Greater Surbiton

The democratic choice is an easier one for progressives to make in the UK than it is in the US. Over here, the ruling Labour Party is more progressive than the Conservative opposition on both foreign and domestic issues. But in the US, things are not so simple. Were I an American citizen, I would be inclined to vote Democrat over domestic issues - abortion, taxation, etc. But I have no doubt that the interests of South East Europe would be better served by John McCain as president than by either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

Bill Clinton bears a very large share of responsibility for the problems faced by the Balkans and Caucasus today. These are, in particular, a dismembered, non-functioning Bosnia; an anti-Western, disruptive Serbia; and a dismembered Georgia. The problem was not that Clinton was a particularly reactionary president in world affairs, but that he simply was not very interested in them, something that resulted in a failure of leadership. The mess in Bosnia is above all the fault of the former British Conservative government of John Major and the former French Socialist regime of the late Francois Mitterand; they were the champions of appeasement and the architects, along with Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, of Bosnia’s dismemberment. Clinton could and should have insisted upon a change in Western policy vis-a-vis Bosnia upon becoming president. Instead, he chose to defer to his pro-Belgrade European allies, Britain and France, not wishing to fall out with them over something trivial like genocide in the heart of Europe. This was not only a moral failing, but a betrayal of US interests; the disastrous Anglo-French policy and Clinton’s vacillating support for it greatly damaged both transatlantic relations and the Balkans. There are times when Europe needs American leadership; Bosnia was one of them.

After the initialling of the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995, Clinton continued to neglect Bosnia, allowing the indicted war-criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to escape arrest - primarily because he did not want to risk American casualties in arrest operations. Nor does Clinton deserve particular credit over Kosova; it is highly questionable whether the US would have acted to prevent the genocide there in 1999 had not Major and Mitterand been replaced in the meantime by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. NATO’s liberation of Kosova should have been followed up by the prompt recognition of its independence, while the Russians were in no position to cause such trouble for us as they are today. We could have ’punished’ the Serbia of Milosevic with Kosova’s independence, instead of the Serbia of today, led as it is by the relatively pro-Western President Boris Tadic. But that problem, too, was allowed to fester; its resolution today is proving much more difficult than it need have been.

Over Russia and the Caucasus, too, Clinton, like George Bush Snr before him, showed a disastrous failure of leadership. With Russian politics in a state of flux, with the pro-Western Boris Yeltsin in power in Moscow and financially dependent on the West, a golden opportunity existed to push Russian policy in the Caucasus in a less imperialistic direction. The Western powers should have acted decisively to halt the dismemberment of Georgia in the early 1990s and prevent the break-away regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from falling under Russia’s exclusive control. We should have recognised the independence of Chechnya, preempting Yeltsin’s violent assault on the country in 1994. But as is so often the case, the dovish policy is the one most likely to lead to confrontation in the long-run - think of Neville Chamberlain and Munich. Our failure to engage in the Caucasus, and Blair’s shameful support for Vladimir Putin over Chechnya in 1999, have been richly rewarded: Georgia, an aspiring NATO member, faces perpetual dismemberment, while an aggressive, ungrateful Putin has reentered the Balkans with a vengeance with the deliberate aim of derailing the region’s Euro-Atlantic integration. Chechnya proved to be the poison of Russian democracy and Russian-Western friendship; a Russian president willing and able to use weapons of mass destruction against his Chechen citizens is unlikely to respect democratic freedoms in Russia proper, and an undemocratic, authoritarian Russian regime is more likely to be hostile to the West.

In fairness, Russia is not solely responsible for the mess in the Caucasus; Georgia’s brutally chauvinistic former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia was one of the architects of his country’s dismemberment, as was the Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who supported the Abkhazians. The people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had legitimate grievances against Gamsakhurdia’s regime and its successors in Tbilisi. These are all issues that a more forward-looking US policy could have helped to resolve, but did not. 

