Kejda Gjermani

Within less than 48 hours, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has labored to not only quasi-politely dismiss and marginalize Michael Totten’s reports from Kosovo in the comments section of LittleGreenFootballs.com (lest his positive, or at least non hysterical message gains any traction with that crowd and prompts readers to question Spencer’s colorful portrayal of Kosovars as Talibans) but to also attack Glenn Reynolds for allegedly being a cultural relativist for even conceiving of non-Muslim religious activists possibly resorting to violence as a means to further their agendas given the right priming conditions— conditions which Reynolds himself ultimately traces back to the intellectual impotence of nothing but, wait for it, cultural relativism.

Spencer furiously denies any motivational or thematic connection between these attacks on the two prominent bloggers, yet his arguments are complementary sides of the same coin.

Totten is targeted as an impressionable naïve traveler who fails to recognize what Spencer believes to be the inescapable ideological vacuum within any not-yet-radical Muslim community —communities which, according to Spencer, despite any and all current pretensions of liberalism and Westophilia, are essentially unstable oxymoronic applications of Islam which are doomed to gravitate toward radicalism in the long run. Kosovo can be no exception, since a perpetual state of jihad is an inexorable core tenet of Islam. Here I will not dwell on the theological subtleties he employs to reach his conclusion (which I suspect Mr. Spencer would accuse me of misrepresenting anyway), but the bottom line of his dissatisfaction with Totten’s reports seems to boil down to Totten’s portrayal of Kosovars as an overall peaceful, progressive, Westward-oriented, and culturally modern people. To suggest that a population with a Muslim background could merit such positive characterizations (without casting apocalyptic doubts on their future sustainability) is heresy!

It is also heresy to point out, like Glenn Reynolds has, that not only Islam but also other world religions, notably Judaism and Christianity, are quite capable of fostering religious supremacy, bigotry, and violence. According to Mr. Spencer, Judeo-Christianity is fundamentally and qualitatively superior to Islam, so to suggest that there could be a degenerative least-common-denominator into which all three religions could converge under any conditions, reeks of cultural relativism, because it denies Judeo-Christianity’s irreducible superiority.

I can understand some of Spencer’s bias given that he is a Christian, but his position implies an astounding selective repression of common historical facts about Christianity in the West. As one of Instapundit’s readers put it so succinctly:

Robert Spencer writes:

“The most virulently fundamentalist Christian can find no sanction in Jesus’ teaching for the murder of his opponents any more than anyone else can.”

Maybe no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, but I would certainly hope that someone might remember it.

And lest we treat the Inquisition like a distant fairytale, let’s not forget about the very real death-threats and hysterical rallies originating in the US over John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” remark just a few decades ago.

But Spencer either doesn’t want to hear it or doesn’t care: Muslims cannot and must not under any circumstances be elevated in anyone’s consideration as civilized, peaceful, modern people, or as allies. Likewise, adherents of Judeo-Christianity cannot be conceived to ever, even under a real or hypothetical incentive structure that consistently rewards violence, lower themselves to acts of hateful aggression: That arena is supposed to be the theological monopoly of the “Religion Of Peace”.

Is it any wonder then, that Spencer’s own religious supremacy reflexively aligns him with “the Christian side” against “the Muslim side” on any complex world conflict where such dichotomy arises, without any internal need prompting him to further scrutinize the objective merits of the contenders or to study the contextual historical scenario of the conflicts? Sometimes even when the conflicts cannot be cogently redrawn along religious lines, as is the case in Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, Spencer seems to have no problem connecting nonexistent dots anyway and ultimately tracing the villains back to his favorite arch-enemy: Islam.

I find it deliciously ironic that Spencer’s official stance on Kosovo today is one of severe ‘skepticism’ and concern over Kosovar Albanians’ vulnerability to cooptation by Islamist extremists, while he himself has been indisputably co-opted by noxious and extremist Serbian Nationalist elements through his involvement with The American Council for Kosovo. From their website:

The American Council for Kosovo is an activity of Squire Sanders Public Advocacy, LLC, and Global Strategic Communications Group, which are registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as agents for the Serbian National Council of Kosovo and Metohija. Additional information with respect to this matter is on file with the Foreign Agents Registration Unit of the Department of Justice in Washington DC.

The deceptively named American Council for Kosovo is in fact a front group for the Serbian National Council of Kosovo and Metohija, whose president for Northern Kosovo Milan Ivanovic was arrested by the UN administration (he took his sweet time to turn himself in after initially going into hiding) on charges of attempted murder (later dropped) and of leading a violent demonstration, during which at least one hand-grenade was thrown at the police (Ivanovic has been personally accused of this act but evidence was inconclusive for a conviction, hence the dropped charge of attempted murder), and 22 mainly Polish peacekeepers were injured. This is not the only violent demonstration Ivanovic is accused of orchestrating and his organized outbursts have even claimed innocent lives.

Ivanovic said he had not decided yet whether to surrender. “I’ll make a decision after talking seriously with lawyers and members of my family,” he said. He denied having been handed the indictment on 30 July, claiming he had instead been requested either to turn himself in voluntarily and “be locked up in the Mitrovica prison” or become a fugitive from what he termed “an Albanian” law.

Ivanovic described the attempt to arrest him as politically motivated and accused UNMIK head Michael Steiner of seeking to force the local Serb population to flee ahead of the 26 October local elections. He warned that the move to arrest to him “could have very grave consequences” and invited the authorities in Belgrade “to join in and discuss these things.” UNMIK dismissed Ivanovic’s claims.

The Serb National Council for northern Kosovo is believed to be actively supporting a vigilante organization known as the Bridge Watchers. The group operates in the industrial town of Mitrovica, divided between an ethnic Albanian south and a predominantly Serb north. It takes its name from the three bridges dividing the city. Despite UN efforts to make them hand over their weapons and submit to UN authority, the Bridge Watchers continue to act as a sort of parallel police force, claiming to be simply protecting local Serbs from ethnic Albanian attacks.

International officials accuse the group and local Serb leaders of staging seemingly spontaneous violent riots against UN police and NATO peacekeepers, but Serb leaders in northern Kosovo have rejected the accusation.

Opposing UN policies in Kosovo, the Serb leaders in Mitrovica prefer to keep close ties with Belgrade rather than recognize UNMIK’s authority in many areas.

Mr. Ivanovic is a hard-line nationalist by anyone’s definition, a staunch supporter of the neo-fascist Serbian Radical Party— an ultra-nationalists‘ melting crackpot of greater scale and proportion than even its name suggests. For starters, the Party organized the recent rallies in Serbia to protest Radovan Karadzic’s arrest, in which the same Ivanovic was visibly involved:

“Karadzic’s arrest means a termination of the Republic of Srpska and a kidnapping of Kosovo,” said Milan Ivanovic. “We shall never surrender neither the Republic of Srpska, Serbia, nor Kosovo. We shall never surrender Radovan,” Ivanovic exclaimed and called on the citizens to “fight the oppressors”.

Again, this is from a key leader of the Serbian group which the so-called American Council for Kosovo serves as a front for, in which Robert Spencer is an advisory board member.

The Serbian Radical Party (Srpska Radikalna Stranka — SRS) is an extremely right-wing nationalist organization. Its founder and director Vojislav Šešelj is currently on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes and atrocities against humanity.

… … … … … … … … … …

The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party — which once advocated union with Russia and Belarus, and is now tied for first place with a coalition of more pro-Western parties — could enter government alongside nationalist Prime Minister Kostunica’s DSS.

Enough about Ivanovic as I am sure you already get the picture.

At this point I hope you will all excuse my cynicism regarding Robert Spencer’s contorted statements of how no Christian exegete has ever interpreted any genocidal passages in the Bible as a plan for action against unbelievers in his own day, while he openly associates himself with violent genocide proponents/deniers (the typical combination) funded and supported by a Christian Orthodox bishop.

By law, all items distributed by the American Council for Kosovo include the following disclaimer:

“The American Council for Kosovo is an activity of Squire Sanders Public Advocacy, LLC, and Global Strategic Communications Group, which are registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as agents for the Serbian National Council of Kosovo and Metohija, under the spiritual guidance of His Grace, Bishop ARTEMIJE of Ras and Prizren. Additional information with respect to this matter is on file with the Foreign Agents Registration Unit of the Department of Justice in Washington DC.”

…though the Bishop’s involvement is curiously absent from the otherwise identical notice posted on their website. Let’s close in on the rest of Spencer’s circle at the American Council for Kosovo. One of Spencer’s friends whom he has appointed as Advisory Board member at JihadWatch, stands out in particular. He is James/Jim George Jatras, Director of the American Council for Kosovo:

Where do I begin? In the above-linked-at comment, Spencer smugly concludes that I must have no idea who Walter Duranty is just because I found absurd his parallel between the Stalin idolizing propagandist and genocide denier (whose revisionist bile and fabrications were not sufficiently challenged due to overall lack of access to information/data regarding the USSR) and Michael Totten (who reports from a freely-accessible country with a strong international presence, and which anyone, including Spencer, can visit to see things for oneself).

