In a panel discussion broadcast live by the top-rated Serbian TV channel on October 9, Srdja Trifkovic discussed the problem of ISIS veterans returning to Europe from the fronts in Syria. The first question was whether this problem was quite as serious as presented by some security experts. [Video (Trifkovic segment starts at 8 minutes 40 seconds)]

ST: The situation is much worse. The United States still has not cured itself from the tendency to try and instrumentalise jihadists in order to pursue some geopolitical objectives. We saw that in Syria recently, when the U.S. was directly engaged in evacuating the top al-Nusra leaders [from Deir ez-Zor] after they had been surrounded by the Syrian Arab Army. We see this also in the concerted attempts to prevent the final onslaught against the last jihadist redoubt [at Idlib] in northern Syria. This is a game for which, in my opinion, [President Donald] Trump is not personally responsible. There is simply a continuity of policies and mindset inherited from previous administrations, which has been completely internalized by the intelligence structures, at the Pentagon and the Department of State. The second problem is . . .

Q: [Former U.S. President Barack] Obama and Hillary [Clinton] have even been accused of direct responsibility for the creation of the Islamic State?

ST: Had it not been for the joint criminal enterprise by Turkey, KSA, Qatar and the United States, the Islamic State would not have been born. The Islamic State was the embodiment of their concerted attempt to defeat Bashar al-Assad. Thus they created Frankenstein’s monster which later, presumably, got out of control—whether it really did so is uncertain . . . [As for the returning ISIS veterans], one term is used here which I regard as totally unconvincing, “de-radicalization.” This is a notion of the Western liberal establishment: that you can take returning fighters from the Middle Eastern war theaters, run them through a washing machine, and they will emerge as pure innocents, cleansed of all jihadist inclinations. This is nonsense.

The problem is not with some hundreds or thousands of veterans. The problem is in a metastasized Islamic diaspora [in the West]. Within it, there are many of those who have not spent a single day on the Syrian battlefront, yet many of them—by some estimates 5, 7 or 12 percent—are ready and willing to invest their lives in the realization of the jihadist project. Since we have 25 to 30 million members of the Islamic diaspora in Western Europe, in the European Union plus a few non-members, we are looking at some two million people who are absolutely committed to the project of expanding Dar al-Islam against Dar al-Harb. They treat their host-societies as a priori enemy territory, and they are prepared to do whatever it takes to ensure that they are transformed. It is only a matter of time when the bill will be due for payment. All that claptrap about multi-culti tolerance will collapse. Sooner or later we’ll have the issue of, to quote Lenin, “who gets whom,” in other words who will take out whom . . .

Q: There are many warnings, though, including the noted German historian [Heinrich August] Winkler, about the rise of the Right in Europe, and that the migrant crisis has created this new danger?

ST: I am really sick and tired of this mantra about the rebirth of neofascism or “the extreme Right.” We are witnessing a perfectly normal reaction of countless ordinary people to the process in which the deracinated elites, neoliberal and neo-Marxist elites, are trying hard to change the demographic makeup of Western Europe. When we look at the recent mayhem in Chemnitz, when we remember the horror at the railway station in Cologne on New Year’s Eve [2015] three years ago, it is clear that people like [the Austrian vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian] Strache, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders in Holland and others, are only the tip of the emerging iceberg of resistance. It is yet to speak up in its full capacity. It has the potential to destroy the European Union, which has morphed into a conspiracy against the preservation of identity. The European Union has become a mechanism for the massive grinding of traditional institutions, of families, nations, and faith.