I fear, therefore, the consequences for South East Europe of a US president who is dovish, uninterested in or unserious about foreign policy. Hillary Clinton has always worked hand-in-glove with Bill in the political sphere, and should share responsibility with him for his disastrous Bosnia policy. Indeed, the story is that her influence made it worse; that she read Robert Kaplan’s truly dreadful book ‘Balkan Ghosts’ and passed it on to her husband; this book, filled as it was with crude stereotypes about the Balkans (along the lines of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’), encouraged the perception of the Bosnian war as an expression of intractable ethnic conflict in which no moral issues were at stake, militating against any intention Bill might have had to resist Serbian aggression. Be that as it may, Hillary was more frank in welcoming Kosovo’s independence than Obama, who appears to see Balkan politics largely through the prism of his need to win the goodwill of the Serbian and Greek lobbies in the US. Hence his letter to the Serbian Unity Congress, in which he stated: ‘I support and shall help in every possible way development of the dialog between all sides in Kosova because I believe that peace and stability can be reached only by solutions acceptable for all sides’ - not far from an endorsement of the Serbo-Russian position on Kosova, which insists on a Serbian veto on any settlement. Hence also Obama’s endorsement of the Greek-nationalist position on Macedonia. These acts may be motivated by simple electoral opportunism, but they do not bode well for a principled and forward-looking US policy toward the Balkans should Obama become president. In flirting with the US’s Serbian and Greek lobbies, Obama is flirting with groups that encompass ultra-right-wing, Christian-fundamentalist, Muslim-hating bigots.

There are several reasons to believe that McCain would follow a more serious and principled policy toward South East Europe than either Clinton or Obama. He is aware of the importance of what he calls a ‘progressive Turkey’ as a strategic partner of the US and a beacon of Muslim democracy, and of the mutual inter-relatedness of democracy and stability in Turkey and Iraq. Turkey is both the most important Balkan country in world affairs and a state that borders on Iraq; the Balkans and the Middle East are adjacent, interlocking regions; McCain’s commitment to staying the course in Iraq is therefore most likely to promote stability in the Balkans.

McCain was correct to oppose Congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide (here I break ranks with Norman Geras). The Ottoman Empire in 1915 was undoubtedly guilty of genocide against the Armenians, and Turkey should recognise this genocide. But it is not for an outside power like the US to single out this historic crime as uniquely totemic and worthy of recognition, particularly given that the US Congress has taken no parallel steps to recognise the genocidal crimes carried out by Russia and the Balkan Christian states against Ottoman and Caucasian Muslims during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why should the US recognise the Ottoman genocide of one million Armenians, but not the Balkan Christian genocide of over six-hundred thousand Ottoman Muslims in 1912-13, when the latter crime was an immediate catalyst of the former ? The Turks would be entirely justified in taking offence at such double standards, and McCain is entirely correct that the US should be developing its relationship with Ankara, not creating new barriers to it - though he is also far from uncritical in his support for Turkey.

McCain was an early supporter of Kosova’s independence. He stood by the oppressed Kosova Albanians before it became fashionable in Washington to do so, and continued to do so despite the support given by many right-wing Republicans - largely for anti-Clinton and anti-Islamic reasons - to the anti-Albanian policies of Milosevic and subsequent Serb-nationalist politicians. A Republican president who is ready to put a combination of US strategic interests and morality above petty sectarian domestic feuds and religious hatred is more likely to act in South East Europe’s best interests.

Finally, McCain led a delegation of US senators to Tbilisi in August 2006, to express unconditional support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and to challenge the presence of Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, suggesting they be replaced by a UN or OSCE force. Although Moscow likes to draw a false parallel between Kosova and South Ossetia, in reality, secessionist South Ossetia is more like the Serb-controlled enclave in northern Kosova - an expression of the imperialism of a larger neighbour that seeks to punish a former colony for seeking independence by dismembering it. Georgia is not Russia’s backyard, and any policy that treats it as being so will only bolster the anti-Western Russian neo-empire that has arisen under Putin to become a dangerous enemy of the West. McCain is entirely correct in his belief that in defending Georgia, the West will be defending itself. His suggestion that Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia be replaced by a UN force should be welcomed by all multilateralist opponents of unilateral intervention by great powers in the internal affairs of other countries. But don’t hold your breath.

