The defeat of Boris Tadić—amply and inappropriately assisted in the final stages of his campaign by the unspeakable, greasy-haired, gay-pride-marching U.S. ambassadress Mary Worlick—is certainly not the end of the global-imperial lethal grip on Serbia. It is to be hoped that is heralds the beginning of its end, but it certainly is the end of the “pro-Western” regime’s four-year-long exercise in self-abasement abroad and ruthless robbery at home.

The robbery included the regime’s theft of some hundreds of thousands of opposition votes following the parliamentary election on May 6. For reasons too technically complex to elucidate here—the seedy details are available to the curious (provided they are not faint of heart)—the ruling coalition of thieves and traitors seems poised to form the next government of this long-suffering land, regardless of Sunday’s presidential race upset. That upset was only made possible by the fact that in a two-candidate race it is much, much harder to engineer the wholesale robbery (nearing 7 percent of all votes cast) that we have witnessed in the multi-party ballot on May 6.

The yawning gap between Serbia’s popular will and Belgrade’s declared political outcome was brazenly glossed over in the Western media two weeks ago, however. The Leninist dictum that the morality of an act depends on the progressive status of its perpetrator still applies. In that spirit, Mr. Nikolić’s “ultranationalist” credentials of yore are routinely invoked as his defining trait of today. The comparison is somewhat strained, but just imagine our mainstream media insisting that a dubiously reconstructed “Anti-White, Foreign-Born Radical Leftist” was elected President in November 2008.

In media shorthand the accurate description of President-elect Nikolić would be “a pro-EU moderate nationalist.” In reality it is hard to be both, of course, but many decent Europeans are trying to square the circle, from Scotland and Catalonia to Poland and Slovakia. The only issue on which the winner draws the line is “Kosovo or Serbia?” Unlike his defeated opponent, he realizes that it is impossible to compromise on a first-order priority—the country’s territorial integrity—for the sake of what is a second-order objective of joining an organization. (Whether doing so is on offer, and whether it would confer any benefits on the joiner, is another issue—see my Endless Road interview on RT.) How many eminently clubbable “Europeans” would agree to cede their country’s current sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine, or South Tyrol, or Sudetenland, or Transylvania, or Schleswig-Holstein, or South Dobrudja, or Silesia (to name but a few of historically contentious provinces) for the sake of remaining in “Europe”?

Unsurprisingly, Nikolić’s reluctance to do so is deemed extremist and criminal. No Serb unashamed of his name and ancestors will ever be deemed clubbable by those hell-bent on turning Europe into Eurabia and morbidly celebrating the demographic demise of European Americans as a great and glorious historical milestone.

Nikolić is a simple man. He is not a statesman but a politician. He made a shrewd move by splitting away from Vojislav Šešelj and his cult known as the Serbian Radical Party, an increasingly irrelevant cabal of aficionados devoted to the hero-worshipping of their unjustly imprisoned Leader. Does he have the guts and the vision to become a true national leader? It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Suffice to say, he has the guts and stamina to withstand a race that was spectacularly dirty—thanks to Boris Tadić and his Democratic Party—even by the Third World standards.

The Nikolić victory will not alter the catastrophic position of Serbia in the short term, her headlong economic, social, and above all moral downfall engendered by the plutocratic rule of Tadić and his “pro-Western” camarilla. That victory nevertheless matters a great deal because it has fundamentally altered the balance of political power in Serbia. For years Tadić and his kitchen cabinet have run the entire gamut of state institutions. For years he has doubled, incredibly, in the self-excluding roles of the president of his Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DS) while performing the functions of the head of state, thus effectively controlling the DS-dominated government in brazen violation of his constitutional prerogatives as president. Such twining of functions used to be the hallmark of Tito, Stalin and Enver Hoxha. It is unknown to the world deemed democratic today.

In the end Tadić suffered the fate of Slobodan Milošević. He became cocky, arrogant, and convinced of his own infallability. Just like Milošević, he cut his presidential mandate short, convinced he could manipulate the electorate by controlled media and pliant institutions. Just like Milošević in the fall of 2000, he lost—only one-fifth of all eligible voters supported him—because Serbia is still a real country composed of real people... the efforts of Ms. Mary Worlick and her paymasters notwithstanding.

A year later, incredibly, Shahin is still in a Dubai prison, still without bail, trial, or conviction. On May 14 he started a hunger strike to protest the failure of the U.S. government to raise a public issue with UAE authorities over his treatment. “I have been imprisoned for over 1,500 days,” he said in a message from prison. “My government has never said a word about me publicly, because they don’t want to spoil their comfortable relationship [with the Emirates]. Meanwhile, they speak out for people in lots of other countries, like China. Do I have to die here before I get the same consideration? All I want is due process, to be able to post bail, see my family, and a fair chance to show in court that I am innocent. Is that too much for my government to ask?”

The background to the case is interesting and fairly straightforward. In the early 2000s the Emirates attracted thousands of foreign investors and experts of various profiles. Dubai one of seven states that make up the UAE experienced a real estate boom, with massive office towers, five-star hotels and premium retail space being built at staggering rates and—initially—commanding staggering prices. Over the ensuing six years, sand dunes were turned into a glittering metropolis, creating the world's tallest building and the biggest shopping mall.

It could not last, of course. The downturn started rapidly in 2008, and a year later one-half of all the UAE's construction projects, totaling almost $600 billion, were either on hold or cancelled, leaving unfinished roads and buildings along the edge of the desert. Yet when the crisis started four years ago Dubai’s autocratic rulers were loath to accept any share of the blame for the consequences. The foreigners were blamed for the mess and routinely presented as greedy and reckless predators.

Shahin, a former top executive of Deyaar Development, fell victim to the purge. He was arrested in March 2008 and accused of embezzling $100,000 from Deyaar, despite the company’s Board of Directors having approved this payment to Shahin as an incentive bonus. The expert auditor—a Dubai court-approved expert witness—informed the court in writing that all the transactions alleged by the prosecution to be unlawful were signed and approved by the Board of Directors and Chairman of Deyaar, reviewed by outside auditors, and subject to quarterly and annual audit since 2004 by Ernst & Young.