Since he fancies himself a far more knowledgeable expert of Ukrainian issues than myself, I would assume Robert Spencer ought to know who Viktor Yanukovych is, but for those who do not know, he can be safely characterized as one of Vladimir Putin’s cronies: a Russian proxy embedded within the Ukrainian political system, a corrupt politician, often at the center of electoral-fraud scandals.

James Jatras is not only a proxy of the Serbian lobby, which he openly admits, but also, quite interestingly (though not the least surprisingly), a veritable stooge of Russian interests:

On March 7, 2003 Alex Kiselev signed a written agreement with the law firm of Venable, LLP to provide PR services to Mr. Yanukovych for the amount of $100,000. Alex Kiselev signed and initialed every page of the agreement acting on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych. On behalf of Venable the agreement was signed by Mr. Patrick E. O’Donnell and Mr. James George Jatras. Venable, LLP is tasked to work on improving the image of Viktor Yanukovych personally, rather than the country of Ukraine. Additional amounts are as follows:

- $ 10,000 for arranging a formal state dinner at the US Department of State, “with a success fee of an additional $ 10,000 if these efforts are successful.”

- $ 20,000 for arranging a personal meeting at the White House between Prime Minister Yanukovych and President Bush, “with a success fee of $ 60,000 to be paid if these efforts are successful.”

Since Mr. Yanukovych did not come to Washington in the spring of 2003 as was originally planned, no fees were paid for arranging a State Department dinner or a White House meeting.

… According to the US Department of Justice Supplemental Statement (Form CRM-154) for a six month period ending November 30, 2003, filed by Venable LLP, it is reported on page 5 that Alex Kiselev paid the total amount of $ 341,396.50 for providing PR services on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych. …beginning in March 2003, Kiselev paid $1,041,396.50 to PR firms in Washington to promote Viktor Yanukovych?! So do we have now to accept as true that it was a charitable contribution out of his own pocket?

Venable LLP is also the lobbying firm for The American Council for Kosovo, again through James Jatras.

James Jatras, a Greek American with a long history of pro-Eastern Orthodox and anti-Muslim activism in the Balkans and formerly senior foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee (1998-2002), signed the agreement between Venable and the Serbian National Council of Kosova and Metohija (SNV) on March 22, 2006. Far from being a neutral observer of Balkan affairs, Jatras is a paid lobbyist for the SNV and an Orthodox extremist with deep connections to the Serbian Unity Congress. Jatras has written numerous articles aimed at warning Americans about the threat of militant Islam in Southeast Europe, several of which appear in a magazine connected to Bosnian Serb groups called Chronicles. (Srdja Trifkovic, Chronicles’ foreign affairs editor, was formerly the official spokesperson for indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic.) Jatras was the keynote speaker at the 9th Serbian Unity Congress (more on that later) and a principal in the Serbian-American-made propaganda film, “Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War” produced and directed by George Bogdanich. And during the Kosova war, it was Jatras, in his capacity as senior foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, who commissioned and circulated Yossef Bodansky’s outrageously spurious report in the House and Senate, entitled “Kosova: The U.S. and Iran’s New Balkan Front,” (more on the Iranian conspiracy theories later) in an effort to block Congressional support for intervention in Serbia’s war against Kosova and to discredit the Kosova Liberation Army.

From another source linked to above:

Chronicles magazine, which published Jatras’ rantings, is also cited by the film in support of its claim that Muslims blew up their own people to arouse international sympathy, and it is connected not only directly to the Bosnian Serbs but also to white Southern neo-Confederacy groups. The magazine is run by Thomas Fleming, who rose to prominence as an opponent of school desegregation in Rockford, Ill., and became a founding member of the right-wing neo-Confederacy group League of the South. Its foreign-affairs editor is Srdja Trifkovic, formerly the official spokesman for Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb government and a source whom Mr. Bogdanich interviewed for the film but apparently decided not to use.

But we heard enough about the man; let’s now hear from him. Some interesting positions of James Jatras, mostly in his own words:

James Jatras, former assistant to Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) and onetime defense witness for Slobodan Milosevic (that’s right), now directs the American Council for Kosovo, a pro-Belgrade lobbying organization based in Washington. In an interview with the Belgrade daily Vecernje novosti, Jatras advises the Serbian government to be “more aggressive” and to demonstrate its “seriousness” by holding military exercises along the border with Kosovo.

“Serbia must stop looking at the United States as if they rule the world, what they like to present themselves as,” Jatras said in an interview.

Thursday for Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti, when asked “how could Serbia be more aggressive without ending up even worse?”

“They are but a paper tiger, stop treating them with the respect they do not deserve,” Jatras said of the United States.

“Washington behaves in this way because it believes Serbia will have to accept the fact that part of its territory is to be snatched from it,” he went on, stressing that Belgrade “had to make it clear that this was not the case.”

He added that Serbia should “in no case join NATO,” (why, that would not go smoothly with Jatras’ master, Vladimir Putin, who is known to go as far as to invade and dismember former Soviet satellite countries in order to prevent them from joining NATO) and that the European Union “should be told clearly that Belgrade will suspend its association process in case Brussels decides to recognize Kosovo.”

“I suggest that, come November, half a million people show up on the streets of Belgrade, protesting the U.S. policy. As a demonstration of how serious Serbia is, holding a military exercise in the south of the country should also be considered,” Jatras concluded.

Did I mention that James Jatras is Robert Spencer’s friend, a JihadWatch board member, but first and foremost, an American citizen, who has worked for the US government as the aide of disgraced Senator Larry Craig, but also as senior foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee? We are all too familiar with the self-loathing fetishes of Leftist moonbats, and the kind of seething anti-Americanism they are known to proudly sport. Let’s not, however, confuse suicidal cultural masochists with malicious puppets of foreign interests: the former tend to blow off their self-hatred in the “we” form, whereas stooges like Jatras make calculated statements in the “they” form. Jatras is not a self-hater because he doesn’t even identify with America, which is how he manages to come so close to advocating attacks on US embassies (which Serbs, catching Jatras’ drift, did indeed perpetrate) without batting an eye. He’s just a puppet of anti-American foreign interests to which he has whored out his citizenship.

Some more interesting tidbits before we get into what you must really be itching to hear about, his defense of Milosevic:

At the Serbian Unity Congress convention in 1998, Jatras is quoted as saying that the U.S. government’s policy toward Serbia “was criminal and worthy of being brought to The Hague tribunal.”

In other articles, he downplayed Serbian massacres (he even placed the word in quotation marks) in Bosnia, claimed Bosnian Muslims killed their own people as a ploy to gain Western support and referred to “the myth of Muslims as innocent victims in the [Bosnian] war.” (source: The Washington Times, 7/20/97, page B5)

Milosevic’s witness James Jatras publicly denounced former governor and one-time Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis as a “pagan” because, while Dukakis is from a Greek Orthodox family, Dukakis’s wife Kitty (daughter of Harry Ellis Dickson, violinist and long-time conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra) is Jewish.

And this provides a smooth segue way into his disgraceful appearance in Milosevic’s trial, because the prosecutors felt the obscure need to make an issue out of the witness’ bigotry, as if his factual testimony alone were not outrageous enough to discredit him.

The entire convoluted transcript of the hearing can be found here, but its gist is neatly summarized by Slobo’s fans at Slobodan-Milosevic.org. The claims made by Jatras are truly incredible and I urge everyone to scrutinize them. It all starts coming together now:

Jatras gave evidence about what was contained in U.S. Congressional reports regarding the Iranian arms transfers to Bosnia and Croatia.

Jatras pointed out that the congressional reports had concluded that the Clinton Administration’s scheme to facilitate weapons transfers from Iran to Croatia and on to Bosnia was a secret program, and that the administration had attempted to cover it up.

Interestingly, almost all of these insane conspiratorial reports which Jatras refers to as objective US inside sources happen to be either planted personally by Jatras himself, or originating from the office of Larry Craig, for whom Jatras was working as an aide. In any case, they are not US intelligence reports.

According to Jatras, the Clinton Administration had decided to attack F.R. Yugoslavia long before the indictment against Milosevic alleges that any “joint criminal enterprise” was afoot.

To bear this out, Jatras pointed to a report that he had written in August of 1998 predicting that Clinton would attack Yugoslavia over Kosovo (possibly because it was obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells what Slobodan was preparing to do in Kosovo?).

Jatras said that Racak was merely a trigger used by the Clinton Administration to launch its pre-planned attack against Yugoslavia.

He said that the occupation of Kosovo and the establishment of K-FOR had been planned out well before the bombing even started.

Oh boy…

Milosevic was just a pawn. The Clinton administration and other great conspiratorial powers set him up in order to cover up an arms trading intrigue. The Bosnians, of course, gracefully started killing themselves off to perfect the ploy and frame Milosevic. And the Racak massacre was a calculated self-inflicted “trigger” to get this whole party started.

