Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Just Your Old-Fashioned Lone Jihadi

And I thought the Salafis were the more mystical and less fractious among Muslims. Our friend, Nebojsa Malic, sets the record straight about the latest events in Serbia:

Mevlid Jasarevic, age 23, is a follower of the Salafi sect of Islam. This afternoon he opened fire on the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Jasarevic was subsequently shot and reportedly killed.

Because Jasarevic is from Novi Pazar, a town in Serbia, odds are the mainstream Western media will describe this as a “Serbian attack”, or at least identify him as “Serbian citizen.” This would be horribly misleading, of course, but that hasn’t stopped them before.

Here are some things to keep in mind here, before the spin distorts them:

* Salafi missionaries came to Bosnia during the war, with tacit approval and even assistance of the U.S., to get the “wayward” Bosnian Muslims in line and wage jihad against the Serb and Croat “infidels.”
* There are 150,000 or so Muslims in the Raska region of southwestern Serbia (which they call “Sanjak”, a term going back to Ottoman days). Their religious leader, mufti Muamer Zukorlic, was appointed by the top Islamic cleric of Bosnia and has been stirring up trouble and preaching violence and hate for several years. In this, he enjoys the support of many foreign governments (“Friends of Sanjak”), including the U.S.
* Jasarevic may technically be a citizen of Serbia, but he is wanted there on charges of terrorism. He left Serbia last year, and settled in the Salafi commune of Gornja Maoca in northern Bosnia. Until it was ethnically cleansed during the Bosnian War, it used to be a Serb village called Karavlasi.

In addition to terrorizing any Christians (Serbs or Croats) they may come across, the Salafi frequently harass ordinary Bosnian Muslims, who by and large follow the Hanafi school of Islam. The Hanafi approach accepts local customs and is what made coexistence with Christians in the past possible in the first place. Salafists dismiss this as heresy and preach absolute intolerance of any who do not follow their ways.

Anyway, just watch: Jasarevic will be described as a lone lunatic, his motives will be “unknown”, and there will be no mention of jihad or Islamic terrorism. The notion that the Salafists in Bosnia may be nurturing terrorists who threaten American lives runs counter to the mainstream narrative of innocent Muslims being victims of evil Serbs, and is therefore thoughtcrime.

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

Dealing in Death

Foreign Policy, Iran, Just War, Middle East, Military, Morality, Political Economy, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

The US is better off in the imperial sense, says Lew Rockwell to Russia Today about the US government’s latest adventure in Libya. Americans using depreciated US dollars are not better off, but the “merchants of death” are doing swell—the Pentagon, the CIA, weapons suppliers, oil companies; every enterprise that is in cahoots with the government is living it up.

“We The People” suffer the impoverishment that comes with the Zimbabwefication of the coin associated with deficit spending (bailouts and war) in perpetuity. (To wit, the money supply has appreciated by 30 percent and QE3 is in the offing.)

Lew spells out the wealth-destroying nature of the obscene orgy enjoyed by our overlords in DC and their patrons and hangers-on.

UPDATED: American-Mediated Lynching In Libya (Cackling Hildebeest)

America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Just War, Justice, Middle East

Backed by American and French (NATO) sorties up above, our buddies the rebels, bless them, apprehended the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. With barbaric, blood-curdling harangues of “Allahu Akbar,” the revolutionaries proceed to lynch him on camera. Sophisticated enough to film their “justice,” these animals are sufficiently in touch with their atavistic selves to tear to pieces a helpless individual. Secular democracy rising.

Invigorated by killing a 16-year old boy (Abdel-Rahman Anwar al-Awlaki) because related to an American the president had ordered assassinated (Anwar al-Awlaki), without due process, Obama, a worthy disciple of Bush the Barbarian, is celebrating the murder: “You’ve won your revolution,” obama tells Libya.

Once again, the US has supervised and given imprimatur to a French-Revolution like upheaval in a Muslim country.

Below is footage of what we’ve become and who we befriend:

Here are stories that flesh out the gory details from Al Jazeera, the MailOnline, and the AP.

UPDATE: THE CACKLING HILDEBEEST. Even the pro-Bush Allahpundit of “Hot Air” recoils at Hillary Clinton’s “We came, we saw, he died,” vis-a-vis Gaddafi’s death. (Although Bush’s barbarians did plenty laughing and looting. I believe Bush took Saddam’s sword, but Google seems to have wiped all evidence of the Shrub’s crime. Looting goes against Just War doctrine, not that Bush prosecuted a just war.) http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/20/hillary-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died/

UPDATED: Onward to Uganda!

Africa, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, War

I’ve never thought much of the president, as you know. But even I was overly optimistic about Barack Obama’s powers of discernment, having once ventured that in the so-called good war (Afghanistan), Obama had found a war he could call his own. BHO has fewer qualms than Genghis Bush himself about pursuing “wars of the womb” (Libya) and skirmishes for certain select causes (no congressional authority required): that’s the guy’s style.

Now, at the behest of B. Hussein Obama, US troops have joined forces with one Ugandan tribal entity against another, and are hunting for a war lord: Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. (I dilate briefly on this conflict in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”; it’s emblematic of most of the faction fighting that grips Africa.)

BHO, however, believes “that deploying these U.S. armed forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa.”

I had failed to sufficiently appreciate both the depths of Obama’s stupidity and the breadth of his abuse of office.

UPDATE (Feb. 7, 2012): “Obama decision to send troops to Uganda comes under new scrutiny.”