Wednesday, May 09, 2007
The
small cell that plotted to attack Ft. Dix was made up of Albanians from Kosovo, along with a Turk and a Jordanian. Note that in the 1980s
most Yugoslav Muslims were deracinated and secular. Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian are really the same language, and the only way you could tell if someone was a Muslim was to check their i.d. cards (the Communists recognized Yugoslav Muslims as a national minority). (See my colleague John Fine's
When Ethnicity did not Matter.)
When Communism collapsed, Yugoslav politicians cast about for new platforms.
Slobodan Milosevic decided to opt for the most chauvinist form of Serbian nationalism one could imagine, setting in motion a vicious and brutal war for territory on the basis of ethnic identity. Muslims in Bosnia were targeted for mass graves.
Kosovo autonomy was much reduced.
In the aftermath of the Kosovo War of 1999,
half of Kosovars lived in poverty and fundamentalist charities started being active among them. Kosovars were most often secular and anti-Islamic or heterodox when religious. Milosevic monstrously attempted to use charges of al-Qaeda presence in Kosovo (unproved) as a pretext for killing Kosovars. In fact, his policies pushed some Kosovars into the arms of the Salafis.
In other words, Kosovo was not about Islam. It was another
post-colonial war like many others in the post-Soviet period. If some Kosovars now turn to radical fundamentalism, it is a result of the collapse of the old Communist framework and the attacks on them of the Milosevic fascists.
John Tirman sees the US occupation of Iraq as generating Muslim fundamentalist violence against the US, in a vicious circle.
The news yesterday that six foreign-born men, apparently all Muslim, were planning to attack U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey is another in a long line of sensationalist headlines that will miss more important points.
Why would they do this? That's the first question, and I doubt we'll get satisfying answers, because their motives will be attributed to global jihadist ideology and left at that. They're not, it is now thought, connected to any global jihad organization. In fact, they appear not to be devout, reportedly drinking heavily at local bars and never seen at local mosques. They wanted, according to the feds, to kill as many American soldiers as possible. The likely, uncomfortable answer to the question above: it is either a kind of maniacal criminality, or retaliation for U.S. soldiers killing Muslims in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The conspirators are mainly from Kosovo, ethnic Albanians; another is from Turkey, the sixth from Jordan. So the next uncomfortable question: how does ferocious military action in the Middle East--the global front in the long war--deal with this, potentially the most serious threat of violence from Islamic militants since 9/11? Should we bomb Kosovo (again)? Turkey? Jordan? All three countries are supposedly the closest of friends to the United States.
Much is being made of these being illegal aliens, but as usual the reality is far more complex, the remedies wholly unclear.
Two were legally here; others came in legally with parents before the 1999 war in Kosovo and overstayed visas. This is far from the usual stereotypes about why our porous borders are a national security threat.
The right-wing shows and blogs are atwitter with this news, an "I told you so" wag of the finger. But what do we actually know?
Some people who entered the country legally from friendly societies became, in all likelihood, alienated by the brutality of Operation Iraqi Freedom and decided to give us some of our own medicine. It's a nasty thought, to be sure, and if they did what the authorities claim (remember, there have been numerous, high-profile arrests that turned out to be duds as terror plots) they should be locked up.
What is most harrowing, however, is the possibility that our global war on terror is actually stimulating violence in our midst. Several of us expressed this concern long ago, and now we have the first evidence that it's coming to pass.
If anything, from these first reports, we should be ever more skeptical of the human costs of the Iraq war, the pervasive mistreatment of innocent Muslims, and the harsh rhetoric that has America--George Bush's America--at war with all of Islam.
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