Shahin was nevertheless held in isolation for 13 months, denied U.S. consular assistance—in violation of international treaties to which the Emirates are a party—and while incommunicado allegedly tortured and forced to sign papers in Arabic he did not understand. After investigating one misdemeanor charge against Shahin for three years, it suddenly dawned on the prosecutor in early 2011—three years after the arrest!—that his court may not have jurisdiction over the case after all. He asked the judge to send the case back to the public prosecutor, and this maneuver enabled the prosecutor to retroactively apply a new, severe law that did not exist at the time of Shahin's arrest. He has twice been "released" on bail, and then immediately rearrested. Dozens of other non-American foreigners have been treated in a similar vein.

Although various charges have been filed against Shahin, no resolution of any of them has taken place. Some cases have even been dismissed on the eve of the scheduled trial, just when the accused was prepared to present his defense to the claims against him. Shahin has had over 200 court hearings, yet only 17 of them lasted longer than three minutes; the longest was over in a mere 40 minutes.

The U.S. government has failed to support Shahin strongly and effectively. The State Department has sent several formal Diplomatic Notes expressing concerns about Shahin's treatment but they remain unanswered.  His case has been raised with UAE officials by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her visit in January 2011 and by other American diplomats, but to no effect. The State Department has yet to make a public statement about Shahin’s predicament, however. This is in marked contrast to the case of three American hikers who strayed into Iran, or that of a Soviet-born seafood merchant and naturalized American who was released from Russian jail after Mrs. Clinton made a direct appeal to her Russian colleague Sergei Lavrov. Paradoxically, the U.S. government has taken far keener interest in the legal problems of two foreigners—Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia and Liu Xiaobo in China—than in the ongoing predicament of one of its citizens.

Dubai’s ruling Al Maktoums control an ostensibly U.S.-friendly, economically weakened and politically fragile Middle Eastern autocracy which needs robust encouragement from Washington to stop victimization of foreigners—including Americans—by manipulating judicial processes. America cannot and should not try to effect regime changes in the Middle East. Washington has all kinds of political and economic tools at its disposal, however, to make their governments more observant of the rule of law. An unambiguous public expression of concern by the Secretary of State about the specific case of Zack Shahin would be a commendable first step.

So should they be killed? The thought is tempting and rather appealing, the imagination runs pleasingly wild. On reflection it has to be rejected. Provided we accept the morally necessary assumption that for all their sulphurically scented traits, the Bankers are “humans,” we cannot escape the Raskolnikov dilemma.

The Russians are the last civilized nation to take literature as seriously as life, and they will be the last to subject that heritage to the deconstructivist butchery of effeminate idiots with minor-college PhDs. This is to their credit because Raskolnikov should be seen as a living person living a real life in New York, or London, or the Midwest today. This real-life person—a teacher, a corporate bureaucrat, a construction engineer, a retired policeman, or a housewife…—should be forgiven for wishing Bankers dead. But their all too understandable sentiment is essentially the same as that of the Red Commissars of 1917 and their heirs everywhere As Dostoyevsky understood decades before Lenin, it is dangerous; understandable; but not justified.

The Bankers should be discredited, tarred, and feathered, stripped of every last cent of their ill-gotten gains, and put to work on a Californian orange farm—absolutely!—but they should not be killed.

A bit of history. I was 15 when I visited St. Petersburg—then still “Leningrad”—with a Belgrade high school tour. My purpose was to go in quest of Dostoevsky, my favorite writer, whom I had just started discovering at that time. He wrote Crime and Punishment on the banks of the Neva—one of the best structured, intricately multi-layered novels of all time. (I even named my son Theodore in Fyodor Mikhailovich's honor.)

It was early July and the White Nights of the North were at their whitest, and the days were sunny. Yet the essential gloomy essence of the place—thickly felt in the courtyard of the building the author inhabited when writing his masterpiece, and in which his tortured hero Raskolnikov lived—could not be concealed. Behind the layers of Soviet decrepitude, one could sense the splendor of Peter the Great’s design. Such splendor makes up not for joyful livability. The city was essentially unchanged since the 1860s (minus some 1941-44 German-inflicted damage, not too visible) and its misty distances looked flat and indistinct against the pale backdrop of the Northern sky behind and the rising mist of its many waterways and canals in front. St. Petersburg is the most European city in Russia and the most inherently perverted for being so. Dostoevsky's novel embodies the worst aspects of both cultures that offer two poles of one civilization.

That essential gloom of the place (which I have not visited since but I don't believe has changed) provided a perfect setting for the novel which is the essential key to understanding the dilemma of our postmodern times. Raskolnikov rails against the social injustice without being a Marxist (not even knowing that the author of Das Kapital exists), adores Napoleon as the 19th century model of superhuman greatness but does not seek l'Empereur's glory for himself. His obsessive quest for "justice" becomes tangibly personified in the old usurer whom he finally kills—premeditatedly murders her—as an act of ontological retribution.

“I wanted to kill without casuistry, to kill for my own sake," Dostoevsky has him say reflecting obviously his own passions, "it was not money I needed but something else…I wanted to know, and to know quickly, whether I was a worm like everyone else, or a man. Shall I be able to transgress or shall I not? Shall I dare to stoop down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or have I the right?”

But Raskolnikov soon discovers he is not a superman capable of enacting his own moral laws, and the lesson has been re-learnt at a great cost by Dostoyevsky’s heirs in the horrible century that followed his death. On the other hand, Raskolnikov is not satisfied with the lower-category claim that because the victim was a horrible, laecherous hag (the usurer was ugly, unlike many of her well-groomed Wall Street heirs), her death was for the good of all. The key issue is that Raskolnikov is utterly unable to live with what he has done; he is going neurotic verging on insane; and in the fullness of time, he willingly makes a full confession to a police inspector who knows his soul. Porfiry Petrovich is not playing games—but merely leading him along the way to inner release that comes with confession.

This dilemma—can we be Gods?—is at the novel’s heart, and at the heart of the crisis of our civilization. And that is why we should let the bankers live, which is not to say we should try to destroy them and all they stand for.