Can you say crazy or just plain evil?

Jatras mentioned, as an interesting side note, a psy-ops campaign in the Krajina, where after Serbian radio facilities had been bombed, Croatian radio announcements were broadcast that instilled fear in the Serbian population and encouraged them flee from the territory.

Well, actually Mr. Jatras, on August 4, 1995, Milan Martic, the “president” of the “Republic of Serb Krajina” authorities, issued an order calling for the evacuation of all persons incapable of military service from the Knin, Benkovac, Obrovac, Drnis and Gracac municipalities. The decision indicated that the civilians should be evacuated toward Srb and Donji Lapac, with the U.N. base in Knin enlisted to assist with the evacuation. This account is corroborated by Milan Babic in his Hague trial. Segments of the Serbian press attacked Martic for ordering the evacuation and surrendering to Croatian forces without a fight. Others surmised that the Republic of Serb Krajina, Croatian and Serbian government authorities had reached an a priori agreement to surrender the area to Croatian government control.

The Croatian government actually encouraged Serbs to stay, albeit perhaps not entirely sincerely. A good number would have eventually had to leave in any case, because they were residing in the houses of the 200,000 Croatians ethnically cleansed from Krajina in 1992, who would be returning to claim their real estate.

In the specific context of the refugee debate, the Krajina exodus bears comparison with the flight of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which brought about the creation of Israel. Croatia claims —as has Israel since 1948— that the refugees fled largely of their own accord, under instructions from their leadership, and those specific instructions have been well documented in both cases. Here is a detailed account of the Serbo-Croatian war for those interested.

And if anyone is wondering about the making of such a monster—how a Christian Taliban (in both ideology and appearance) came to be,— let’s just say the apple did not fall far from the tree (that wasn’t really supposed to rhyme). Stella Jatras, the late mother of James Jatras, is a regular contributor to the anti-Semitic conspiracist site, AntiWar.org. Her consistent praise of Karadzic, sympathy for Milosevic, denial of Srebrenica’s massacre, and overall lunatic revisionism on all Serb-related fronts, can give some insight into the kind of posion James must have been inhaling throughout his entire life. It is worth mentioning that the Jatrases are ethnic Greeks although they sound like Serbian ultra-nationalists. Stella and James Jatras are perfect illustrative examples of how ethnic chauvinism and religious supremacy can be converted into one another almost costlessly in the minds of the demented, to ultimately fuel a very predictable kind of hatred.

All that’s been unearthed here is but a whiff of James Jatras’ dark closet, some very rudimentary fragments of which my husband revealed on Robert Spencer’s site two nights ago through the comment sections, and which curiously elicited a defensive volley of verbiage from Jatras himself within just a few hours!

This man is obviously a professional propagandist, and I am actually surprised that the Internet is not littered with comprehensive reports on his outrageous activities and statements. I have no interest in rebutting his entire piece line by line as there are too many lies to counter and it would feel as futile as Don Quixote’s fight against windmills.

Certain claims I cannot ignore, however, nor should I be tempted to, as their debunking is a mere matter of correcting blatant revisionism by providing historical sources. I invite readers to check out his post linked-to-above so that they know exactly what we are talking about:

Regarding Jatras’ “point #1” (i.e. his allusions to jihadist Kosovar violence): So far I have noticed that the claims of Kirk in Human Events regarding attacks in Gjilan, Ferizaj and Prizren seem to all be echoes of earlier attacks by Serbs and then some retaliatory attacks by Kosovars, but as to shooting at KFOR or UNMIK, there is nothing to suggest that these attacks are anything more than old wives’ tales. Searching the KFOR site and The Daily Falcon, which is the newspaper published for the servicemen at Camp Bondsteel, there appears no mention of any hostilities by the Kosovars.

Jatras says:

Neither do the laptop bombadiers in the media, who, as they had in Bosnia, cheered on the great Kosovo “humanitarian intervention” in 1999 to stop a nonexistent “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians — and which led directly to the real eradication of more than two-thirds of the Serbian community, as well as Roma (mostly Muslim, some Orthodox Christian), Croats (Roman Catholic), Jews, and others.

It doesn’t seem like James Jatras ever met a psychopathic butcher he didn’t like, and if he came to Milosevic’s defense, equivocating Karadzic’s crimes is small potatoes by comparison. As is genocide denial… What nonexistent “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians? This one listed in great detail at the State Department? Was this also part of the propaganda and misinformation that the US planted to frame Jatras’ poor friend Slobo?

With all due respect to Mr. Jatras, well actually, wait a minute, I don’t owe him any respect; but I lived in Tirana in 1999 myself and I saw with my own eyes floods of people hosted in soccer stadiums, ravaged families, torn families, everyone looking for each others’ lost relatives feared dead.

And should Jatras contend that I along with everyone who was in Albania at the time were simply collectively hallucinating (nothing would surprise me from him at this point), the stranding of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Albania and Macedonia for months at a time is an indisputable fact, and I can assure Mr. Jatras that these people were not out on a picnic. Insisting otherwise is no less absurd than proposing that September 11th, 2001, was as Photoshop job.

Oh, and I almost forgot: His statistics about the displaced Serbs (who left un-coerced, which Jatras conveniently neglects to mention) are also bogus.

Jatras further says:

With respect to the nexus in Kosovo between religion (Muslim vs. Christian) and nationalism (Albanian vs. Serb), it needs to be kept in mind that sharia rule under the Ottoman Empire ended less than a century ago, in 1912, when Kosovo (then known as “Old Serbia”) was liberated during the First Balkan War. For the preceding centuries, Muslim Albanians had migrated at will over the mountains from Albania, taking over land from which Serbs had fled from reprisals following repeated unsuccessful revolts against the Ottoman caliphate. (That the Serbs are the original inhabitants in Kosovo is beyond question. There are no pre-Ottoman Albanian structures, no Albanian toponyms. There is not even an Albanian word for Kosovo itself, the Albanian term “Kosova” being merely their rendering of the Serbian name — derived from kos, “blackbird,” in reference to the famous 1389 battle — much as we English-speakers call München “Munich” and Roma “Rome.”)

Just like this British historian (one out of many) who is about to prove the factual content of every single clause of Jatras’ every sentence to be false, I do not even think ‘who got there first’ is particularly relevant in deciding the rights and wrongs of any present-day political situation. Still, since James decided to go there:

This is one of the chapters of Noel Malcolm’s excellent and extensively sourced book, Kosovo, a Short History, and it pertains to the issue of “origins”.

The previous chapter brought the political history (if such it may be called) of Kosovo up to the final period of Bulgarian-Macedonian rule, before the territory of Tsar Samuel was reconquered by the Byzantine Emperor Basil the Bulgar-slayer. Medieval Kosovo is often referred to in general terms as ‘the cradle of the Serbs’, as if it had been a Serb heartland from the outset; but the reality was rather different. Just over 800 years separate the arrival of the Serbs in the Balkans in the seventh century from the final Ottoman conquest in the 1450s: out of those eight centuries, Kosovo was Serb-ruled for only the last two-and-a-half— less than one-third of the entire period. Bulgarian khans or tsars held Kosovo from the 850s until the early eleventh century, and Byzantine Emperors until the final decades of the twelfth.

All the toponyms which Jatras has been desperately looking to avoid so he could claim their nonexistence are carefully referenced in the source I just provided. The Albanian name for Kosovo was Dardania, by the way, derived from the Illyrian/proto-Albanian word for “pear” because of the many pear trees lining the region. There is at least one town named Dardha (pear) in Albania today.

Is Kosovo Serbia?

Kosovo remained Ottoman territory until it was conquered by Serbian forces in 1912. Serbs would say “liberated”; but even their own estimates put the Orthodox Serb population at less than 25%. The majority population was Albanian, and did not welcome Serb rule, so “conquered” seems the right word.

So taking into account Albanians’ indigenousness in Kosovo which is exhaustively sourced by Malcolm in his book, as well as by many other independent historians, we have a classic case of projection with respect to Jatras’ statement:

By the same token, the prevailing attitude among Kosovo’s Albanian Muslims, even those with no discernable Islamic piety, reflects their sense of entitlement to mastery over the land and its rayah (essentially, “cattle”) inhabitants. The attitude is hardly different from those of Turks with respect to Constantinople or Arabs to “al-Quds,” no matter how secular they may be: “we” conquered it, and no one can take it back from us.

My husband has politely informed Spencer of Jatras’ connections, the most problematic of which (his defense of Milosevic) Spencer was already aware of and unbothered by. What seems to bother Spencer, to the point of calling me an Islamist agent in so many words (wait for him to squeal “Where did I write that!” as he’s been in a very literalist mood lately but doesn’t want to either eat his words or regurgitate them, but will instead twist them like worms), is when I set the historical record straight about what has happened in the Balkans, and when I condemned the genocide deniers/sympathizers and self-styled holy warriors with, among other epithets, those which the most flaming ones of them proudly self-describe by. For those new to this blog, I am a non-religious Albanian soon-to-be American, and my father is what Mr. Jatras would call a pagan, for coming from an Eastern Orthodox family himself and marrying my mother, a woman of Jewish descent.

