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Wahhabism in the Balkans
Islamist aggression heats up in Kosovo.
by Stephen Schwartz


Extremist rhetoric and violence by Wahhabi Islamists continues to rock the Kosovo Republic. The Balkan territory, with an overwhelming Muslim majority, has experienced a sudden campaign of propaganda and physical assaults against Islamic moderates. Wahhabi bombast in mosque preaching now encompasses grotesque and vulgar anti-Christian insults.

Near the end of February, Kosovar media reported that Shefqet Krasniqi, the most prominent and provocative local Wahhabi imam had preached that Mother Teresa was destined for eternal punishment in "the middle of hell, deep." Krasniqi's hateful diatribe was based on Mother Teresa's Catholicism and a claim that only Muslims are destined for paradise (a concept specifically denied in the Koran). Krasniqi elaborated on this affront by stating that the Albanian nun "could have all the men she wanted."

These declamations were especially scandalous because Mother Teresa is a hero to Albanians of every religion and no religion. The mosque where Krasniqi committed his verbal atrocity is located only two blocks from Mother Teresa Street, the main thoroughfare of the capital, now mainly a pedestrian walkway. The founder of the Missionaries of Charity is viewed by the great majority of Albanians as the embodiment of a principle enunciated by the 19th century Albanian Catholic poet and Ottoman governor of Lebanon, Pashko Vasa, who encouraged his people to "not look to church or mosque/The Albanian's faith is Albanianism." Although Albanians have warred in defense of their nation against Christian Slavs and Muslim Turks, they have never suffered sustained interreligious conflict in their own ranks.

Imam Krasniqi's outrageous behavior was condemned by political leaders and Catholic clerics as well as by numerous ordinary Kosovar Muslims contributing to the comment space in the online edition of the daily newspaper Express, which reported the story. Blerim Latifi, adviser to Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci (the latter having been repeatedly slandered in the West as an alleged Islamist), compared the imam with the Taliban and said, "What this man said about Mother Teresa is a national shame. Only a blind fanatic, who has lost the minimal capacity for reason, speaks in this manner."

Fatjon from the northern town of Peja wrote in the Express comment space that he heard the bigoted imam describe all of Europe as "another term for hell." A Prishtina reader with the comment handle "A Muslim who loves his religion" wrote, "Government, react to this if you want a state, otherwise you are leaving the country to be ruled by [the radical imam]." Others cursed and shamed the imam, expressing the wish that he be consumed by Satan; they denounced him as an enemy of Albanians and agent of the Serbs, and advocated his arrest. Vali, from the border town of Gjilan, called the imam a cancer, demanded Krasniqi's expulsion from the official organization of the local Muslim clergy, and concluded with the most dramatic possible statement: "If the Islamic authorities side with Shefqet I will leave Islam." Krasniqi, as is his wont, followed up his outburst with a pompous reaffirmation that the doors of heaven are closed to Mother Teresa. After two days, the official Islamic Community of Kosovo formally condemned Krasniqi's remarks, but has failed to remove him from his preaching responsibilities.

The controversy coincided with another in a series of brutal attacks on anti-extremist Kosovar Muslim functionaries.

As the Wahhabi offensive rolls on across Kosovo, many are asking what has emboldened the radicals to such excesses in a place where they were never welcome and seldom seen.

Some Albanians fear that the Islamists are counting on the United States to abandon Kosovo.

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Wilson Lied, Kids Died!
by Ann Coulter
July 14, 2004

Another high-profile John Kerry supporter was outed as a nutcase this week: Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Walter Mitty of conspiracy theorists. Wilson is the ne'er-do-well WASP embraced by the Democrats last year for calling Bush a liar. Wilson claimed to be shocked, appalled, alarmed when President Bush said during his 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Wilson was shocked because, in 2002, he had been sent on an unpaid make-work job to Niger to "investigate" whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger. Wilson's method of investigating consisted of asking African potentates questions like: Did you commit a horrible crime, which, if so, would ruin your country's relationship with the United States? I have no independent means of corroborating this, so be honest!

On the basis of the answers he got, Wilson concluded that Saddam had not sought uranium ore from Niger. Since "Africa" means "Niger" and "British intelligence" means "Joseph Wilson," Wilson realized in horror that Bush's statement referred to Wilson's very own report! Out of love for his country and an insatiable desire to have someone notice his worthless existence, Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling Bush a liar.

The whole story was already nutty enough to be believed by every columnist at The New York Times. But then journalist Robert Novak revealed that Clown Wilson had been sent as an unpaid intern to Niger by his wife, a chair-warmer at the CIA who apparently wanted to get him out of the house. This in turn provoked our own Walter Mitty to accuse Karl Rove of outing his wife as an undercover "spy" in retaliation for his attacks on the Bush administration.

In response to Wilson's crazy behavior, he was made an adviser to the Kerry campaign. He was also fawned over by Vanity Fair magazine, embraced by Democratic senators like Jon Corzine of New Jersey, hailed as a patriot in The New York Times, awarded The Nation magazine's "Award for Truth-Telling" and given a lucrative book contract.