I have noted before the parallels between the Islamic fascists of al-Qaeda and the Christian Chetnik fascists in Bosnia, including the fact that both groups share the same left-wing apologists. I have also noted before that Islamophobes and Islamofascists are two sides of the same coin. I am therefore unsurprised to see that another piece of the Red-Brown jigsaw puzzle has slotted into place, and that right-wing anti-Muslim bigots are beginning to view the West’s dangerous and aggressive enemy, the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, as a desired ally in their crusade against the Muslim peoples of the world.

An exceptionally bigoted article by Irina Filatova, representing the Putinist Russian-nationalist perspective, appeared on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ website in response to Western recognition of Kosova’s independence. Filatova writes: ‘This opposition [to Kosova's independence] among the Russians is practically unanimous. From the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky to the communist Gennady Ziuganov to even Nikita Belykh, leader of the Union of Right Forces, a crumbling but consistent defender of liberal values in Russia - all support the official line of Putin’s government.’ She goes on: ‘Many Russians warn that the creation of a Muslim state in the middle of Europe will strengthen the position of Muslim minorities and of Islam in Europe generally. They also point to the role of Kosovars - even under Nato control - in drug and people trafficking in Europe… how would the British feel if in 20 or 30 years Windsor, for example, proclaimed its independence on the grounds that the majority of its population was now Muslim and if the US decided to support this claim?’ What we have here is a bogey raised of ‘Muslim minorities and of Islam in Europe generally’; of a particular ethnic group identified with organised crime; and of a Muslim demographic threat leading to a Muslim state on British soil. However offensive such BNP-style sentiments are, and however inappropriate to find them expressed in an article on the website of Britain’s leading liberal newspaper, they are undoubtedly representative of the chauvinistic mainstream in Putin’s Russia.

Russian nationalists like Filatova are selective in their presentation of Russia as the aggrieved party, righteously upholding international law - an area in which Russia’s record is less than immaculate. The Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states and Japan’s Kurile Islands during and after World War, and subsequently invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan - all without the sanction of the UN Security Council. Previous Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin have repudiated or apologised for the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but this tradition of apologising for has not been continued by Putin. The current Russian president describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the twentieth century, and has refused to apologise for the Soviet Union’s illegal annexation of the Baltic states - an annexation that the US never recognised - claiming that the act had been consensual. He has refused also to return Japan’s Kurile Islands. Other Putinist actions that have been less than fanatical in their respect for international law include Russia’s launching of a cyber-war to destabilise Estonia, because the Estonians decided to move a statue from one place to another; the murder of Alexander Litvinenko; and the maintenance of a military presence in Moldova’s and Georgia’s break-away territories of Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in violation of the sovereignty of two UN member-states, Moldova and Georgia. Indeed, Putin’s support for these break-away territories, which are much closer to Russia than is Kosova, suggest that Russia, as well as being less than consistent in its support for international law, is less than consistent in its opposition to unilateral ’separatism’.

Russia’s conflict with the Western alliance over Kosova is, in other words, a crisis that Putin unnecessarily manufactured for his own purpose, which is to split the EU, disrupt its expansion and cause problems for the US and Britain. This is not a conflict that can be attributed to aggressiveness on the West’s part; Western leaders have bent over backwards to accommodate Putin since he took power in 1999. Tony Blair very publicly (and shamefully) supported Putin’s murderous war to crush Chechnya. Putin responded to Western benevolence by supplying Saddam Hussein’s regime with military information in the run-up to the Iraq War. This is not a conflict that we started.

There is a global struggle taking place against Islamic fascism, and it is one that all democrats should support. But in doing so, we find ourselves in some sense aligned with some unsavoury bigots whose motivation has less to do with support for democratic Western values and more to do with simple hatred of Muslims and Islam. Since democratic Western values include respect for freedom of conscience and religious toleration, such bigots clearly have no place in our ranks. Their hatred of Muslims is essentially no different from the Islamofascist hatred of Jews and Christians, and their bigotry only alienates ordinary Muslims and pushes them into the arms of the extremists. It is therefore gratifying that the Kosova crisis has prompted these bigots to reveal their true colours: as supporters of the West’s enemies. Writing in the pages of Frontpagemag.com, the screaming American chauvinist Julia Gorin suggests: ‘If Russia intervenes [over Kosova], then 2008 might become the year that war broke out between Russia and NATO. America, the EU, Europe’s immigrant ‘youths,’ and Osama bin Laden would find themselves on one side, fighting Russia, China, and those Europeans who resist Islamization on the other.’ No question about which side Gorin would be on in such a conflict; it wouldn’t be ours. Her antipathy toward the Kosova Albanians apparently originates with the support given by Democrat President Clinton’s support for them. Never mind that the Kosova Albanians are about the most pro-American nation on the planet; if you sufficiently hate Muslims and Democrats, it is apparently acceptable to align yourself against them and on the side of the West’s enemies.

