nothing, essentially a  war against the Christians. Imagine all that blood and treasure to expand Islam. And now Bush supports an independent Kosovo? Suicide!

An Islamic Revival in Bosnia Tests a Fragile Nation’s Secular Cast ...

More than half a dozen new madrasas, or religious high schools, have been built in recent years, while dozens of mosques have sprouted, including the King Fahd, a sprawling $28 million complex with a sports and cultural center.

Before the war, fully covered women and men with long beards were almost unheard of. Today, they are common.

Many here welcome the Muslim revival as a healthy assertion of identity in a multiethnic country where Muslims make up close to half the population.

Healthy for whom? Not women, children and other living things.

But others warn of a growing culture clash between conservative Islam and Bosnia’s avowed secularism in an already fragile state.

Two months ago, men in hoods attacked participants at a gay festival in Sarajevo, dragging some people from vehicles and beating others while they chanted, “Kill the gays!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Eight people were injured.

Muslim religious leaders complained that the event, which coincided with the holy month of Ramadan, was a provocation. The organizers said they had sought to promote minority rights and meant no offense.

In this cosmopolitan capital, where bars have long outnumbered mosques, Muslim religious education was recently introduced in state kindergartens, prompting some secular Muslim parents to complain that the separation between mosque and state was being breached.

Sounds oh so cosmo!

Bosnia’s Muslims have practiced a moderate Islam that stretches back to the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Sociologists and political leaders say the religious awakening is partly an outgrowth of the war and the American-brokered Dayton agreement that ended it, dividing the country into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic.

Blame Bush for centuries of Islamic jihad!

“The Serbs committed genocide against us, raped our women, made us refugees in our own country,” said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, the grand mufti and main spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim community.

“And now we have a tribal constitution that says we have to share political power and land with our killers,” he said. “We Bosnian Muslims still feel besieged in the city of Sarajevo.”

Muslims besieged, now that's rich.

That resentment is evident. As several thousand worshipers streamed into the imposing King Fahd mosque on a recent Friday, a young man sat outside selling a popular conservative Muslim magazine with President-elect Barack Obama on the cover.

"Hussein, Will Your America Kill Muslims?" the headline asked, using Mr. Obama’s middle name, a source of pride for many Muslims here.

Religious and national identity have long been fused in multifaith Bosnia.

It was tradition in villages to refer to neighbors by their religion — Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, rather than as Bosniak, Serb or Croat.

In the nation-building that followed Dayton, that practice has become stronger.

In Sarajevo, a predominantly Muslim city, dozens of streets named after Communist revolutionaries were renamed after Muslim heroes, and political parties stressing Muslim identity gained large constituencies.

Osama Bin Laden, perhaps?

Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, meanwhile, cleave to their own religious and cultural identities. Church attendance is on the rise; in the Serb Republic, even ministries and police departments have their own Orthodox patron saints.

Muharem Bazdulj, deputy editor of the daily Oslobodenje, the voice of liberal, secular Bosnia, said he feared the growth of Wahhabism, the conservative Sunni movement originating in Saudi Arabia that aims to strip away foreign and corrupting influences.

Analysts say Saudi-financed organizations have invested about $700 million in Bosnia since the war, often in mosques.

[...]

Still, violent episodes have occurred. Earlier this year, after an explosion at a shopping mall in the town of Vitez killed one person and wounded seven, Zlatko Miletic, head of uniformed police of the Muslim-Croat Federation Interior Ministry, warned that a group in Bosnia linked to Salafism, an ultraconservative Sunni Islamic movement, was bent on terrorism.

[...]

“Children are fasting on Ramadan, going to the mosque more than their parents,” he said. “We had de-Islamification for 40 years during Tito’s time, so it is natural that people are now embracing the freedom to express their religion.”

Children going on their own? Sans parents? They think we are idiots.