Unlike the Communist mass murderers of the past century, Raskolnikov sees clearly his tragic predicament through the prism of a distinctly Christian hate of cunning commerce and ruthless profitmaking. Being prepared to use violence against those who destroy the meek and the pure of spirit for Mammon's sake, but NOT being a secular revolutionary—he IS what the Rulers of the World fear the most.

But in the end, with a Russian twist that is essentially pan-Christian, he repents and realizes that "Thou shalt not kill!" takes precedence. And the end of the story is the new beginning, as he serves his sentence in Siberia, accompanied by his long-suffering Sonia: “Here begins a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his rebirth, of his gradual transition from one world to another, and of the revelation to him of a new, hitherto quite unknown reality.”

This is a blueprint for our own rebirth and renewal in the dark times ahead. And screw the bankers.

Friday, May 4, 2012, 16:08 Moscow Time

Wiping out local minorities after an extensive NATO airstrike is the only combat tactic the KLA had mastered and the only thing the Syrian opposition can really learn from them, foreign-affairs editor for the U.S.-based Chronicles magazine, Srdja Trifkovic, told RT.

RT: Just what might the Syrian opposition learn at these camps?

Srdja Trifkovic: Well, first of all I don’t think they can learn much from the KLA veterans in terms of combat efficiency because the KLA was singularly unsuccessful in its rebellion against the Serbian security forces until the NATO bombing. They started their terrorist ambushes in 1997. They intensified their activities in 1998. But all along it was atrocity management that they wanted, for instance, the famous case of Racak where the combat victims were presented as innocent civilian dead slaughtered by the Serbs.

But even during the bombing the Serbian forces maintained full control of all of the key population centers and they even kept the roads open. It’s only that the KLA came in after the Serbs started withdrawing under the terms of the ceasefire with NATO. And even then they were not engaging in combat, they were acting as marauders ethnically cleansing non-Albanians. So the first point is that there is nothing to learn in terms of combat efficiency and in terms of actually organizing a successful guerrilla force.

RT: Words that have been associated with the KLA—assassination, terror, bombings—is that really the kind of thing that the Syrian opposition wants to be associated with?

ST: It seems that they don’t care, because I understand that Ammar Abdulhamid, one of the Syrian opposition leaders who came to Pristina and actually spoke to an AP reporter, said “We are here to learn.”  Now this should be a huge wake-up call for those Syrians who are not supportive of the opposition, especially the minorities: the Alawites, the Christians—either Orthodox or Greek Catholic—the Shiites, the Kurds.  The moderate Sunni Muslims should remember that if the Syrian rebels learn from the KLA, that means there will be a bloodbath after the fall of Assad and there will be no room for anyone but the majority group which subscribes to its extremist credo, whether it is that of greater Albania in Kosovo or the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot in Syria.

“Today, I signed an historic agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that defines a new kind of relationship between our countries—a future in which Afghans are responsible for the security of their nation, and we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states; a future in which the war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

Hundreds of agreements signed by U.S. presidents over the decades have been called “historic,” including several high-profile ones from the Cold War era—agreements involving serious partners in charge of serious countries—yet they are mostly long forgotten.

A generation from now the “Strategic Partnership Agreement” (SPA) signed by Presidents Obama and Karzai on May 1, 2012, will be forgotten, too. It may be vaguely remembered by a few historians specializing in the U.S. foreign policy in the early 21st century, and even then only for its sheer frivolity. The sole detail that matters is negative: the SPA does not commit the U.S. to the maintenance of any troop levels or funding after 2014; the pending exit will be conclusive. The rest is wishful thinking bordering on the surreal, including:

• “Protecting and Promoting Shared Democratic Values” (Afghanistan reaffirms its strong commitment to inclusive and pluralistic democratic governance, including free, fair and transparent elections, and to protecting human and political rights.)
• “Advancing Long-Term Security” (The U.S. will designate Afghanistan a “major non-NATO ally,” and after 2014 will support training and equipping the government forces.)
• “Reinforcing Regional Security and Cooperation” (Working with regional countries and organizations in fighting terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering.)
• “Social and Economic Development” (The U.S. will encourage American private sector investment, with both parties fighting “decisively against all forms of corruption.”)
• “Strengthening Afghan Institutions and Governance” (Afghanistan will promote efficiency and accountability at all levels of the government.)

This is not an agreement. This is a work of romantic fiction hardly worthy of detailed comment (see my Afghan Debacle of February 29). Its cloud-cuckoo quality would be humorous were it not for all the wasted lives and treasure in the decade preceding it.

The rest of President Obama’s TV address had the same absurdist quality as the “historic” agreement itself.

[L]et us remember why we came here. It was here, in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden established a safe-haven for his terrorist organization…  It was here, from within these borders, that al Qaeda launched the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children. And so, ten years ago, the United States and our allies went to war to make sure that al Qaeda could never again use this country to launch attacks against us. Despite initial success, for a number of reasons, this war has taken longer than most anticipated. 

“For a number of reasons” is a curious turn of phrase which glosses over the problem of flawed strategy. It is true that the initial objective of U.S. military operations was to remove the Taliban regime and deny Islamic terrorist networks a key base of operations, but the chosen method was wrong. A surgical operation against al-Qaeda, a brief occupation of Kabul in the aftermath of 9-11, and a vigorous supervision regime based on pilotless aircraft, should have been enough to demonstrate American resolve, to neutralize terrorist threats, and to satisfy the public opinion at home. Making Afghanistan peaceful, democratic and prosperous—reflected in the Agreement wish-list—had never been an attainable goal. No “strategy” based upon it could be successful.

The initial objective—ostensibly limited and attainable—had morphed under George W. Bush’s presidency into an open-ended exercise in nation building underpinned by grossly wasteful development programs. By the end of his second mandate, the situation on the ground had settled into a stalemate. The Taliban were able to reestablish their more or less permanent presence in the majority Pashtun rural areas in the south; the “allies” held the cities and kept the main roads open; Mohammad Karzai and his corrupt cronies pretended to be a real government.