Melanie Phillips, writing in the Spectator, has this to say: ‘It was at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 that some 70,000 died to keep the Islamic Ottoman Empire from advancing further into Europe. What is the point of fighting the jihad in Iraq when we are cheerfully opening the door to it in that very same place? Russia’s President Putin has warned that recognising Kosovo will rebound very badly upon the countries who have blundered into endorsing it. The fact that this outcome is merely the inevitable consequence of the war so unwisely prosecuted by those countries against Serbia does not soften its deeply alarming implications. Putin is warning only too correctly of the dangers to the west of this development and the supreme folly of endorsing it.’ Mad Mel’s article is about one of the craziest I’ve ever read, and contains too many gems to be listed here, but one of my favourites is this one: ‘The Albanians [in Kosova] have turned Christian graveyards into car parks, playgrounds and rubbish dumps. Anything relating to Serbia or Christianity libraries [sic], public records, books, names of places and even towns have been wiped out.’ Anything, apparently, except for the statues of Mother Teresa and Skanderbeg - the Albanians’ two most revered national heroes, both of them Christians - that stand right in the centre of the Kosovar capital of Pristina. Perhaps the Albanians didn’t notice them ? Thus, an anti-Muslim bigot with no knowledge of Kosova, its history or its people is allowing her prejudices to align her with the anti-Western regime in Moscow.

Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihadwatch argues: ‘Among major world powers, both Russia and China are opposed to an independent Kosovo. Even within Europe there are nations that oppose this independence — Spain — and others where many are uneasy. It would have been politically possible for the American government to have thought a bit more about the implications, the consequences, of having another Muslim state — the product of centuries of Ottoman rule — within Europe, and to have thought a bit more about the historical treatment of the Serbs under that same Ottoman rule, and their understandable bitterness.’ He goes on: ‘There is no reason not to take Serbia’s side now. There is every reason — of principle and of Infidel self-interest — to take it.’ In other words, you can burn down US embassies, you can give military information to Saddam to help him kill American soldiers, you can drive a wedge into the Western alliance, but you will still be our ally against people who wave the American flag in gratitude - provided that you are Christian and they are Muslim.

Albania has sent troops to Iraq and has shown much greater loyalty and staying power as our ally there than many predominantly Christian states. Albanian Defence Minister Fatmir Mediu has said that Albanian troops will remain in Iraq as long as US forces remain there. Western anti-Muslim bigots would like to deprive us of yet another ally, simply in order to satisfy their own hatred for all things Muslim.

What a disgrace.

In the global struggle against the Islamist menace, the anti-Muslim bigots are a liability. They should have no place in our ranks.

Hat tips: Hakmao, Drink-soaked Trots; Oliver Kamm.

I have spent the last two weeks in Andalucia, Spain, where I attended an academic conference of historians from the former Yugoslavia. I was able to witness at first hand the evidence of the pride with which educated Spaniards view Spain’s Moorish heritage. The ‘Moors’ - a somewhat rough term that encompasses Arabs, Berbers and other Muslims and Arabic-speakers - ruled part of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 1492. This is a period of 781 years: longer than there have been Europeans or their descendants living in the Americas; longer than there have been Protestants living anywhere. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact this has had on European and world history; this is a subject that could not be exhausted by many scholarly studies, and I cannot begin to do justice to it in a humble blog post. But just to scratch the surface: Arabic numerals first appeared in Europe in al-Andalus - Muslim Spain - and spread across the continent thanks to the Mediterranean trade between Muslims and Christians; the astrolabe, an astronomical tool, was introduced to Europe via Muslim Spain and helped Christopher Columbus to discover America; Muslim Spain was also the conduit by which Christian Europe learned the secret of gunpowder, and much else besides. Nor does the Islamic contribution to European civilisation begin and end with al-Andalus; coffee was introduced into Christian Europe from the Muslim world, via Ottoman Constantinople and Venice, and into England directly from the Ottoman world.