I find it curious that Robert Spencer closes both eyes to atrocities perpetrated by Serbs, because if it had only been Muslims on their receiving end, I would understand now (but of course not justify it) seeing where Spencer is coming from, but Serbs have also fought against Croats and Slovenes, —their fellow Christians. Yet he takes the side of the most historically aggressive representatives of his own “Religion of Peace”. Could it be that while ostensibly and quite irrationally denying any violence within Christianity, he in fact secretly and perhaps subconsciously admires violent Christianity?

What more is there to say? Going back full circle: no, I do not find any traces of relativism in Glenn Reynolds’ innocuous statement, nor does the outlook that produced his comment represent any hindrance to the West’s response to the jihadist threat. Quite on the contrary, the most significant drag in formulating an appropriate response stems from those Judeo-Christian supremacists such as Spencer and his associates, who discredit the anti-jihadist movement by overstating its scope (uncontrollably screeching “jihad!” even where none is involved) and who, most importantly, see the fight against jihad as a holy war of their own, in which they end up allying with the devil to further their agendas.

With his honest and balanced dispatches from the Balkans, Michael Totten has crippled these Serbian Nationalist front groups’ propaganda efforts just like he had earlier, along with fellow independent journalist Michael Yon, exposed the mainstream media’s coverage of the Iraq war for the self-serving doom-and-gloom panic mongering that it deliberately was.

Spencer has made various controversial and often self-mitigated pronouncements regarding Kosovo, but when push comes to shove his on-record position is one of only-time-will-tell “skepticism”. I don’t know how aggressively lobbying on behalf of an organization which seeks to revoke Kosovo’s independence thus leaving Kosovar Albanians with no time at all to “tell” Spencer or the rest of the world anything, is possibly reconcilable with self-declared above-the-fray skepticism, but I have a more pressing question for Spencer:

What is his position on the Iraq war, and particularly on US efforts to build a stable, peaceful, and pluralistic democracy in the heart of the Middle East? If the prospect of sound self-governance by the liberal if not nominal Muslims of Kosovo is such a tough sell for Spencer, then what about the future of Iraq, whose population is incomparably more religiously conservative? Doesn’t intellectual and moral consistency dictate that if Spencer would rather see Kosovars “kept in check” by Serbia’s violent hand, then he should also prefer the “stability” that Sadam Hussein provided Iraqis with to the fanciful prospect of freeing them so they can govern themselves? Doesn’t intellectual and moral consistency dictate that Spencer be rallying it up with Moveon.org over the almost certainly wasteful loss of American lives and resources into as inherently unachievable, or failing that, at least unsustainable, a project as a Muslim democracy? Consistency is a beautiful thing but some of us feel no ethical imperative to be bound by it.

If there is a case to be made against Kosovo’s independence without resorting to revisionism, genocide denial, propaganda, and association with neo-fascist elements, then why doesn’t Spencer make it?

The question is, at this point, purely rhetorical.

Drudge loves Peggy, no doubt about it: it’s how I got to this latest piece of hers. I found it to be a bit scattered, but overall right on target.

The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born.

The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

Yes indeed. Republicans are dying. Do not resuscitate. This current crop of Republicans need to run through the last disgraceful phases of their political life-cycle and fade away into oblivion. Maybe it will take the messianic reign of lord Obama to inspire/infuse new blood into the Republican party. But perhaps we are past that now: after all, we all know what happened to the last tide of then(1994)-new blood. The established pockets of corruption traditionally entrenched within the Republican party are there ready to suck in any new blood like leeches. There are simply too many tempting avenues for scoring cheap short-termistic political points through mere pandering.

Does the Republican party have too much baggage? Republicans should take a hint from what happened to Canada’s conservatives.

For now, I am ambivalently cheering for Obama out of spite: Republicans need to hit rock bottom in order to digest the reality check of their compounded failures.

Money doesn’t buy happiness, of course, but it ought to remove almost all obstacles lying in its way. $109 million, 109 million opportunities for yourself, yet all you care about are the so many “opportunities” you have for our country? All these glorious master-plans you have concocted for us little people… Who the hell do you think you are Hillary, and what’s your excuse for being so miserable despite your riches?

Donate all your millions first, before you get the audacity to screech for raising taxes for the rest of us. What a contemptible hypocritical corrupt power-hungry Leftist byotch! It makes me feel all toasty inside to know that despite your fortune, you always have been and always will be miserable! That’s the story of your life.

I generally prefer not to discuss current events because once they are no longer current time tends to compoundingly discount the relevance of any analysis. Whatever the transformations currently happening to America’s political and cultural landscape, they may indeed be much clearer in hindsight, or perhaps they may never be fully understood but will certainly be rationalized one way or another. However, I believe we are living on the brink of history in the making, and despite the irreducible uncertainty the future holds, I feel compelled to examine certain unignorable developments and make my intuitions public before this is all said and done.

That the GOP is experiencing an identity crisis is self-evident. Over the last few months the Party cannibalized herself as one candidate after another tripped over their feet trying to climb on top of her shaky political pedestal. No one can convincingly say what Republican voters were looking for, but it looks like they’ve pretty much found it in John McCain. Yet there is restiveness in the so-called Conservative sector, once hailed as the core ideological constituency of the Right but now finding itself marginalized to the peripheries of the Republican Party whose political headquarters are being rebuilt Leftwards.

Most Conservative icons have criticized the Arizona senator’s controversial Conservative credentials, but some have gone as far as to boycott the Party over his nomination, thus translating the Conservative tantrum into a highly leveraged ultimatum. So Conservatives indeed feel betrayed by the GOP’s leadership, but have they ever scrutinized their faithfulness to their own principles? Most importantly, have they ever coherently articulated what Conservative principles represent? …Can they?

The notion of a true Conservative is farcically reinvented off the lips of the latest self-proclaimed specimen, the same way that “change” has become a politically prostituted mantra for the Left, devoid of any substance or pretense there of. Yet change can ultimately be anything as far as it concerns Leftist “revolutionaries” preaching overhaul for the sake of overhaul: nothing ideologically uncomfortable about it. While the Party of perpetual “progressive” reform need not be bothered with the intricacies of a well-defined “change”, conserving for the sake of conservation just doesn’t fly as well. The future is necessarily open-ended, but anyone invested in preserving valuable aspects of a supposedly cherished past, needs to be able to coherently pinpoint what is worth preserving (or even restoring, if the past is remote enough) and fluently articulate why.

The Conservative movement has lost its conceptual anchor into the essence of America’s greatness and is now consumed with merely conserving the Conservative movement. The future has historically been unkind to reactionaries; hence Conservatives’ recent fall from relevance should come as no surprise.

Vague platitudes of a Conservative golden era are ludicrous. There was never such a thing as a glorious way of life Americans ought to have preserved like an insect captured in the amber of history. Allusions to morally airbrushed “good old days” founded in sound “Judeo-Christian” values, are nothing but blurred second-hand collective hallucinations of a generation disastrously failing to grasp modern-day ideological challenges. Before ever being entitled to a dominant voice in this country’s future, Conservatives must sever their romantic attachment to this idealized fabricated past.

American traditions and lifestyles always have and always will be in a vector of flux and experimentation toward modernity, nevertheless there is but one timeless political recipe for human flourishing and sustained prosperity. America’s founders lucidly articulated it throughout the Founding Documents and successfully embedded it in the early American institutions. This philosophical prescription for maximal individual liberty and limited government has transcended centuries as America’s fundamental nature.

The fathers of Modern American Conservatism, —Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and William Buckley Jr. — are now all dead. Instead of bemoaning their loss as tragically irreplaceable and praying in vain for a second coming, Conservatives should rather adjust their intellectual-heritage rearview mirror until the founders of the American Nation come into clear sharp focus. Ironic corruption of language notwithstanding, it is Liberalism, as it is classically understood, which Conservatives better get in the business of conserving, and in so doing, shed some ideological deadweight of their own.

The inane treatment of Judeo-Christianity as a proxy for Western Civilization should be first to go. Tying the moral foundations of the American Nation with cultural archetypes of prehistoric Biblical Jews, or with those of devout Europeans emulating them is beyond preposterous. The dogmatic authoritarianism inherent in Judeo-Christianity and its ubiquitous tradition of framing Man as a wretched sinful creature fallen from grace since birth, are antithetical to a societal infrastructure built around individual freedom and dignity.

Judeo-Christianity provides no coherent moral justification for why humankind deserves freedom. The Bible presents men and women as fundamentally unequal and incorrigibly flawed, offhandedly condones slavery, and offers absolute monarchy as the sacrosanct form of government prescribed by God.