I'm not sure we were waiting for any more evidence on whether Wilson was an idiot, but this week we found out he's a liar, too. The Senate report on the CIA's intelligence gathering concluded that, contrary to Wilson's statements about his own report, his findings had bolstered rather than undermined the case that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger.

Most amusingly, despite Wilson's insistence that he had been tapped for the Niger trip based on his nonexistent expertise and zero credentials, the Senate committee produced his wife's memo recommending her husband for the (unpaid) job. This followed Wilson's assertions that his wife "definitely had not proposed that I make the trip" and his astonishment that anyone could imagine his wife was "somehow involved in this," saying that "just defies logic."

When presented with the memo from his wife recommending him for the job, Wilson said only that his wife was not the one who made the decision to send him to Niger. This cleared up the matter for anyone who had been under the impression Wilson was married to George Tenet.

As an aside, I note that the main point of the Senate report was to slam the agency for its Mickey Mouse intelligence gathering on weapons of mass destruction. Guess what Wilson's wife does at the CIA? That's right! She gathers intelligence on weapons of mass destruction! No wonder she claims to be "undercover." Her fantasist husband calls the incompetent CIA paper-pusher "Jane Bond." (I'm an astronaut!)

The implicit deal the government has always had with worthless, rich WASPs is they get trivial, make-work jobs with the Foreign Service so they can go around calling themselves "diplomats"; but the trade-off is, they're not supposed to make fools of themselves or commit treason. It's not that high a hurdle. Unlike the Ivy League WASPs of yesteryear, at least worthless WASPs from the lower-ranked schools like Wilson have, thus far, managed to avoid treason. Merely being an ass shouldn't cause many problems for the country -- except that: One political party embraced the ass.

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WHY WE DON'T TRUST YOU WITH NATIONAL SECURITY
by Ann Coulter
January 4, 2006

It seems the Bush administration - being a group of sane, informed adults - has been secretly tapping Arab terrorists without warrants.

During the CIA raids in Afghanistan in early 2002 that captured Abu Zubaydah and his associates, the government seized computers, cell phones and personal phone books. Soon after the raids, the National Security Agency began trying to listen to calls placed to the phone numbers found in al-Qaida Rolodexes.

That was true even if you were "an American citizen" making the call from U.S. territory - like convicted al-Qaida associate Iyman Faris who, after being arrested, confessed to plotting to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge.

By intercepting phone calls to people on Zubaydah's speed-dial, the NSA arrested not only "American citizen" Faris, but other Arab terrorists, including al-Qaida members plotting to bomb British pubs and train stations.

The most innocent-sounding target of the NSA's spying cited by the Treason Times was "an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden." Whatever softening adjectives the Times wants to put in front of the words "ties to Osama bin Laden," we're still left with those words - "ties to Osama bin Laden." The government better be watching that person.

The Democrat Party has decided to express indignation at the idea that an American citizen who happens to be a member of al-Qaida is not allowed to have a private conversation with Osama bin Laden.

On this one, I'm pretty sure Americans are going with the president.

If the Democrats had any brains, they'd distance themselves from the cranks demanding Bush's impeachment for listening in on terrorists' phone calls to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

To the contrary! It is Democrats like Sen. Barbara Boxer who are leading the charge to have Bush impeached for spying on people with Osama's cell phone number.

That's all you need to know about the Democrats to remember that they can't be trusted with national security. (That and Jimmy Carter.)

Democrats and other traitors have tried to couch their opposition to the NSA program in civil libertarian terms, claiming Bush could have gone to the court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and gotten warrants for the interceptions.

The Treason Times reported FISA virtually rubber-stamps warrant requests all the time. As proof, the Times added this irrelevant statistic: In 2004, "1,754 warrants were approved." No one thought to ask how many requests were rejected.

Over and over we heard how the FISA court never turns down an application for a warrant. USA Today quoted liberal darling and author James Bamford saying: "The FISA court is as big a rubber stamp as you can possibly get within the federal judiciary." He "wondered why Bush sought the warrantless searches, since the FISA court rarely rejects search requests," said USA Today.

Put aside the question of why it's so vitally important to get a warrant from a rubber-stamp court if it's nothing but an empty formality anyway. After all the ballyhoo about how it was duck soup to get a warrant from FISA, I thought it was pretty big news when it later turned out that the FISA court had been denying warrant requests from the Bush administration like never before. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the FISA court "modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined."

In the 20 years preceding the attack of 9/11, the FISA court did not modify - much less reject - one single warrant request. But starting in 2001, the judges "modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration." In the years 2003 and 2004, the court issued 173 "substantive modifications" to warrant requests and rejected or "deferred" six warrant requests outright.

What would a Democrat president have done at that point? Apparently, the answer is: Sit back and wait for the next terrorist attack. Also, perhaps as a gesture of inclusion and tolerance, hold an Oval Office reception for the suspected al-Qaida operatives.

Every once in a while the nation needs little reminder of why the Democrats can't be trusted with national security. This is today's lesson.