Byzantine Blog

Clinton Administration Allied With Radical Islam

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, reveals The Real 9/11 Conspiracy, the one that is still among the best guarded Washington secrets, which none of the greatest timely-accurate-around-the-world-news-at-your-doorstep media outlets would touch with a 10 foot pole:

“First, the Clinton Administration was allied with radical Islam when it waged a war on Serbia and the CIA was ordered to assist the Kosovo Liberation Army, some of whose members were trained by bin Laden. That was 1999-two years before 9/11.

One of many stories about such connections appeared in the Washington Times on May 4, 1999, and was written by Jerry Seper. It said, ‘Some members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has financed its war effort through the sale of heroin, were trained in terrorist camps run by international fugitive Osama bin Laden...the KLA members, embraced by the Clinton administration in NATO's...bombing campaign to bring Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the bargaining table, were trained in secret camps in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere, according to newly obtained intelligence reports...The reports said bin Laden's organization, known as al-Qaeda, has both trained and financially supported the KLA. Many border crossings into Kosovo by ‘foreign fighters’ also have been documented and include veterans of the militant group Islamic Jihad from Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan.’

CIA Was Actively Assisting Bin Laden Network

After 9/11, Dollars for Terror, an important book by Swiss television journalist Richard Labeviere, explained in detail what was happening and how it had backfired on the U.S. He presented the thesis that the international Islamic networks linked to bin Laden were nurtured by elements of the U.S. intelligence community, especially during the Clinton years.

This is a shocking view, but it puts other developments in perspective, such as Clinton support for radical Muslims in such places as Kosovo and Bosnia before that. The book also suggests that Islamic radicals, who were present in the U.S. in the 1990s and training to fly aircraft, were tolerated because it was believed that they were going to hit targets in other countries, not the United States.

In other words, the CIA was actively assisting the bin Laden network, thinking it would serve U.S. interests.

(...)

Tragically, some of the misguided Clinton policies have been continued, such as the plan to create a Muslim state in Kosovo, to go along with the Muslim state already established with Iranian help in Bosnia. Bush should reverse course on that one-and fast.”

Entire article by Cliff Kincaid, The Real 9/11 Conspiracy

Stupid and Malevolent Policy in the Balkans

Srdja Trifkovic of The Chronicles Magazine, takes time to honor the brilliant man and one of the greatest thinkers of our time, Sir Alfred Sherman, who passed away on the 26th of August. Going over Sir Sherman's incredibly accurate and timely warnings about the gross Western miscalculations that led to a series of vicious wars in the Balkans, one can only be shocked to realize NOBODY LISTENED:

“In the last decade and a half of his life, Sherman was tireless in exposing the stupidity and malevolence of the Western policy in the Balkans. In 1994 we joined forces to establish The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, with the help of Michael Stenton and Ronald Hatchett, as a non-partisan research institute. In Sherman’s words, it was “designed to correct the current trend of public commentary, which tends, systematically, not to understand events but to construct a propagandistic version of Balkan rivalries, designed to facilitate the involvement of outside powers.” He chose the name of a great Western poet who gave his life in the fight to free Balkan peoples from Mohammedan rule, which reflected his belief in “the essential unity of our civilization, of which the Orthodox nations are an inseparable and essential ingredient.” As Michael Stenton wrote when Sherman retired as LBF Chairman in 2001:

Pick Your Blue-Eyed Boys

Alfred has known Yugoslavia since the days the Muslim ladies were still wearing veils. Long decades before the talk of a ‘clash of civilizations’ he understood the Balkans in this sense. Where the average journalist sees the wars in Yugoslavia through some ‘worst since World War Two’ lens, Alfred sees precise parallels: between the Anglo-French reluctance to recognize Nazi malice and ‘Western’ courtesies and concessions to Islam today; between the fashionable denunciation of the Czechs for their treatment of the Sudeten Germans in 1938 and the recent excoriation of the Serbs in Kosovo and elsewhere. First select your blue-eyed boys, then wait for the atrocities, then believe what your favorites say. He has seen it all before—whether on the winning or the losing side. It inspires him not with cynicism but with stoicism. He is filled with regret but not with bitterness.