The Obama administration decided to give Afghanistan higher priority, however. Unlike Iraq—which was treated as “Bush’s war” and eventually terminated on terms far from satisfactory—Afghanistan was adopted as Obama’s own project. Starting in early 2009, the U.S. committed significant additional financial and military resources to the country. The new strategy was twofold. One objective was to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghan National Army and police throughout the country and to withdraw U.S. and NATO forces by the end of 2014. The other was to facilitate a power-sharing agreement that would bring the Taliban into political mainstream, thus creating conditions for durable and stable peace in the country after the U.S. withdrawal. Both goals were unrealistic from the outset, as the slow progress on both fronts in 2011 confirmed. Even worse, achieving one without the other was neither useful nor possible: the twin pillars of U.S. strategy were unattainable in isolation from each other. “This war has taken longer than most anticipated” because it was unwinnable on Obama’s own terms—and it remains so, contrary to his claim on Tuesday night that “the tide has turned”:

[O]ver the last three years, the tide has turned. We broke the Taliban's momentum. We've built strong Afghan security forces. We devastated al Qaeda's leadership, taking out over 20 of their top 30 leaders. And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda, and deny it a chance to rebuild—is within reach. Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over. But tonight, I'd like to tell you how we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan.

Obama’s claim that his goal all along has been “to defeat al Qaeda, and deny it a chance to rebuild” is incorrect: that may have been the original goal, but three years ago Obama broadened it. His current twin goals of making Afghanistan secure by transferring security tasks to the Karzai government and by bringing the Taliban into political mainstream are not “within reach.” His strategy started collapsing last February, when a wave of mass protests—triggered off by the burning of Qurans at an American military base—indicated that the fight for Afghan hearts and minds had failed. The violence resulted in several murders of Americans by their Afghan “allies.” This made mockery of the process of Afghanization of security tasks. The key issue of the lack of “partnership” with the Afghan forces was not new. In May 2011, a U.S. Army study established that murders of Westerners by Afghan forces did not represent “rare and isolated events.” Even before last winter there had been little trust between U.S.-led coalition forces and their Afghan “allies,” contrary to Obama’s assurances:

[W]e have begun a transition to Afghan responsibility for security. Already, nearly half the Afghan people live in places where Afghan security forces are moving into the lead. This month, at a NATO Summit in Chicago, our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year. International troops will continue to train, advise and assist the Afghans and fight alongside them when needed. But we will shift into a support role as Afghans step forward.

This statement overlooks the crisis in relations which started on March 11^th with the killing of 16 unarmed Afghan villagers by a U.S. Army sergeant. The reaction in the country was predictably frenzied. In a symbolic gesture, the Taliban took over the village where the killings took place without a fight. Five days later, Karzai called on U.S. and NATO troops to leave Afghan villages and confine themselves to major bases, and asked for the withdrawal to be accelerated to late 2013. As if anticipating Obama’s TV address, Karzai asserted six weeks ago that the “Afghan security forces have the ability to provide security in the villages of our country.” Both claims were belied by the December 2011 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan, which warned that the war was still essentially a stalemate. Moreover, the “State of the Taliban”—a classified NATO report leaked to the media in February — warned that once the coalition withdraws, “the Taliban considers victory inevitable.”

[B]y the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.

Second, we are training Afghan security forces to get the job done. Those forces have surged, and will peak at 352,000 this year. The Afghans will sustain that level for three years and then reduce the size of their military. And [at the NATO summit] in Chicago, we will endorse a proposal to support a strong and sustainable long-term Afghan force.

The notion that U.S. troops will be able to hand over security to Afghan forces able and willing “to get the job done” is unrealistic. Obama is still sticking to the timetable predicated upon successful Afghanization of operational tasks, but the effort has been badly behind schedule for months. Last summer, Army Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell admitted that the plan to train Afghan soldiers and police to replace the 100,000 American troops remained plagued by high attrition, corruption, attacks on allied troops and assassinations of Afghan officials by “rogue” members of government security forces. Gen.Caldwell admitted that only one of the 84 infantry battalions trained and fielded by the coalition was ready to operate independently. Obama must be aware that, left to their own devices, those units will disintegrate and a significant minority of their rank-and-file will desert to the Taliban. His address therefore makes sense only as a deliberate bid to conceal from the nation, six months before the election, the fact that the “mission” has failed. That is the true meaning of the “agreement” signed with Karzai, and Obama’s rhetoric seemed to confirm the underlying agenda:

The agreement we signed today sends a clear message to the Afghan people: as you stand up, you will not stand alone… It includes Afghan commitments to transparency and accountability, and to protect the human rights of all Afghans—men and women, boys and girls… [W]e will work with the Afghans to determine what support they need to accomplish two narrow security missions beyond 2014: counter-terrorism and continued training. But we will not build permanent bases in this country, nor will we be patrolling its cities and mountains. That will be the job of the Afghan people.

Obama further said that “our goal is not to build a country in America's image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban.” Quite so: the time has come to cut the losses and leave Afghanistan to the devices of its own “men and women, boys and girls.”

A few hours after Obama’s crack-of-dawn departure a suicide car bomber and Taliban militants disguised in burqas attacked a Kabul compound housing hundreds of foreigners, killing seven. This is the shape of things to come. “Tens of thousands of people will be killed here if the Americans pack and get out,” says Afghan independent parliamentarian Mirwais Yasini, who warns that the Taliban would seize power again in just a matter of weeks. He may be right, but that is an Afghan problem. Ensuring lasting peace and stability in the country is theoretically desirable, but neither essential to U.S. security nor likely to be attained.

The final part of Obama’s address promised American assistance in the quest for a lasting political solution, but that is a bad idea. A future intra-Afghan dialogue involving the Taliban and their Pashtun tribal base on the one hand, and Tajiks, Uzbeks and other elements of the Northern Alliance on the other, should be left to the parties concerned. American involvement would be detrimental to success. Confidence-building measures aimed at bringing disparate factions to the table are probably doomed to fail anyway, but they certainly cannot work if one or more of the parties have no confidence in the United States as the facilitator of the process.