The reference to the Creator in the Declaration of Independence by the agnostic Thomas Jefferson was appropriate in so far as it further legitimized the proverbial self-evident ethical truths through divine pedigree. Free enterprise is not the coincidental result of collective utility maximization by enlightened social engineers. It is rather the inescapable byproduct of the enshrinement of individual rights, which are inalienable and morally absolute, and which deserve philosophical protection as such. The loose mention of a non-denominational Creator served as a preliminary philosophical shield to the indisputability of natural rights, through appealing to Colonialists’ lowest common moral denominator. Nothing in the founding documents insinuates individual rights to be derivatives of religious dogma.

The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. —John Adams

Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together. —James Madison

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than on our opinions in physics and geometry….The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. —Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson casually defines the protection of citizens and their property from violence and coercion to be the only legitimate domain of government intervention. Such negative rights retain their internal consistency even when scaled up for large complex communities and are always straight-forward to enforce.

Social Conservatives seeking to use government to legislate morality to the masses have been poisoning the well for too long by destroying the practical and ideological consistency of negative rights, thus opening the door to government cooptation by demagogues with various agendas and malignant vested interests from all sides of the political spectrum. Their religiously inspired diatribes against full American freedoms continue to alienate people in droves, particularly because most Americans today are rightfully oversensitive regarding matters of conscience, religion, social institutions, and private behavior.

Until it extirpates this reactionary faction, the Conservative movement’s defense of free markets is hopelessly doomed to intellectual impotence. Economic self-reliance through free proud enterprise on the one hand, but moral paternalism in matters confined to the bedroom or uterus on the other hand, are ideologically irreconcilable positions both of which sound hypocritical when preached by the same political voice.

Judeo-Christian values are neither sufficient nor even necessary components of Americanism. Conservatives with a mental blind spot to this reality often try to justify the institutionalization of Judeo-Christianity by deeming it to be the only absolute ideological shelter for freedom. Plato alone has spoken with more clarity and conviction about absolute transcendental values such as Justice and Goodness, than there can be found throughout the entire Bible. Natural Law has enjoyed a fertile tradition in Western Philosophy, originated by Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, carried out by the Stoics, and augmented by many great thinkers up to the present day.

Not only is the firm binding of natural law with religion not dictated by any philosophical necessity, it is also a strategically self-defeating position for Conservatives to take in the ongoing battle for hearts and minds. I cannot think of a more dangerous proposition for the future of American cultural institutions than the prospect that their desirability and justification depend on the dubious existence of Abraham’s God.

Didn’t Conservatives get the memo? Organized religion is dying at a head-spinning rate not only in this country but across the Western world at large. The proverbial writing on the wall could be seen for decades but reality checks for Social Conservatives come with a time lag. The Religious Right has been running on very tenacious fumes against the demographic tide of events thanks in part to the politically convenient tendency of its base to vote as a block on pet issues. The levels of bi-partisan pandering Social Conservatives have been so successful at eliciting are no longer sustainable.

Religion never provided a particularly satisfying map of reality for its subscribers, its main redeeming quality being community building. Churchgoing used to be an essential social event for millions of interaction-starved Americans. It is no longer so. With new lanes being added to the information highway, increasing opportunities for remote social networking, and free access to scientific materials, the Church cannot compete with the levels of social sophistication Americans can afford today.

That is not to say that the new generation is ready to live without dogma, but innovative outlets for mysticism cannot be so blunt. The religionists’ children are rejecting their parents’ stale Judeo-Christianity only to fall prey to “secular” new-age religions. These new cultural bubbles can be harder to burst than any organized religion because proud “secularists” aren’t self-aware of their own mysticism and violently resist being called out on it. Reality escape-routes unmarked by 6000-year-old Earths and Noah’s Arks are necessarily and conveniently more elusive.

If religion ever was the opiate of the masses, the “secular” Left is crack cocaine for the ideologically-vulnerable apostates of organized religion. New generations are rightfully laughing Judeo-Christian superstitions out of the cultural scene but they are also inevitably rejecting economic freedom and limited government by association. The Religious Right nearly drowned the baby in the filthy bathwater, and the “secular” Left is ready to throw both out altogether.

Many politically savvy thumbs sticking in the wind are becoming increasingly sensitive to the “spiritual hunger” aspect of the Zeitgeist. Al Gore and Barack Obama are already successfully exploiting it to bootstrap their own glamorous personality cults. Feminism, radical environmentalism, animal rights, anti-globalization, anti-Americanism, global-warming hysteria, and all-encompassing Statism, are all very much in vogue.

Such developments should attune Conservatives to the cultural necessities of our times: Americans are experimenting with many templates of morality, but they would rather succumb to nihilism or moral relativism than return to the “caves”. Judeo-Christianity is going to die and unless Conservatives genuinely reform their movement to develop enticing modern ideological propositions, the Left will undoubtedly win by default and civilization will eventually succumb to the void.

The name Conservatism should be second to go. Its taxonomic subtleties don’t scale well across long periods of time, as the ideological reference-point can be easily lost with such a term that doesn’t directly mention what it is conserving, but only that it is conserving it. This inherent vaguery is a potential melting crack pot for multidenominational reactionaries. The mental associations are not sexy either in a world where Saudi Arabia can uncontroversially claim conservative as a label.

Liberalism may be a suitable replacement, though I am not convinced that enough Conservatives can be de-programmed to call themselves Liberals. It would certainly be an interesting exercise in ideological self-assertion, forcing a public fight over what true
classical Liberalism stands for and who deserves to call oneself a Liberal. Putting the Left on the defensive would allow today’s Conservatives to define the boundaries for tomorrow’s battles.

The political stance on abortion must also go, and I don’t care about the order in which it does. There are intelligent arguments on both sides of the fence, but in so far as the anti-abortion cause is religiously inspired, it is lost. What is worse, Conservatives are earning compounded surpluses in the hypocrisy department with shady political maneuvers. Nowhere does the Constitution address the issue of abortion, therefore the Tenth Amendment spells eloquent doom for universal anti-abortion activists.

Lacking the kind of demographic muscles needed to erect a Constitutional Amendment for their pet issue, Social Conservatives have repeatedly tried to pressure the Supreme Court as a backdoor toward their ends. Conservatives who spiritedly call out Democrats on their big-government insinuations that flagrantly violate the Tenth Amendment need to look in the mirror first. There will never be popular support for an anti-abortion amendment, and such political middle-ground is clearly unsustainable. Abortion is an unfortunate issue for Conservatives to tarnish their reputation as committed defenders of the Constitution.

Indeed, the sanctity of life is a moral topic deserving great political attention. Just as there may genuinely remain environmental issues to be dealt with collectively after, but not until, full property rights are conferred and enforced, there may remain hues of uncertainty to be settled politically (preferably at the state level), as to when an embryo becomes a fetus and when a fetus becomes a person. However, this issue is hardly worth political priority until full Constitutional rights are restored for non-uterus-bound citizens, or at least a general contraception/early-abortion alternative is secured for all women. In any case, no cause is worth the corruption of Constitutional channels.

The Conservative position on immigration is also overdue for a makeover. The need for secure borders is a forgone assumption, but most other problems and solutions are open-ended and politically challenging. Under current arrangements, illegal immigrants largely subsidize a thoroughly corrupt Mexican government, thus indirectly supporting a vicious cycle: destructive socialist policies keep Mexico’s economy paralyzed? in turn further promoting more employment-seeking adventures across the border, illegal as they may be.

America has invaluable leverage for pressuring Mexico’s government to reform. Here the proverbial stick is not as effective as a politically-engineered carrot. Offering realistic guest-worker programs contingent upon Mexico meeting well-defined political milestones could spark an economic renaissance in Mexico and greatly discount economic despair as a motive for illegal immigration. Only the cream of the crop of today’s Conservatives could devise a coherent platform of concentrated classically liberal measures for Mexico.

Other pro-capitalist templates for combating the roots of illegal immigration are available. Undocumented workers are attractive to American employers because as a source of labor, they exhibit none of the problematic rigidities of the domestic labor pool: they don’t unionize, are not owed social security or other benefits (though millions of undocumented workers pay payroll taxes), absorb below-minimum-wage positions, cannot sue the employer over work-related damages, and provide much needed overall labor liquidity. Undocumented workers are meeting a demand which only a free labor market could satisfy by itself. Domestic reforms dismantling labor’s internal barriers are not only very American per se, but would also essentially dissolve the comparative advantage illegal immigrants currently enjoy.

Such proactive solutions require leadership of a level currently unknown in the Republican mainstream. Even if immigration reform was successfully implemented, it would not be more than a patch-up solution. Establishing a principle of citizenship is the only final answer.

The Constitution outlines an implosion-proof political structure that leaves virtually no channels for economic parasitism by any groups or individuals. To an American it isn’t supposed to matter much who her fellow citizens are, their culture, customs, race, or language, because the only way they can legitimately affect her is through voluntary trade and cooperation, which are mutually beneficial by definition. The corruption of American institutions through collectivist meddling in general and welfare statism in particular, turns every American into a partial slave to his fellow citizens. It is not fashionable to resent such arrangement, but who wants the collective pool of burden to grow!