To make this point is not to subscribe to the triumphalism indulged in by some Muslim commentators on the subject; Islamic civilisation was itself based upon Christian, Jewish and pagan foundations, just as Christianity was an offshoot of Judaism and a large part of Europe’s heritage derives from pagan origins, e.g. the seven-day week. Indeed, it is ultimately pointless to try to determine just how much of our modern heritage we owe to each religion or prior civilisation; Europe is a synthesis, and has been so for most of its history.

This is, however, something that is difficult for many contemporary nationalists - whether from predominantly Christian or Muslim countries - to acknowledge. Although I have had occasion to criticise Spain’s democratic deficiency, it is nevertheless a relatively mature democracy in comparison to several countries in the eastern part of the European continent. Thus, although Spanish national identity was greatly shaped by the centuries-long Christian Reconquista to drive the Moors from the Iberian peninsula, resulting in an exceptionally strong Catholic orientation that influenced, among other things, the outbreak and course of the Spanish Civil War; although Spain expelled its Morisco (Moorish) population in the early seventeenth century; yet today there is sufficient historical distance for modern, educated Spaniards to appreciate the Islamic conquerors as part of their national heritage, as we in England appreciate the Norman French. Not to mention our last successful conqueror, the Dutchman William of Orange, whose Dutch army invaded England and occupied London in 1688, driving out the legitimate English king, James II; successive generations of English historians have contrived to portray this successful foreign invasion as a ‘Glorious Revolution’. Spaniards treasure national monuments that date from Moorish times: Seville’s Giralda; Cordoba’s Mezquita; Granada’s Alhambra. Just as we in England treasure our Norman castles.

The readiness to accept past invaders, particularly those of a different religion, as part of one’s national heritage is, indeed, an acid test for the maturity of one’s democracy, and it is a field where the nations of South East Europe still prove deficient. Turkey is, as much as Spain, the product of a synthetic Islamic-Christian heritage; the Christian legacy is almost as visible in Turkey today as the Islamic, and many of Turkey’s greatest tourist attractions are Christian in origin, such as the Hagia Sophia and the rock-dwellings of Cappadocia. Yet however aware Turks are of their Christian heritage, it is something they tend to find difficult to come to terms with, as Bruce Clark has brilliantly described in his book Twice a stranger: How mass expulsion forged modern Greece and Turkey (Granta Books, 2007). The modern Turkish nation-state was founded upon the extermination or expulsion of millions of Christian Armenians and Greeks - just as the modern, post-Ottoman Christian Balkan nation-states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro were founded upon the extermination or expulsion of much of the indigenous Ottoman Muslim population.

The tyrannical regime of Franjo Tudjman in Croatia in the 1990s made strenuous efforts to disavow Croatia’s Serb heritage. Yet the tune of the Croatian national anthem, Lijepa nasa domovina, was probably composed by Josip Runjanin, whose family was Serb Orthodox (the lyrics were composed by Antun Mihanovic, whose family was Catholic); the nineteenth-century father of integral Croatian nationalism, Ante Starcevic, had a Catholic father and a Serb Orthodox mother. Croatia’s greatest scientist, and one of the greatest scientists of world history, Nikola Tesla, was an ethnic Serb. The Croatian republic was established in the 1940s by a Croatian Partisan movement whose army, by the end of the war, numbered about 150,000 - roughly two-thirds of these were ethnic Croats and over one-quarter were ethnic Serbs. Tudjman’s own daughter Nevenka married a Serb and he, therefore, had part-Serb grandchildren. Yet in liberating the Serbian-occupied region of ‘Krajina’ in 1995, the Tudjman regime treated only the territory as having been liberated; the Croatian Serb population - natives of Croatia - was treated as the enemy. The bulk of this population having been evacuated by the Serbian-occupation authorities, the few Serb civilians who remained behind were systematically terrorised and frequently killed under the umbrella of the Croatian authorities, while Serb homes were burned and destroyed to discourage the refugees from returning - all this done to a national minority that had contributed so much to Croatia.