After Obama’s television address it is obvious that the Afghan mission is over. From now on the decision-makers’ energies should focus on the technicalities of a swift withdrawal and on the preparation of contingency plans to neutralize any future terrorist threat using drones and missiles. All along, the Taliban had only needed to survive to win, and they have survived. Within weeks or months after the last American soldier leaves Kabul, the Afghan National Army will collapse, Karzai will be killed or exiled, and Afghanistan will be its old unpleasant self. And, more importantly, Barack Obama will likely still occupy the White House.

To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens: it’s impossible to eat enough in order to vomit enough on reading such material. The Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo bear as much relation to al-Qaeda as the Archbishop of Canterbury does to the snake-handling sects of Appalachia. Milosevic’s victims should be remembered. The truth about their fate should be defended.

“It is not just the equivalent of Holocaust denial,” Kamm goes on, “but the same fraudulent argument. It should be recognised and named for what it is: genocide denial.”

BEFORE WE REVISIT “Srebrenica,” let us deal briefly with Kamm’s interesting contention that the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo are immune to the well-known pursuits and obsessions of their coreligionists around the world.

“Frankfurt airport gunman jailed for life,” reported the BBC (among many others) on February 10. “A young Kosovan man who admitted shooting dead two US airmen at Frankfurt airport last year has been sentenced to life in prison,” the story went:

Arid Uka, now 22, is a Muslim ethnic Albanian who was born in Kosovo but grew up in Germany. Uka was convicted on two counts of murder and three of attempted murder by the court in Frankfurt. The American servicemen were travelling from the UK to the Ramstein airbase near Frankfurt… Two other airmen were seriously injured in the attack on a bus at the airport. A jammed gun prevented Uka from shooting a fifth airman in the head.

“Sarajevo gunman fires at US embassy in Bosnia capital,” the same source reported on October 28 of last year. After a standoff in the city centre, a police sniper wounded the 23-year-old Mevlid Jasarevic, a member of the Wahhabi sect, and he was arrested. Jasarevic spent an amazing 50 (fifty) minutes emptying frames of ammunition from his Kalashnikov at the embassy before he was wounded and apprehended. Earlier this week, on April 23, he and his two accomplices, Emrah Fojnica and Munib Ahmetspahic, were accused of forming a terrorist group in the Bosnian-Muslim village of Gornja Maoca. Jasarevic talked about his motives in a video taped just before the attack: “I don’t need to explain why I attack Americans,” said the bearded man, sitting with two automatic rifles leaning against the wall behind him. “They have launched a fight against Islam and Muslims across the whole world. They kill Muslims, rape their wives, take away the old and the young, arrest, do whatever they want.”

A former MI6 man who spent considerable time in Bosnia after the war told Balkanalysis.com that the delayed Bosnian police reaction—and the fact that security lapses allowed the attack to happen in the first place—came as further confirmation that “the Bosnians are just not reliable partners. We’ve seen them befriending the Saudis, but also others if it suits [their interests]. Bottom line being, they are never going to be trusted completely.”

Last January 5 a Federal appeals panel upheld the convictions and sentences of five Muslim men—four of them Albanians from the former Yugoslavia – accused of planning to attack Fort Dix and other military bases. The men—Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka—were arrested in May 2007 and convicted by a federal jury in Camden, N.J., 18 months later. The goal of the group was to “kill as many soldiers as possible.”

“Bosnian accused of carrying explosives into U.S. Embassy in Vienna,” The New York Times reported on October 1, 2007. The 42-year-old Bosnian Muslim attacker tried to enter the embassy with a backpack filled with explosives, nails and Islamic literature. He was arrested after the bag set off a metal detector.

On February 12, 2007, a Bosnian Muslim immigrant, Sulejman Talović, opened fire in a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, resulting in the deaths of five bystanders and the shooter himself, as well as the wounding of at least four others. He used a shotgun with a pistol grip and a handgun, and had a backpack full of ammunition. Talovic’s family and a “shocked” Bosnian-Muslim community were unsurprisingly quick to reject any possibility of the jihadist connection. But Talovic’s Bosnian-born girlfriend revealed that his favorite film was Malcolm X—the same movie that triggered off John Walker Lindh’s path to jihad. Talovic also had a contact at the local mosque—the same mosque attended by U.S. Marine Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, the deserter now safely back in his native Lebanon.

The list goes on, and it will go on in the years to come. Archbishops of Canterbury, indeed.

To understand the problem we need to revisit The Jewish Chronicle’s archives. On September 30, 1994, it published an article (“Let’s Remove the Blinkers”) by Sir Alfred Sherman, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies. Sherman warned that the Muslims’ objective was “to create a ‘Green Corridor’ from Bosnia through the Sanjak to Kosovo” that would separate Serbia from Montenegro. Western powers are “in effect fostering this Islamistan,” Sherman warned, and developing “close working relations with Iran, whose rulers are keen to establish a European base for their politico-religious activities.” In addition, “Washington is keen on involving its NATO ally Turkey, which has been moving away from Ataturk’s secularist and Western stance back to a more Ottomanist, pan-Muslim orientation, and is actively helping the Muslim forces.”

Sherman’s 1994 diagnosis proved to be prescient. Over a decade later it was echoed by Col. Shaul Shay of BESA Center at Bar-Ilan University, in his book “Islamic Terror and the Balkans” (Transaction Publishers, 2008). Shay noted that “the Balkans serve as a forefront on European soil for Islamic terror organizations, which exploit this area to promote their activities in Western Europe, and other focal points worldwide.” His conclusions were unambiguous: “[T]he establishment of an independent Islamic territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania… is one of the most prominent achievements of Islam since the siege of Vienna in 1683. Islamic penetration into Europe through the Balkans is one of the main achievements of Islam in the twentieth century.” Shay’s account shows how the Bosnian war provided the historical opportunity for radical Islam to penetrate the Balkans at a time when the Muslim world – headed by Iran and the various Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda – came to the aid of the Muslims. The Jihadist operational and organizational infrastructures were thus established in the heart of Europe.