Nativist immigration policies chronologically coincide with the rise of the Welfare State, and it’s more than a coincidence. Aspiring Americans get the short end of the stick, which is regretful because Americanism by choice is nobler than merely by birth. Immigrating to America is itself a highly entrepreneurial act and the Right should welcome the many millions of worthy aspiring Americans from across the world.

The Left has astutely cultivated the victimization, destructive subsidization, and exploitation of every under-class into a politically lucrative enterprise. When Democrats screech out for unconditional amnesty for the twelve million illegal aliens, don’t think they mean it! The Left needs this permanent under-class, but such outbursts earn sympathy from minorities and force Republicans into the ugly nativist role, a role which many have displayed great natural talent for.

Republicans cannot afford to be the anti-immigration Party, and no, insincerely squealing against “only anti-illegal immigration” will not cut it if they are clearly unwilling to propose any practical comprehensive channels for foreigners to legally settle into the country. Until these rhetorical attitudes are drastically revamped, the Left will win over new Americans by default.

Full circle back to the current election…

The brief taste of political relevance Conservatives enjoyed with Reagan may be ironically preventing them from moving forward. Their movement seems tragically chained to the past by a delusion of bygone grandeur. For many, the Reagan administration symbolized the triumph of unadulterated Conservative principles, a golden era they nostalgically evoke the return of, a glorious legacy not to be compromised. Having once had it their way, the prospect of ideological reformation is now an unpalatable concession, akin to selling out.

I don’t think most Conservatives have an appreciation for the unrepeatable constellation of historic factors, all the odd stars perfectly aligning to momentarily propel their movement into prominence in the 1980s. As powerful as Reagan’s appeal was, the 1980 election was equal parts a rejection of Nixon and Carter’s destructive Statism. Even the supposedly untainted Conservative principles applied during the Reagan years were largely divergent elements cobbled together in an unstable mandate. Those times will be no more because they can be no more. “True Conservative” principles are too ideologically explosive for any Republican executive to handle consistently (e.g. the failed Contract with America). Something’s got to give. Unless they are content with perpetual political scraps from their own Party (i.e McCain), Conservatives need to challenge the nation to get excited about freedom, individualism, entrepreneurship, the dignity of self-reliance, and the future.

Instead Conservatives have chosen to overextend their electoral reach with a stubborn bluff from which their movement can only emerge bankrupt. The tantrum is unsatisfiable because their demands are helplessly incoherent. They won’t get their cake and are politically starving no matter how obnoxiously they want to both have it and eat it: low taxes but swelling deficits, individual freedoms but moral paternalism, limited government but virtuous intervention, a strong military but the practical equivalent of suicide in the battle of ideas, attacking terrorists overseas but refusing to coherently communicate how and why.

Amidst resentment and overall stupefaction, the cracking noises from the GOP’s ideological foundations are only growing louder as the November presidential election
approaches. One thing is clear in this mess: The GOP is haphazardly dragging her dirty political consciousness further to the Left with her candidate choice, despite sparkling friction from the Conservative base.

Judging by the relatively far-fetched and often unrelated or even contradictory explanations presented over the course of the nomination race, I suspect that even pundits are just as confused as everyone else by what’s happening. Some rightfully emphasize that none of the more ideologically appealing candidates were interesting or inspiring; others contend that the leadership has fallen out of touch with the base over core issues, and cite the Republican record on spending in recent years to corroborate their case.

This macro-scale shift to the Left cannot be blamed on any renegade political actor usurping the electoral spotlight. Unhappy Conservatives are giving too much credit for the Republican fallout to John McCain, the reheated electoral left-over from the year-2000 campaign. The nodes on the cause-effect chain can be elusive to trace, but we must not get this pivotal issue backwards: The shift to the Left has already happened in America, the witnessed reflection into politics being a mere manifestation of this deeper sadder reality.

Eight years of vacant moral leadership, blurred sense of purpose, and compromised half-measures by the Bush administration have left America confused, disheartened, and hyperpolarized. Republicans simultaneously slammed on the gas and the brakes of their political machine through very curvy terrain.

A politically expedient immigration plan was unconvincingly presented and quickly swept under the carpet. The administration halfheartedly fought Democrats over spending, only to outdo them with reckless Republican deficits, thus absurdly equivocating the principles behind the otherwise greatly beneficial tax cuts.

George W. Bush sleepwalked through his ambitious mandate in the Middle East, unwilling or unable to communicate to the nation the strategic purpose of the fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond, failing to defend the many successes, and refusing to provide assertive counter-narratives to the “Bush lied, people died” hysterics. Unchallenged, the Left has monopolized nearly all communication channels assessing the progress of American foreign policy and has compoundingly invested its political comeback in the debasement of America’s efforts abroad in general, and in the framing of Iraq’s war as a meaningless failure in particular.

And now a giant sore economic boil is imminently bursting, leaving many intelligent and well-meaning Americans confused, vulnerable, and in many cases helpless, from their last taste of this politically constipated Republican rule. The themes running through Barack Obama’s campaign are evidence to how attuned the vanguard Left is to this moral void. Soothing tales of collectivist utopias are creeping into the nation’s cultural subconsciousness through the widening cracks of the Republican status-quo.

America is the world’s highest-philosophical-maintenance institutional experiment, but many of her traditional defenders are unworthy of today’s challenges. The problem is that the Right doesn’t know what it is fighting for. Freedom isn’t free, but until freedom is even properly understood, let alone defended, America’s future is in urgent jeopardy.

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The burqa/headscarf is unfortunately becoming so ubiquitous in the US and Canada that I am starting to get tired of getting outraged every single time I spot it. Being rightfully appalled can be exhausting business. I have noticed that I tend to bypass the appropriate emotional response (read: repulsion) increasingly more often lately, and instead just silently proceed to make more additions to my deportation wish list. I do make a distinction between the headscarf and the full-body burqa: while the former is simply disgraceful, the latter should be illegal to wear in public because it covers the face along with enough loose space in the gut area for its wearer to comfortably squeeze in a concealed weapon, which has practical ramifications for criminals on the run and would-be bank robbers. I also differentiate with respect to the nuances of disgust reserved for the spread of the burqa in Western Europe on the one hand, and across the US, Canada, and Australia on the other hand. How so?

In short, Europe stands for nothing today. Ethnic nation-states in the Old West are crumbling under a scary moral void. Too many European citizens have no such thing as a comprehensive set of principles behind their various national identities; all they’ve got is their measly “Germanness”, “Frenchness”, “Britishness” or whatnot to hold on to, all of which are rapidly eroding in the acid of Cultural Relativism that the Europeans have been so eager and so stupid to embrace. Europe cannot stomach the backwardness of its Muslim Immigrants, yet it has no new cultural home to offer them. The French want their immigrants to participate in their “Frenchness” somehow, but “Frenchness” is inherited, it can never be acquired. Of course Sarkozy’s father was an outcast because of his Hungarian last name. There’s no way to get around it: Europe never forgets anyone’s ethnic otherness. The Holocaust is very eloquent on this subject. The European identity is ethnic/tribal at its core, not ideological. Europe has no moral shelter to offer even its natives, let alone its immigrants. Now that the church has been dethroned from its historic position of moral hegemony, the Old Continent is mutely agonizing like a giant headless cockroach awaiting slow starvation.

So what do Europeans have to say to burqa wearers, or to female circumcisers for that matter? “That’s not how we dress/do things over here”?? Europeans have no firm conceptions of why some of their traditions and practices are objectively superior to the new influx from the savage world. That’s because the moral foundation of their civilization has been a mix of Christian theology (now increasingly irrelevant) and pure ethnocentricity (Cultural Relativism has rendered ethnocentric supremacism impotent.) So I do not feel as strongly about defiant burqa-girls in Western Europe. I think it would be in their best interest to renounce their backward ways and embrace the less backward European tradition, but there is no guarantee that they will be fully accepted by the nationalistic establishment even if they do so. Furthermore, because Europe advertises its culture as a nationalistic dogma instead of a cogent moral argument, of course there will be poor penetration within the Muslims: they’ve already got their own big fat dogma! It also makes European culture less appealing to defend, thus I am less outraged when I spot burqa-girls flagrantly defacing it.

By contrast, the former British colonies are not ethnic nation-states. They are essentially membership clubs, the belonging to which is based on clear ideological commitments. For example, the national identity of the US is nothing but a moral profile outlining American values. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t like freedom, then why do you come to the US? If you don’t value self-realization, then what are you doing here? The burqa/headscarf and the subjugation they imply, of women to men, flies in the face of the American tradition of freedom and equal moral entitlement of genders. It is an uncompromising culture of freedom that is supposed to make Americans “American”. A lot of Americans themselves skimp on the “all men created equal” statement here and there but at least pay it due lip service. Now if someone so visibly refuses to partake in that culture, then what is supposed to make them “American”? They clearly do not belong in the country.