Turkey and Croatia are, however, currently under governments that are genuinely committed to turning their backs on such practices. Yet in areas where the national question is not yet resolved, local chauvinists are still engaging in the destruction of what should be treasured parts of the national heritage. The greatest building in the largest city held by the Bosnian Serb nationalists, the Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka, was destroyed in 1993 by the Serb authorities, which have since successfully stymied all efforts at its reconstruction. In Kosovo, as I have written elsewhere, Albanian thugs in 2004 vandalised and desecrated local Serb Orthodox religious buildings; Serb thugs in Belgrade and Nis responded by attacking mosques and smashing Ottoman gravestones. These are acts of barbarity that would be equivalent to the Spanish today destroying the Alhambra. The Banja Luka Serbs may come to regret the destruction of what should have been their greatest tourist attraction; they can still rebuild it.

The Kosovo Albanians should treasure their Orthodox churches and monasteries, and the Serbs their mosques and Ottoman monuments, as the Spanish treasure the Alhambra, Giralda and Mezquita. The Kosovo Albanians should feel proud of the Orthodox part of their heritage, as the Serbs should feel proud of the Islamic part of theirs. Skanderbeg, the Albanians’ greatest national hero, was a Christian who fought alongside the Serbs against the Ottomans, and who had a Serbian daughter-in-law; the Albanian double-eagle flag is itself of Byzantine origin. The most powerful Bosnian ever to have lived was Mehmed-pasha Sokolovic, who, as grand vizier in the sixteenth-century, presided over the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power; Sokolovic came from a Serb Orthodox family and, although a Muslim convert, reestablished the Serbian Patriarchate of Pec. Whether Sokolovic was a ‘Serb’ or a ‘Bosniak’ is a meaningless question; he belongs to both nations today. The fact that there is a Serb population in western Bosnia is itself a product of the Ottoman heritage; the Orthodox spread westward in Bosnia under the Ottoman umbrella. Belgrade’s greatest building and tourist attraction is the fortress of Kalemegdan, which was built by successive occupiers including the Ottomans; the tomb of one of its Ottoman governors still stands prominently in its heart, inside which hung, at least until very recently, an Ottoman flag. Belgrade place names like Kalemegdan, Karaburma and Mirijevo are Turkish in origin.

(As an aside: while many of our contemporary Western ‘anti-imperialists’ like nothing better than patronisingly to stereotype the Serbs as ‘noble savages’ who have been holding out against ‘imperialism’ for centuries, Serbs in reality often bravely fought for the Ottoman, Habsburg and other empires. In the Battle of Ankara in 1402, when the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid was defeated by the great Central Asian conqueror Tamurlane, Bayezid’s Serbian troops fought loyally for him while his Muslim troops deserted. Kara Djordje Petrovic, who led the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottomans in the early nineteenth century, served in the Austrian army; his name, and that of the Serbian royal dynasty that he sired - Karadjordjevic - is itself Turkish in origin. The Serb commander Stevan Jovanovic conquered Hercegovina for the Habsburgs in 1878. Serb troops from Croatia fought loyally for Austria-Hungary against Serbia in World War I. The Serb commander Svetozar Boroevic von Bojna successfully defended the Habsburg Empire from the Italians for the best part of World War I, and reached the rank of Field Marshal in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Serbian troops served alongside the British and French against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. Etc. etc. Some of this should rightfully be celebrated.)

All of this is to say that the heritage of the nations of Europe that have experienced both an Islamic and a Christian presence, or a Catholic and an Orthodox presence, like the heritage of Europe as a whole, cannot be homogenised as the nationalists and religious bigots would like, and ‘purified’ of ‘alien’ national or religious elements. Whereas being a ‘good’ nationalist may once have been seen to involve tearing down an ’alien’ mosque or a church, being a good European and democrat today should require the embracing of all elements of the national past, in all their rich multi-ethnic and multi-religious diversity, and rebuilding or restoring those same mosques and churches destroyed by previous generations. The unified, democratic Europe that is emerging requires not just the unification of our territories, but the unification of our histories.