Muslims Are Not Jews

As early as 1992, writing in London’s Jewish Chronicle, Sherman warned against the lapse of logic in confusing the present plight of Bosnian Muslims with that of European Jewry under Hitler. “It does us no good to claim a locus standi in every conflict be equating it with the Holocaust,” he wrote, “or when third parties in their own interests take the name of our martyrs in vain; Bosnia is not occupied Europe; the Muslims are not the Jews; the Serbs did not begin the civil war, but are predictably responding to a real threat”:

Some years ago, I, among others, warned that, whatever the logic of establishing Yugoslavia in the first place, any attempt at hurried dismemberment, particularly along Tito’s internal demarcation lines, would lead to armed conflict, self-intensifying bloodshed and floods of refugees . . . Since 1990, the independent Croatian leadership—with its extreme chauvinist and clericalist colouring—and the Bosnian Muslim leadership—seeking, in its Islamic fundamentalist programme, to put the clock back to Ottoman days—have threatened to turn the Serbs back into persecuted minorities… The Serbs cannot forget that, in living memory, the ‘Independent Croatian State,’ set up by Hitler in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, massacred close on half of the Serbian population—which was then the largest of the three communities in Bosnia—and as many Jews as it could  lay hands on . . . If there is any parallel with the Holocaust, it is the martyrdom of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, who account for a third of the Serbian nation.

Herr Hitler, a Reasonable Man

Both the Croatian and Muslim leaderships enjoy support and encouragement from Germany, Sherman noted, and from militantly Islamic governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, though Serbian refugees from Croatia and Bosnia outnumbered Croatian and Muslim refugees combined, the media virtually ignore them:

It reminds one of the late 1930’s, when most of the British press demonised the Czechs at Downing Streets behest, denouncing them as a threat to European peace and for ill-treating their peaceful German Sudetenland minority; ‘Herr’ Hitler, by contrast was held up as a reasonable man . . . It is almost invariably the innocent who suffer in war. But that does not equate them with  victims of the Holocaust, any more than being a Jew automatically qualifies one to pronounce on Yugoslavia. This needs to meet the Serbs’ legitimate claim to self-rule with religious and cultural freedoms, otherwise they will go on fighting even if the whole world is mobilised against them . . . This will not be achieved so long as European Community foreign policy is made in Bonn, whose agenda entails the reversal not only of Versailles, but also of the post-1945 settlement.

By the end of the decade Sherman saw the U.S. policy in the Balkans as inseparable from the drive for global hegemony. At a conference jointly organized by The Lord Byron Foundation and The Rockford Institute in 1997, he noted that the American century began with the Spanish-American War, and that it was ending with American penetration of the Balkans. But in contrast to the Spanish-American war, he argued, U.S. intervention in the Balkans has no clear strategic aim, but is allegedly a moral crusade on behalf of the “international community”:

Can't Sit on Bayonets

This begs many questions. First, is there such a thing as “the international community”? Do people in China, which accounts for a fifth of the world’s population, and the Buddhists, who account for another fifth—among others—really want the US and its client states to bomb the Serbs or Iraqis? And who exactly, and when, deputed the US to act on behalf of this “world community”? . . . Secondly, can the blunt weapon of force, of whose use US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boasted, balance conflicting and competing ethnic, religious, economic and political interactions over this wide and conflictive region? Can the US raise the expectations of the Albanians and Slav Moslems without affronting Macedonians, Greeks, Italians, Bulgars and Croats, as well as Serbs? . . . Thirdly, can force be a substitute for policy? It was a wise German who said that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. The same goes for gunships, the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. Bomb and rocket once, and it has an effect. But if the victim survives, the second bout is less effective, because the victim is learning to cope.

Almost a decade ago, well before Iraq and 9-11, Sherman saw that Washington had “set up the cornerstone of a European Islamistan in Bosnia and a Greater Albania, thus paving the way for further three-sided conflict between Moslems, Serbs and Croats in a bellum omnium contra omnes . . . Far from creating a new status quo it has simply intensified instability.” The U.S. may succeed in establishing its hegemony, in the Balkans-Danubia-Carpathia and elsewhere, “but it will also inherit long-standing ethno-religious conflicts and border disputes without the means for settling them.” His 1997 warning could have come from the pages of Chronicles:

Megalomania, a Form of Madness

At the time of writing, the USA is uniquely powerful. It will not always be so. In the course of time, Russia may gain its potential strength, and there is very little the USA can do about Chinese developments one way or the other . . . A law of history is that power tends to generate countervailing power. It is not for me to trace how this will come about. We can do little more than guard against arrogance and over-extension and minimize the pointless sacrifices they usually entail. I am proud to have taken part in this struggle, the struggle to bring the powerful to their senses before they plunge into reckless, ruthless folly. This struggle carries no guarantee of success, for it is the quest for sanity that epitomizes the struggle of suffering humanity throughout the ages.

His realization that Western intervention in Yugoslavia has come as a result of Western crisis and not of Balkan tragedies, stemmed directly from his key insight that Washington’s “Benevolent Global Hegemony” is based on a new cultural paradigm, materialistic and anti-traditional. This megalomania is a form of madness, he would add, and nothing new in world history (...)

Entire article by Srdja Trifkovic, Sir Alfred Sherman: Witness to a Century

Cartoons, in the order they are shown, by Serbian cartoonists: N.V., Predrag Koraksic - Corax and Nikola Otas