Until the day comes when national boarders are obsolete and anyone can freely go/live anywhere, the US will have to discriminate between peoples of the world with respect to their admissibility into the country. Because America is not an ethnic nation-state, it would be racist to select on the basis of ethnicity (the Diversity Visa Lottery is preposterous, I know). All that remains then is ideology, and to a lesser degree, skills. Being American should not be a matter of arbitrary background circumstance, though it’s sadly becoming more and more fashionable for disaffected youths born in the country to view it as such, but rather a conscious choice affirming one’s embrace of a free life and the moral entitlements and responsibilities stemming from such a life. A similar argument goes for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand too, although these countries’ values are perhaps less explicitly outlined than in the case of the US constitution.

Back to Europe… Well you know what they say: there’s eurotrash and then there’s Euro Trash. I must confess that for practical reasons I consider most if not all of Europe to sadly be trash. I exhausted a good part of this topic above, but there’s plenty more to be said. Western Europe is plagued by rampant political correctness and a Fallen Empire syndrome: what a deadly mix!

The former is manifested in hasty and pathetic attempts by Western European countries to reinvent their identities within a contrived culture-neutral neo-leftist frame. This confirms my gut suspicion that neo-leftism is the popular fallback of the half-assed apostates of Christianity. The nanny state is increasingly replacing the Church’s traditional social and moral functions in European countries.

The latter haunts the conscience of nearly every European but they are so repressed about it that you wouldn’t have a clue, and probably wouldn’t believe me unless you have some first-hand experience with Eurobullshit. We need to remember that it’s been less than a century since the Old West gave up its imperialist status quo. The European public image has been drastically sanitized since, maybe too drastically in too short a time for the European sub-consciousness to catch up. The Old Continent is torn between its emerging proletarian neo-leftist identity and the burning shame from its fall from relevance.

A lot of it is sublimated into raw leftist strife, but underneath it all Europe deeply resents not being a superpower: it misses its old glory, its colonies. This motivation can be traced back to the foreign-policy inclinations of the former superpowers: they keep supporting their traditional vassals of centuries ago, no matter how much the dynamics have changed since. The European stance on Serbia is a prime example of this. There is no practical reason to maintain these positions because the imperialist intentions of exerting influence by proxy in any given region have almost completely disappeared. Europe sticks to its antiquated positions/favoritisms for nothing but continuity’s sake. It’s a way of reassuring itself that it’s still relevant in the world, that it can still decide the fate of smaller nations, that it has the cojones to stick with its stubborn and arbitrary nation-building (or “nation-destroying”) initiatives without being made to flinch (take that, America!). Defiance and rage against the US are outlets for Europe’s sour grapes mentality.

The bottom line: a growing army of passive-aggressive drones in chronic collective-identity crisis. So many European youths feel helpless, have no light in their eyes, lack an ideological back-spine, and are brainwashed into State worshiping. Europeans like thinking of themselves as cultured, tolerant (I’m probably repeating myself, since the conventional wisdom maintains that cultured and tolerant are synonyms) worldly, classy (unlike those brute Americans) and progressive. Yet they obsess over petty nonsense like attacks on the purity of their languages (the perpetrator being of course, English), commonly despise avant-garde entrepreneurship as plebeian vulgarity, but value the study of dead languages, equation-drilling, their regional literature, and pedantic academicism.

The truth is that while Europe has been the driving locomotive of Western Civilization for the major part of the latter’s existence, the amazing philosophical evolutions (revolutions?) it spurred have found room to burst only at the seams of Europe’s backwardness: the greatest most progressive ideas originating from the Old West were only grudgingly and halfassedly accepted by the establishment, often not before vigorous attempts to repress them. Socrates got served, the Athenians almost had Aristotle’s head on a plate, Galileo was persecuted, Roger Bacon was imprisoned, John Locke was intimidated, and the list goes on and on. The revolutionary thinkers who carried the Western tradition forward were very often cutting against the grain of their own culture, and to this day Europe has yet to fully accept and adopt what its best minds have suggested it…

There are meaningful historical reasons for Europe’s decline:

Under many variations, ethnocentrism has been ubiquitous in the world since the dawn of civilization: to view essential aspects of oneself as derivative from the collective, and not only to prefer one’s way but also to believe it best, superior to all others, has been the natural status quo for millennia. Collectivism and the firm binding of the good with one’s own way through refusing to see a distinction between the two, form the very cultural fabric of ethnic nation-states.

Greek philosophers were the first men we know to address the problem of ethnocentrism. Distinctions between the good and one’s own, between nature and convention, between the just and the legal, are signs of this movement of thought. They related the good to the fulfillment of the whole potential of the individual and were aware that few, if any, of the nations of men had ways that allowed such fulfillment. They were open to the good: They used reason to seek it out. They wanted to be able to evaluate themselves and others, and thus had to use objective standards to judge even their own practices (The Closing of the American Mind, p.36-38).

Fast forwarding to the end of Medievalism: Eventually, in as far as curious objectivity was applied to the physical world through the quest for finding new and better ways, the advancements in technical knowledge/engineering yielded such staggering tangible results to the benefit of the population at large, that most of Europe eventually embraced this new fashion of thinking (to the Church’s great discontent). It even became fashionable for wannabe enlightened monarchs to cultivate their own “pet scientist-philosophers” in their courts.

The application of rational objectivity began to spread by contagion to the conception of human nature. The fruits of this experiment were thornier than their counterparts from the natural sciences: The emergence of Man in a new ethical frame that conceived of him as a free rational agent with inalienable moral entitlements derived from his very nature as Man, with his life, liberty, and happiness as paramount values, was an ideological stab to the heart of the collectivist ethnic nation-state and its authoritarian power structure. So this re-conception of ethics on a universal individualist plane appeared as a threat to ethnocentric culture and a dangerous uprooting charm. Politically, the development of these heretical ideas inspired administrative transformations: mostly on an incremental basis but also through bloody revolutions.

There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science. —Anton Chekhov

Yet friction from Europe’s tribalistic heritage was enormous, and certainly sufficient to considerably damp down the impact of these advancements. Compromises with the establishment were sought, which often corrupted the essence of the proposed liberal values for the sake of preserving social order: at the end of the day, it meant conserving the status quo. This resistance to liberalism didn’t originate from just the ruling class with indeed much to lose, but sadly from Europe’s masses, the people with so much to gain from the adoption of liberty. National identity pointed them back to the passionate attachment to their backward provincial ways, and away from Western Thought that was trying to liberate them from it. Science chipped away at subjectivity while universal individualist ethics eroded collectivist chauvinism, but the bulk of Europe’s population could not bring itself to turn the page.

The people of Europe had been split into fanatic religious sects at constant war, isolated in ethnic factions, pitted against one-another for centuries, trapped in puddles of provincialism infested by superstition. Embracing liberalism meant giving up the immense pride derived from the minuscule differences between their customs and myths and those of their neighbors. It meant giving up their collectivist identity with its perks of supremacist righteousness and feelings of superiority, which they had no felt need to objectively scrutinize.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance. —Edmund Burke

Countries like England and Holland did experiment with economic freedom with great results, but only on a fickle discretionary basis and for purely consequentalist reasons. They never accepted the moral foundations that supported free markets and free societies. Lacking firm ideological and institutional commitments to universal individual rights, these countries’ courtship of these classical Man-centric values did not stand the test of time. In short, Europe had too much cultural baggage for liberalism. The seeds of freedom had to be sewn somewhere else.

After failed efforts to conceive a new society within sterile Europe, the United States of America was Western Thought’s first love child: a country conceived in liberty, self-determination, and natural law. Indeed its initial political formulation wasn’t flawless: slavery and deficient political rights for women were ugly incumbents. Yet it’s noteworthy that the Founding Fathers never specifically banned women from voting (but the states did have that power and used it). Many of them were also vocal abolitionists throughout their lives. Most importantly, they drafted the Constitution as such an airtight argument for freedom, that with time it successfully transcended all the leftover debris of Old-Continent tyranny that were originally incorporated into the country for the sake of expediency.

Whereas Europe’s kinky flirts with freedom revolved around the whim of kings, queens, political coalitions, or angry mobs, America’s political heart was always in the right place. While Europe was still consumed by its ethnic wars well into the 20^th century, America was busy getting prosperous through commerce. While Europe was preparing to butcher millions of its own, America was becoming a new home to thousands every year, affording them opportunities never dreamt of in their old caste-based societies.

So I wonder: How and why exactly did Europe pull a 180 and get so hard-core PC in just a matter of decades? What catalyzed such a drastic surgical detachment from the tribalist undertones of its billennial culture? I think it was mostly an implosion:

Marxism had an ideological binding-effect on European nations. It consolidated international strife into an intra-national dynamic of factions in perpetual state of struggle and discontent: from the old chauvinistic rivalry between the English and the French, to the more intimate strife between the proletariat and the capitalist class within the same country. Note that the Marxist paradigm is an elaboration of, and qualitatively self-similar to, the original looser frame of ethnic hatred: Like the latter, it interprets people in collectivist and dehumanizing terms (ethnicity/class), pits them against one another over grievances that are often imaginary or second-hand (differences in language, religion, regional customs/ transient relative positions in the labor market), and encourages them to consume their hatred (ethnic cleansing/class war). Marxism was a fractal refinement of ethnic conflict. It brought it physically closer to the hearts of those who had craved hatred for its own sake throughout generations. It was a deeper more “nuanced” drill into the same direction of projecting hatred inwards.