BACK TO “SREBRENICA” – As I wrote in this column a year ago, “Srebrenica” is used by the apologists for the American intervention in Bosnia on the side of the Muslims not as a geographic location that needs to be preceded by a noun (“the massacre in…”) but as a stand-alone term that denotes horror, on par with “Auschwitz” or “Hiroshima.” Oliver Kamm and his late role-model Christopher Hitchens provide a paradigmatic example of the species.

I have said it before, and I repeat now: “Srebrenica” used in this sense is a myth based on a lie. The upholders of the lie deny that there is anything to question: thousands of Muslim prisoners were allegedly executed by the Serbs and a distinguished international judicial forum of unquestioned authority has found it to constitute genocide, so according to Kamm there is nothing to debate because everything is settled and clear.

Reasonable people with no ethno-religious axe to grind in the Balkan quagmire have long fought this black-and-white version, however, including the claim that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed in cold blood and the systematic misuse of the term “genocide.” But let me get back to that article of mine, behind which I stand as firmly today as I did at the time of its writing.

The fact beyond dispute is that during the Bosnian war thousands of Muslim men were killed in the region of Srebrenica. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell almost without a fight to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison—the 28^th division of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Army—attempted a breakthrough. A significant number reached safety at the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 60 km to the north; a few found shelter in Serbia, across the Drina River to the east. An unknown were killed while fighting their way through; and many others—numbers remain disputed—were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.

The numbers remain unknown and misrepresented. With “8,000 executed” and—inevitably—thousands more killed in the fighting or reaching the Muslim lines, the column attempting to break out should have counted 12 to 15,000 men—an impossibly large number. There should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of executions, burials, and body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, still falls far short of the sanctified figure of 8,000. The Islamic shrine at Potocari, where the supposed victims are buried, includes those of many soldiers killed in action, Muslim and Serb, between May 1992 and July 1995, at different locations all over the region.

The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) never came up with a conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unproven. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes. The number of likely casualties corresponds closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Rooper says.  But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave before it fell’:

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed.  This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that some had fled into Serbia.  It is therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed.

The Red Cross reported at the time that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers managed to reach Muslim lines near Tuzla and were redeployed by the Bosnian Army “without their families being informed.” The number of military survivors was also confirmed by Muslim General Enver Hadzihasanovic in his testimony at The Hague.

The last census results, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla “without their families being informed” we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal’s own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995—notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald—give 40,000 as the maximum figure. It just does not add up.

Having spent five days interviewing over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors at Tuzla a week after the fall of the enclave, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Henry Wieland declared, “We have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.” A decade later a Dutch field investigator, Dr. Dick Schoonoord, confirmed Wieland’s verdict: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.”

A “PROTECTED ZONE”?—It is often pointed out that Srebrenica was an UN “protected zone,” but it is seldom noted that the enclave was simultaneously an armed camp used for attacks against Serb villages in the surrounding areas. Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Muslim Army soldiers in Srebrenica after it had obtained the “safe haven” status, and that he had personally arranged numerous deliveries of sophisticated weapons by helicopter.

French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, is adamant that the crimes committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.” Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself… he didn’t even look for an excuse… One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”

Cees Wiebes, who wrote the intelligence section of the Dutch Government report on Srebrenica, notes that despite signing the demilitarization agreement, Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica were heavily armed and engaged in provocations (“sabotage operations”) against Serbian forces. Professor Wiebes caused a storm with his book Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, detailing the role of the Clinton administration in allowing Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims.

On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 (“Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”) that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because “military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim,’ which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.”

POLITICAL BACKGROUND—Two prominent supporters (at the time) of the late Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, his Srebrenica SDA party chairman Ibran Mustafic and police commander Hakija Meholjic, have subsequently accused Izetbegovic of deliberately sacrificing the enclave in order to trigger NATO intervention. Meholjic is explicit: in his presence, Izetbegovic quoted Bill Clinton as saying that 5,000 dead Muslims would be sufficient to provide the political basis for an American-led intervention on the side of the Muslims.

Testifying at The Hague Tribunal, Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic confirmed this theory by describing how 18 top officers of the Srebrenica garrison were abruptly removed in May 1995.  Ibran Mustafic, the former head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, is adamant that the scenario for the sacrifice of Srebrenica was carefully prepared:

Unfortunately, the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business … Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I would have rejected to carry out that order. I would have asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica, so that I can give him a gun let him stage attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo.

Military analyst Tim Ripley agrees that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by the Muslim political leaders. He noted that Dutch UN soldiers “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica past their observation points, carrying brand new anti-tank weapons [which] made many UN officers and international journalists suspicious.”

The term “genocide” is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica’s fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide, instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north—which left open escape routes to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped:

The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.

The fact that The Hague Tribunal called the massacre in Srebrenica “genocide” does not make it so. What plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Srebrenica and other parts of Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Žepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. Such psychobabble turns the term “genocide” into a gruesome joke.

Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide.” Even if the unproven figure of “8,000” is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia’s Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America’s NATO ally Turkey—a major regional player in today’s Balkans—committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict can be genocide-free.

The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes—which is what “Srebrenica” is really all about—is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake. Oliver Kamm is guilty of both.

When you advocate bombing a faraway nation of which we know little, call its leader a new Hitler (and, by extension, condemn the failure to bomb as a new “Munich”). When you want to discredit domestic opponents of migratory population replacement or abortion, compare them to Hitler. When you want to demonize the European civilization, Christian religion, national identity, or traditional culture, Hitler is ready. Six decades after the phenomenon was defined by Leo Strauss as reductio ad Hitlerum, the practice is more widely spread than ever. If you dislike a person/policy/idea, find a Hitlerian point of contact and thus prove that the PPI in question is a priori bad, mad and worthy of criminalization.

The final corollary of the concept is that we are all potential Hitlers, and only by vigilantly guarding against deviant thoughts (“I like Americans better than Somalis”), emotions (“I enjoy the Master Singers more than Porgy & Bess”) and practices (“I enjoy walking my German Shepherd in the Bavarian Alps”) can we protect ourselves from the lure of the inner Adolf.