Comments

[Sebaneau]

http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2529
The role of the EU in destabilising Southeastern Europe
Ivan Torov, Peščanik.net (Belgrade), 20 December 2008
(Original in Serbian here: http://pescanik.net/content/view/2496/80/ )

Lucid critique, translated from the Belgrade-based Pešcanik website, of the way in which EU mistakes and weaknesses have encouraged first Greece, then Slovenia and in the latter's wake Serbia to make trouble for their neighbours

It seems that EU membership brings advantages that are not solely of an economic and financial nature. This is what Slovenia, to take one example, has proved in recent days with its threat - at the very end of Zagreb’s negotiations with the EU - to block Croatia’s entry on the grounds of its alleged ‘claims to Slovenian territory’. The propaganda war that has been simmering for months has now erupted into full view, and Brussels - was this not expected?- has acquired yet one more vexing problem.

That this is not merely a bit of artless pressure by Slovenia on a former ‘fraternal Yugoslav republic’, in order to make it alter its obdurate position on a contentious territorial issue, is illustrated by the equally bullish recent behaviour of another EU state - Greece. At the start of 2008, Greece blocked Macedonia’s entry into NATO (in a package that included also Croatia and Albania), declaring that it would not ‘tolerate territorial claims from the north’. Greece, which sees itself as the exclusive heir to European civilisation, has warned Macedonia that it should change its name, and indeed its national identity, history and language. In effect, the whole lot. Brussels tacitly sided with Greece, as a result of which a state that has chronic problems with all its neighbours has been encouraged to be even more arrogant and aggressive. Macedonia, though a NATO candidate for the past three years, was stopped in its tracks; and the list of conditions that it still has to meet now includes also a change of name. This young state in the former Yugoslav area consequently finds itself in something of a domestic and international impasse.

Greece seized the opportunity - for the second time in a relatively short period of time - to use the right of veto that it enjoys as a full EU member. When the EU finally decided to accept a divided Cyprus - or rather, the Greek part of the island - it in practice gave Athens carte blanche to behave as a regional arbiter, to whom everything is allowed. One victim of this has been Turkey, with its ‘eternal’ candidature, which is being asked to stop supporting the Turkish side of Cyprus if it wants to join the EU.

What - in the case of Cyprus - appeared as an exception has since become the rule. Others too have come to wield the instrument of veto in order to impose their will on their non-EU neighbours. Wishing no doubt to make life easier for itself by having its future members solve their conflicts with their neighbours in advance, the EU has in fact made a strategic error by securing a privileged position for its members that allows them in effect to play the role of a regional policeman. Its seemingly neutral, yet in reality partisan, behaviour thus stimulates in reality the escalation of ‘local’ crises, both real and potential. Greece has taken ample advantage of this privileged position by issuing ultimata: yesterday to Turkey, today to Macedonia, and tomorrow - to judge by some signs - to Albania too. The virus, as we have recently been able to witness, has been caught also by Slovenia, which - learning from the Greek experience - views the concluding negotiations regarding the entry into the EU of Croatia as its last chance to insist on compliance by the latter with Slovenian demands.

Slovenia’s tactic has encouraged Serbia, in particular, not to hurry with normalisation of its relations with Croatia. The newly appointed Croatian ambassador to Belgrade is still waiting to present his credentials, and Serbian officials conceal the fact that the Croatian prime minister Sanader is ready to visit Belgrade. Serbia is keen not to do anything that would help Croatia, in view of its own numerous conflicts with Zagreb. Slovenia’s behaviour is providing Serbian president Boris Tadic with a model for how Serbia itself might act if and when it becomes a member of the EU. Although Serbia’s pro-European course is currently being revised, some calculations remain intact. One is that, even if it would be best for Serbia to join the EU with Kosovo as part of it, if this proves impossible then - as a full EU member, and aided by sympathetic EU states - Serbia will be in a position to block Kosovo’s own adhesion to the EU. Also, since Belgrade is convinced that it will join the EU before Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as an EU member it could also influence the dynamic of these two states’ own process of integration into the EU. All this on condition, of course, that Serbia’s own membership is not tied to prior recognition by it of the fact of Kosovo’s independence.