One important trait Marxism doesn’t share with classical ethnic chauvinism is self-victimization. While ethnocentrism is usually supremacist, leftist strife acknowledges a deep inferiority complex through its obsession with the “exploitation” of the proletariat. This partly explains why Marxism spread like fire in Russia and Eastern and Southern Europe: these nations were history’s rejects. Their powerful western neighbors, the Ottoman Empire, and other transient regional superpowers had brutalized and humiliated them for centuries, often using them as pawns in international conflicts. Marxist self-victimization appealed to these countries’ peoples on a very intimate level.

By contrast, Western Europe was too invested in its grandeur to immediately succumb to an oppressed and dispossessed internal vision of self. But around the middle of the 20^th century, the Old West woke up with a terrible headache from a hangover of lost greatness. A few remarkable things had happened:

First of all, Europe practically lost all its colonies. So used were the former colonial powers to their international limbs, that they now felt stubbed. This certainly took a toll on their collective self-esteem.

Most importantly, America saved Western countries’ political viability after both world wars, besides saving their people directly from annihilation. The vital and one-sided reliance on their unrefined transatlantic cousin was hard to swallow. Both wars had exploded from the major western powers’ unhinged ambitions of world dominance. By the end of WW2 all the initial contenders were devastated to the bone, while the insolent fresh-faced USA emerged as the world’s supreme powerhouse among international applause for saving Europe from its homicidal lunacy.

The pendulum of power had permanently shifted away from the Old West, but the humiliation did not end there. Adding insult to injury, as a bonus consequence of their insane war, the USSR was now looming like a giant cancerous nuclear mole right on Europe’s ass. The troubled continent had to look for protection from the US, again.

The prospect of being vassals to the US does things to the sub-consciousness of a people whose primary notion of identity for centuries had revolved around the ability to dictate submission to the rest of the world. If you’re an American who has felt European rancor first-hand, this might explain a few things.

When the USSR ceased to be a threat, there was a collective sigh of relief, and then just silence. With no imminent threats to distract it, Europe could finally fully digest the realization that it was now irreversibly light years behind America in just about every relevant respect. Europe did slowly succumb to a pitiful internal vision of self, which allowed socialism to creep in like a virus since the end of WW2, infiltrating the severely weakened immune defenses of national pride.

Cultural relativism is an interesting highlight of Europe’s neo-leftist disposition. It’s generally touted as an umbrella to shield the mostly Muslim immigrants from cultural scrutiny but in reality it’s largely a self-serving construct. It serves as an outlet for collective neurosis through escaping reality. In a world dominated by pragmatic dynamics, led by the USA and trailed by Eastern emerging powers, Europe has to face everyday what it missed out on: the opportunity to be relevant, to institutionally embrace freedom and capitalism, and to be part of the new world order. Instead the Old West cannibalized itself in the last century over supremacist collectivist dogmas, and its consolation is now that at least its priorities were correct: that everything is culturally relative, that there is no such thing as natural law dictating what man’s proper mode of existence is, that one politico-economic system is just as good as any other (so long as a collective culture backs it) no matter the objective level of prosperity it can afford its people (so Europeans can proudly refuse to acknowledge failure or back away from their societal miscarriages), that cultural hegemony is the only thing worth fighting for (as Europe bloodily did), and that their delusions are not deluded so long as they really believe in them.

The core of Europeans’ passion for political correctness lies in their psychological need of escaping reality, of hiding their heads in the sand, of refusing to acknowledge their ideological failures, and avoiding a much needed objective assessment of their situation.

Many Europeans channel these repressed needs by applying the sophistry of cultural relativism to their backward immigrants, but in reality it’s themselves they are trying to shield and protect. When the clash between their culture and the savage Islamic influx is truly shocking, most Europeans don’t know how to react. They are so invested in cultural relativism that the path of least resistance is often appeasement.

There is a minority that fights fire with fire, counteracting the pressure from Islam with ultra-nationalistic fascist sentiment. This goes to illustrate that the European identity is mostly tribal/ethnic, not ideological, and that itself is the main problem. The most popular defense of Europe’s identity comes as a resurgence of ethnic chauvinism, rather than as an appeal to Western values on their own objective merits.

Europe needs a reality check urgently. It is sad to see America becoming more and more like Europe, when Europe is the one in dire need of looking up to what America is supposed to be. Rome didn’t fall in a day, but until Europe acknowledges its big problem, gives up the stubborn and irrational attachment to its collectivist ways, and develops enough character to challenge radical Islam on a moral plane, it will remain the sick man of the Free World.

This Islamic garment is a symbol of oppression for a variety of mostly straightforward reasons, and as such is morally reprehensible. What I just said shouldn’t be controversial at all to uphold, were it not for the raging storm of political correctness that has swept through our culture lately. So I’m not going to go through the ideological reasons of how and why the burqa sucks, because to me it’s so trivial. Plus I don’t even invoke any of that when I see a woman in a burqa: the silent war of cultures, the sickening throwback to a savage era of female subjugation to men, etc…

My immediate reaction whenever I spot a burqa-girl comes as an intimate shocking shudder down my spine. What an awkward and obtrusive image! It ironically generates the same kind of silent tension in common social settings as would the presence of a completely naked person sitting next to you in the bus, or nonchalantly walking into a bank or a restaurant. Whether one tries to mingle with people while naked or hermetically covered from head to toe, the absurd contrast to what everyone else is wearing screams out loud at the crucial subtleties we commonly take for granted in the spectrum of human relations.

Our clothes keep us warm, seal off and protect our most delicate body parts from environmental damage, conceal our genitals and breasts so as to not rub in everyone’s faces our crude sexual attractiveness or lack there of, but also allow us to invent a public identity through a personalized combination of designs, accessories, and possibly symbols and slogans. So our clothes enhance our individuality but it’s our face that forms the epicenter of our public persona: we cognitively anchor the representation of anyone’s personality to that person’s unique facial features. We are prone to recognize faces out of random mixes of objects whenever possible, so our brains are primed for this. The face takes up a disproportionately large chunk of our mental representation of human beings as children’s drawings illustrate. Eye contact and facial expressions play an important role in how we relate to others during conversations and even in how we warm up to strangers.

The burqa is a monstrous device because it effectively shaves off the most basic and accessible dimension of identity: the face. The woman hiding underneath it is dehumanized in the eyes of her beholders: she is reduced to an indeterminate object of unspecified form and features. A horse can hide under a burqa, or a clown, or a monkey, or a coffin, or a thief, or a ghost, or a mummy, or a giant noodle. Not only does the burqa erase the wearer’s most human and recognizable trait, her face, but it also razes to the ground all other external symbols of identity: the distinctive combinations of clothing items, styles, accessories, jewelry… How can I empathize with someone in a burqa if all I see is a monochromatic faceless shapeless bag? The wearer is practically interchangeable with anyone else wearing a burqa. There is zero potential for deep or subtle interpersonal relations through such a discomforting barrier. It’s alienating on a human level to be the one who is fully open and exposed while your interlocutor is hiding behind an opaque veil. This makes any kind of interaction with burqa-girls intrinsically awkward.

The burqa has also a perverse X factor that elicits laser beams out of my eyes: in its underhanded way it’s so self-righteously slutty! The entire rationale for it is that you need to fully cover every square inch of your face and body lest any random male passerby spontaneously breaks down and starts to compulsively drool (or worse) all over you. You really think you’re such hot shit that it’s a big deal whether anyone can see your hair or face? Nobody cares! Nobody is aroused by your stupid hair! Get over it!

Not only does wearing the burqa imply an overly sexualized sense of self, but it also silently spells out a moral condemnation of all women who do not abide by such anal and self-demeaning standards of “modesty”. If your standards for socially proper attire are so far removed from the norm that you are practically living in your own moral planet, and that planet is collapsing into a black hole under its own warped field of ‘judgmentality’, there will be a point where the principle of general cultural relativity breaks down in an asymmetric fashion: As viewed from the PC planet, your style is kind of weird and no fun, but perfectly equivalent to whatever they’ve got over there, and while they might not go out of their way to bond with you for one politically correct excuse or another, you must surely be a great girl underneath and the PC crowd wishes you all the best in life. As viewed from your planet, however, the PC crowd is roaming with lustful immodest sluts who seduce every male in their path by flaunting their face and hair, and are so going to burn in hell for it.

The burqa is eerie, alienating, judgmental, demeaning, dehumanizing, and is calling everyone else a whore.