Correction: My friend and colleague Andras Riedlmayer, whose expertise on the topic of cultural destruction and vandalism in Bosnia is second to none, informs me that what I have written above about the Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka is out of date: the Banja Luka authorities have recently dropped their opposition to the reconstruction of the Ferhadija, and even provided modest financial support for it; reconstruction has consequently commenced under the direction of Professor Muhamed Hamidovic, retired dean of the Faculty of Architecture in Sarajevo. On this occasion, it is a pleasure to be corrected.

Local political and religious figures in Afghanistan are apparently concerned that the TV screening of a Shakira concert could inspire suicide bombers. It would be superfluous to comment on what this tells us about the terrorists’ motives. But we can safely discount a sense of injustice at the crimes of Western imperialism.

Among political ‘dissidents’ of one kind or another, it is frequently taken for granted that almost everything about international affairs you read in the daily papers or see on the news is simply imperialist propaganda, which the ruling classes disseminate in order to hoodwink the brainless common people into supporting their policies. Perhaps more than any other part of the world, the former Yugoslavia is portrayed as the place against which imperialist propaganda most frequently sins. All those who for one reason or another were sympathetic to the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic or hostile to the Bosnian Muslims, felt compelled to justify themselves with the claim that Serbian atrocities in the 1990s were massively exaggerated by the imperialist media and/or that Alija Izetbegovic’s Bosnian regime was itself responsible for the bloodshed. This line then gelled with the same folks’ discourse on the Iraq war, whether for or against; it being either claimed that the US had no business preaching about a war against Islamist terror when it had itself supported Izetbegovic’s ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ against the innocent Serbs, or that the war on terror retrospectively proves that the US backed the wrong side in the Yugoslav war. To maintain either of these positions requires conflating the moderate Bosnian Muslims led by Izetbegovic with the genuine Islamofascists of al-Qa’ida - a difficult trick to pull off. In this article we shall show just how difficult it is, by analysing a popular myth of the anti-Muslim lobby: that Bosnia’s Izetbegovic was an Islamofascist who revived the politics of the SS in the Balkans. And there is no better place to start than with our old friend Neil Clark, whose statements on the topic are unfortunately entirely representative of a wider circle of Milosevic supporters and Islamophobes. Indeed, compared to some, Neil ‘Milosevic - prisoner of conscience’ Clark is veritably moderate.

Clark is something of a celebrity as he has recently won this year’s ‘Best UK Blog’ award. Out of a total number of UK bloggers that Clark himself estimates at 4 million, his blog came first with the impressive tally of 1,116 votes, although some of his more zealous supporters in this contest, such as his frequent sparring-partner Oliver Kamm, admit to having voted for Clark many times over (in Oliver’s case, perhaps for ironic reasons). Be that as it may, Clark is justly proud of having captured what he describes as ‘the most prestigious prize in blogging’, which he attributes to the fact that ‘the positions I espouse are (unlike the self-appointed uber elite of bloggers) in tune with the views of the majority of ordinary people.’ I should like to take this opportunity to offer Neil my congratulations. 

Clark is perhaps best known for his admiration of the late Slobodan Milosevic, of whom he famously said that ‘his worst crime was to carry on being a socialist.’ He has, consequently, acquired something of a reputation as a Balkan expert among the ranks of both left-wing and right-wing Milosevic supporters. So it is reasonable that he should have a go at fellow Balkan expert Michael Palin of Monty Python for not being sufficiently well informed on recent Balkan history. Apparently, Palin’s sin was to remark that Milosevic had ‘died of a heart attack at The Hague after his conviction for war crimes.’ Clark points out that Milosevic died without being convicted.

And now for something completely serious. Although comical in the eyes of any normal person, Clark is simply one of a number of Milosevic supporters who have been promoting the line that the late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic was a supporter of the SS in Bosnia during World War II. In fact, in this group, Clark’s views have been far from the most outlandish. Others have gone so far as to claim that Izetbegovic was a supporter of the SS during the recent war in Bosnia as well. Yet these more radical elements have arrived at their interpretation through strict adherence to the Neil Clark methodology in historical research. What they all have in common is a desire to rehabilitate Milosevic while demonising the Muslim inhabitants of the Balkans, thereby countering the perceived brainwashing of the human race by imperialist propaganda. 