There are literally thousands of offerings to illustrate the syndrome, starting with A for AHMADINEJAD…

• Newt Gingrich calls Iran’s president a new Hitler, says that he is as big a threat to global security as Adolf Hitler was in the 1930s.
• In interview (April 2009), acting Israeli prime minister Olmert said the Iranian president “speaks as Hitler did in his time …”
• U.S.  Senator compares Ahmadinejad to Hitler and makes fun of his name.
• Mitt Romney likened Ahmadinejad to Hitler in a speech to Jewish university.
• Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post on “finishing Hitler’s work”: “His successors now reside in Tehran… Hitler was only slightly more direct when he announced seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, ‘the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ … When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?”

… and ending with T for TRIFKOVIC (e.g., with Michael Sells on “Hitler in full oratorical flight” in Breivik, Trifkovic, and Radical Serb Ideology) and W for WAGNER.

One-hundred twenty-three years after Hitler’s birth, an attempt to advance towards normalization of his person and legacy is both possible and necessary. It need not and must not end up either in trivializing his grotesque record or in succumbing to the temptations of the historian’s prejudices. Perhaps a barrier will always separate us and him, but the effort is intellectually and morally legitimate.

It cannot be done for as long as he is alive and well, thanks to those who profess to abhor him. On current form the world deserves him. Many happy returns, Adi!

Syria’s political and military landscape has visibly shifted in recent weeks. It may be too early to say that Bashar al-Assad is out of the woods, but the odds are changing in his favor. His soldiers have consolidated their control over former rebel strongholds, following a series of setbacks which the loose coalition of anti-government forces—known as the Free Syrian Army—suffered in last month’s fighting.

The advocates of military intervention in Washington, such as Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), are on the defensive. There is no political will on Capitol Hill to involve the United States in another war in the Middle East just as the mission in Afghanistan is coming to an inglorious close. The concern that any weapons delivered to the Free Syrian Army may end up in the hands of Islamic terror groups is being openly aired. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on Easter Day that it would be risky to arm the rebels, “mainly because we just don’t know who they are.” In fact we have a pretty good idea: like their Libyan counterparts a year ago, they are predominantly Islamic militants associated with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB).

Even more compelling argument against international intervention is that the “regime change” scenario does not apply. Bashar’s departure from power would not end the crisis, it would aggravate it. The Alawite-controlled military will never give up the fight, and its cohesiveness is not in doubt. Government security forces and the army still retain their coherence and operational effectiveness. Even if Bashar agreed to go, which is unlikely, the generals would select a leader more determined than he to unleash the full firepower of the Syrian army against the rebels, including missiles and air power which have not been used thus far.

Sectarian divisions would emerge with a vengeance and plunge the country into a fully-fledged and multi-sided civil war. The choice for an intervening power would not be between “pro-democracy protesters” and “Assad’s blood-soaked regime” but between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze and Alawite, Kurds and Christians. A perfect quagmire.

IN THE MEANTIME, the danger of another proposed military intervention—against Iran—also seems to be receding. Tehran has hinted at the possibility of a compromise on the issue of nuclear enrichment ahead of negotiations with six powers in Istanbul later this week. The head of Iran’s nuclear program Fereidoun Abbasi has said that Iran could stop its production of 20 percent enriched uranium needed for a research reactor, and continue enriching uranium to lower levels for power generation. Uranium has to be enriched to more than 90 percent to be used for a nuclear weapon, but the U.S. and Israel have demanded in the past an end to all uranium enrichment in Iran. Agreement to reconvene follows several weeks of diplomatic wrangling between Tehran and Russia, China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Iran said last month that it was ready to re-engage with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

The price of oil dropped to just over $100 on the news, as analysts expressed cautious optimism that there will be no war after all. As we’ve said before in these pages, real concerns about Iran’s nuclear program exist but they can be resolved through diplomacy. A reasonable agreement would also allow Iran to enrich uranium to the extent needed for power generation and accept Iran’s right to the enrichment technology, so long as she agrees to subject her entire nuclear program to international oversight.

It is striking that Sarkozy added matter-of-factly that the arrests were not related to Mohamed Merah, the Muslim terrorist killed by police last week after he murdered seven people in the Toulouse area. This raises some troubling questions.

If the arrests were not related to Merah, it stands to reason that the authorities were in possession of information warranting today’s action well in advance of his murderous spree. That the raids were not carried out earlier indicates either a culture of permissive negligence in the French security apparatus—the one that allowed Merah to operate freely, in spite of his long history of terrorist connections—or else a political ploy by Sarkozy, calculated to improve his rating in advance of a two-round presidential election scheduled for April 22 and May 6. Most likely both elements were present: the police had not considered those 19 potential jihadists worthy of a commando-style raid until prompted by the Élysée Palace to deliver a high-profile action now.

In his bid for a second five-year term, Sarkozy has been trailing his main adversary, Francois Hollande of the Socialist Party, and he sees his chance for victory in attracting votes from the supporters of Marine Le Pen. Over the years, the National Front leader has rightly criticized Sarkozy for being soft on immigration, and in the aftermath of Merah’s murders she declared that the “Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated” in France, allowing political-religious groups to flourish due to the “laxism” of the authorities.

Le Pen’s recent warning that “security is a theme that has just signed up to the presidential campaign” seems to be confirmed by Sarkozy’s other gestures. After Toulouse, he declared that he would propose several new anti-terrorism laws for swift enactment, including a provision that would make visits to extremist “Islamist” Web sites a crime. Since then, however, Sarkozy’s own aides have noted that the National Assembly has adjourned for the duration of the presidential campaign, which makes it certain that the proposals will not be debated—let alone adopted—for weeks after the campaign is over.

Furthermore, as French legal experts of different political hues have pointed out, the apparent unconstitutionality of such a law makes its eventual passage unlikely. Sarkozy knew all that when he made his announcement, of course, but grabbing headline news for a day with a “tough” statement took precedence over its legal substance. Sarkozy’s agenda is also apparent in his latest claim that the Toulouse shooting was “a bit like the trauma that followed in the U.S. and New York after 9⁄11.” It was nothing of the kind, but the French head of state is not making a diagnosis—he is suggesting a narrative that would serve his political ends.

