Archive for Srdja Trifkovic
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, an expert on foreign affairs, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad. His latest book is The Krajina Chronicle: A History of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.
Swiss Minarets
Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad. The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons. It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians, known as the Egerkingen Committee, after the federal supreme court overrode the objections of the local community and approved the construction of a minaret by the Turkish Cultural Association in the northern town Wangen bei Olten.
Patriarch Aleksy, R.I.P.
Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, died of heart failure on December 5, 2008, at the age of 79.
Born in Estonia in 1929 into a pious family of Russian émigrés of German extraction, Aleksei Mikhailovich Ridiger was ordained a priest in 1950, completed his theological studies in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) three years later, and was tonsured in 1961. His subsequent rise through the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church—allegedly facilitated by a KGB connection, which he always denied—culminated in his election as Patriarch in 1990.
Le dernier mot: Washingtonian Madness
My farewell column has a melancholy air not only because all partings are inherently sad, but because the times are genuinely grim. The world is changing . . . not for the better, and America is making a disproportionate contribution to the process. There is a malaise at the very core of this country’s foreign-policymaking, on both sides of the dominant duopoly in Washington. At its poles there may be differences over tactics and means, but the alleged necessity of America’s continued, open-ended “engagement” in faraway lands is never questioned—and it will not be questioned under the new regime.
Bosnia, Hillary’s Playground
At a time when the U.S. power and authority are increasingly challenged around the world, the incoming team sees the Balkans as the last geopolitically significant area where they can assert their “credibility” by postulating a maximalist set of objectives as the only outcome acceptable to the United States, and duly insisting on their fulfillment. We have already seen this pattern with Kosovo, and it is to be expected that we’ll see its replay in Bosnia under the new team.
U.S. Foreign Policy: Grim Continuity Guaranteed
Barack Obama’s selection of Joseph Biden as his Vice President, Hillary Clinton’s appointment to State, Robert Gates’ retention at the Pentagon, and the selection of General James Jones as head of the National Security Council point to the President-elect’s willful blindness to the collapsing economic foundation of the American hyperpower. His key appointees all share a vision—a grand strategy of sorts—that guarantees an unwelcome continuity of this country’s foreign and security policies in the next four years.
Pakistania Delenda
That India should accuse Pakistan of involvement in recent Islamic-terrorist outrages in Bombay was to be expected. That the accusation would turn out to be so well founded so quickly, was not. The only lasting solution to the problem of Pakistan is the disappearance of Pakistan from the political map of the world. This goal is realistic, but it cannot be achieved by overt war because of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. It can be achieved, however, by exploiting Pakistan’s fundamental weakness: its ethnic, regional and tribal disunity. Actively supported by the civilized world, India need not send any terrorists to Pakistan. She should merely provide support to Baluch, Sindhi, and Northwestern tribal separatists – support of the kind that Islamabad has been giving to Kashmiri jihadists for decades. A Pakistan-free world would be a better and safer world. It can be done and it should be done.
Misallocated Infamy
For the past 67 years America has commemorated over 2,400 sailors, soldiers and airmen who were killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Every such anniversary reminds us that all history is to some extent contemporary history: Almost seven decades after the event, the myth of FDR’s goodness and greatness—revived for current political purposes during and after this year’s election campaign—makes it less “appropriate” than ever to ask if he knew about the attack; and, more importantly, whether he willed it. This date “will live in infamy,” for a few more decades at least, until it succumbs to this country’s collective amnesia. We may be running out of time for its infamy to be allocated more equitably.
India, Jihad’s Permanent Battleground
Teams of heavily armed terrorists carried out seven coordinated attacks in India’s financial capital “Mumbai” (Bombay) on Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning. Over 170 people were dead by the time the hostage crisis ended three days later, with more bodies likely to be found at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel.
Similar attacks by Islamic terrorists occur with grim regularity in India (see Timetable at the end). The disputed province of Kashmir notwithstanding, militant Islam sees the second most populous country in the world as a piece of “unfinished business”: having been ruled by Muslims once, it cannot legitimately revert to Dar al-Harb, ever.
The Price of Hillary
No secretary of state will come to that office with stronger pro-Israel credentials or closer ties to the Jewish community than Sen. Hillary Clinton, Douglas Bloomfield assures his readers in The Jerusalem Post. Good for them, and for Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians; but for the rest of us Mrs. Clinton’s appointment as the third woman U.S. Secretary of State is hugely problematic. It heralds “the end of the world as we know it” in some ways, although neither she nor her coterie necessarily know what they are doing.
Donating the Rope
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor after the corporate Germany decided to bet on him – in spite of his radical rhetoric – because it believed it could control him. On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will become the 44th president of the United States in large part thanks to gigantic contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests, and big law firm attorneys. They, too, think that his social, cultural and economic program –- no less radical, in its peculiar way, than that of the NSDAP –- will succumb to their kind of “reality,” and that they can control him.
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