Sarkozy’s reference to “a certain form of radical Islamism” (une forme d’islamisme radical) that would no longer be tolerated in France raises further questions about his understanding of the threat. It contains indirect admission that this particular “form,” epitomized by hidden handguns and Kalashnikovs, has been effectively put up with until now—just as Miss Le Pen had warned for years.

On closer scrutiny Sarkozy appears guilty of not one or two, but three logical errors:

1. To start with, he routinely uses the term “Islamism”—a widely-spread misnomer that artificially distinguishes hard-core, relentlessly activist Islam from the purported mainstream model of the Religion-of-Peace-and-Tolerance.

2. Sarkozy’s language further suggests that there is an “Islamism” which is not “radical.” Even those who advocate the distinction between Islam and Islamism (notably Daniel Pipes) readily concede that the latter is inherently radical in its mindset, goals, and methods. Sarkozy’s use of the adjective “radical” is therefore redundant, or else it postulates the existence of non-radical Islamism, which is contradictio in adjecto.

3. The French head of state then goes a step further and suggests that, even within the nonsensically constructed realm of “radical Islamism,” there are some initiates who are no longer to be tolerated and there are others whose continued presence in France is acceptable. In other words, there are some “forms of radical Islamism” that are deemed acceptable now and would continue to be tolerated in the future.

For a former student of the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) and a lawyer presumably acquainted with of the logical strictures of Descartes and the finer points of Napoleonic jurisprudence, it is indeed remarkable to display this level of intellectual and moral confusion. For his nation’s journalists, academics and public figures not to take Nicolas Sarkozy to task for these particular errors—detrimental to that nation’s very survival—is a sad testimony to France’s current condition.

Mohammed Merah (23), who was killed at his apartment on Thursday after a 30-hour standoff, was a Muslim—one of at least twenty million who now inhabit the European Union. The “context” was duly provided by The New York Times: “Much of the concern about domestic terrorism in Britain, Belgium, Germany and France has focused on these young people, who may have had little formal religious education but are susceptible to calls for jihad, especially when their own lives have been marked by disappointment, crime, racism and joblessness.”

The suggested narrative about this “soft-spoken and alienated youth” is clear:

1. Had Mr. Merah and his ilk had more “formal religious training,” they would have been less likely to kill, maim or otherwise harm their infidel fellow citizens because they would have become good Muslims, which is to say peaceful, tolerant and compassionate.
2. Had the infidel host-society been less racist and had it provided “jobs”—which Mr. Merah and millions of other young “European Muslims” like him would no doubt eagerly take in lieu of welfare—they would not have succumbed to the lure of jihad.

The variants on the theme of “racism” as the root of all evil in France are too numerous to quote or hyperlink. The Associated Press report, carried by dozens of newspapers all over the United States, took note of the supposedly “chronic and ambient discrimination within French society.” The Islamist terrorist and the neo-Nazi, for La Stampa’s editorialist, are “two opposite nightmares which live side by side.” According to The Scotsman, “the neo-Nazi threat” is real and by no means diminished by the killer’s identity. “France is a deeply racist country, and Toulouse will only make that worse” was Adrian Hamilton’s headline in The Independent, with the French merely transferring their resentments from Jews to Arabs.

This is all predictable liberal nonsense. The key neglected aspect of the Merah case is that he should have been marked, tracked, and prevented from carrying his murderous plans years ago. We now know that Merah had traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to undergo terrorist training in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border, but what happened next is unclear. French investigator say that he was arrested in Afghanistan and handed to the United States military, which “put him on the first plane headed back to France.” A Pentagon spokesman on detainee issues confirmed that he had been taken into custody by the police in Kandahar a few years ago, but that it remained unclear whether he had been released or turned over to American, French or some other NATO nation control after that.

The reason for confusion was revealed by The New York Times, which noted that Merah would have been difficult to track as he moved around the world, “because he left the country as a French citizen and had a French passport [and] could have returned through a third country like Turkey or Thailand to avoid detection.”

The problem of Muslim terrorists with Western passports is not new, and the solution exists: European countries (as well as the United States) need laws that will treat a Muslim citizen’s links with Islamic extremism—amply documented in Merah’s case—as grounds for the removal of citizenship and deportation to the suspect’s country of origin, or in Merah’s case his parents’ country of origin. The only obstacle to such reasonable and morally as well as legally justified course is the self-destructive mindset of the Western liberal society itself.

Once it is accepted that a bona fide Islamist cannot and should not be a citizen of a secular Western state—and that realization will eventually sink in, after dozens, perhaps hundreds more lives are lost—the political will can be easily translated into legislation. Those who preach or promote jihad from Marseilles to Malmo, and advocate the introduction of sharia in the non-Muslim host-societies, can and should be treated in exactly the same manner as ideological extremists of other hues who preach violence. It will be a long and hard struggle to open the eyes of legislators and legal regulators that Islam itself is a radical, revolutionary ideology, inherently seditious and inimical to Western values and institutions, but it can be done. If France now gets closer to that realization, Merah’s victims will not have died in vain.

Other necessary measures would then follow, such as preventing illegal invasion and not only halting but reversing “legal” immigration from the Muslim world into Europe, North America and the Antipodes. For those who stay, introducing profiling is essential: not all Muslims are terrorists, but all significant transnational terrorist networks that threaten Western countries’ national security and way of life are composed of Muslims. Merah’s case is a timely reminder that a person’s appearance, origin, and apparent or suspected beliefs should raise red flags at airport security checkpoints and elsewhere. Routine profiling needs to be legitimized as an essential tool of trade of law enforcement. The possession of a Western passport should no longer be treated as a potential terrorist’s “right,” and must not exempt him from due scrutiny.

The only French political figure of prominence capable of understanding the necessity of such measures is Marine Le Pen. Le Pen, currently ranked third in the polls of presidential candidates for the April 22 election, says France must “wipe out” the Islamist threat and accused the authorities of systematically minimizing it. “We have underestimated the rise of radical Islam in our country,” Le Pen said. “We didn't want to see it, out of weakness or for electoral reasons…”

After a grim week for France it is to be expected that her message will be heard more clearly than before.