Readers may remember that early last year, in a debate at Harry’s Place, Clark was unable to provide any evidence to back up his assertion that Izetbegovic had recruited for the SS during World War II. This is an old story that has been extensively discussed by Oliver Kamm, among others, and there is no need to go into it again in detail here. The long and the short of it is that, as far as I can tell, the rumour that Izetbegovic recruited for the SS began with a letter allegedly sent by Milan Bulajic (a Srebrenica-denying Serbian historian), to David Binder (an American journalist known for his admiration of Serb Nazi-collaborator Momcilo Djujic and indicted Serb war-criminal Ratko Mladic), claiming that he (Bulajic) had learned of Izetbegovic’s pro-SS activities through studying the transcript of his post-war trial by the Communist authorities in Bosnia (it should be noted here that Izetbegovic was not tried as a war-criminal or as a collaborator, but because of his political opposition to the Communist regime). The claim that the teenage Izetbegovic recruited for the SS during World War II thus remains entirely unproven, and will remain so unless Bulajic or anyone else can produce evidence to support it. Nevertheless, the rumour of Izetbegovic’s ‘SS past’ circulated among pro-Milosevic conspiracy theorists until it was picked up by Clark, via an obscure US-based outfit called the ‘International Strategic Studies Association’ (ISSA), as Kamm has explained here. The article on which Clark based his claim against Izetbegovic was this one, written by a certain Vojin Joksimovich.

Although Clark has become an object of ridicule for many of us (for reasons that Stephen Pollard summarises here), his treatment of Balkan affairs is entirely representative of his wider circle. For example, among the many factual errors that Joksimovich makes is his claim that Izetbegovic’s close political collaborator Hasan Cengic was a ‘veteran of the 13th Waffen SS Division’. Cengic was, it should be pointed out, born in 1957, and therefore might have found it difficult to serve in the SS. Nevertheless, this accusation against Cengic was repeated by other members of this circle, including Yossef Bodansky, ‘Director of Research’ at the ISSA and a pioneer in demonising the Izetbegovic regime. Another such conspiracy theorist, a certain Peter Robert North, turned up on Clark’s blog to push the line that Cengic had indeed served in the SS twelve years or so before he was even born.

North has written elsewhere that ‘Alija Izetbegovic RESURRECTED this NAZI SS DIVISION back in the early 90’s at the beginning of the war [in Bosnia] ’ [emphasis in original]. This same claim was made by members of a US-based circle of Milosevic supporters and Srebrenica deniers, including Francisco Gil-White, who claimed that ‘Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia proudly recreated the Nazi SS Handzar Division’. Gil-White’s collaborator, the ex-Maoist Jared Israel of the Milosevic-supporting, Srebrenica-denying website Emperor’s Clothes, also makes much of a supposedly recreated Handzar division in Izetbegovic’s Bosnia.

Jared Israel and Francisco Gil-White, as true disciples of the Neil Clark school of documentary evidence, base their claim that a reborn Bosnian SS Division, up to 6,000 strong, existed under Izetbegovic, on a single newspaper article written by Robert Fox and published in the Daily Telegraph on 29 December 1993, and reproduced in full on the Emperor’s Clothes website. Like all good Chomskyites, they view themselves as Wise Men with a unique gift for deciding which newspaper articles represent The Truth and which are simply Imperialist Propaganda. I do not share their genius in this field, so I can only guess how they do it, but it seems that any newspaper article that supports their line represents The Truth, while all those that do not support their line can be dismissed as Imperialist Propaganda - indeed as evidence of just how much Imperialist Propaganda there is, and how determined the Ruling Classes are to propagate it. The Emperor’s Clothes website is, in fact, largely devoted to claiming that the vast number of media reports of atrocities by Milosevic and his forces were all simply fabrications. Yet it has no trouble whatsoever in condemning Izetbegovic as having recreated an SS division in 1990s Bosnia, solely on the basis of a single article from this same, ‘imperialist’ media. Gil-White describes Fox’s article as ‘one of a sprinkling of reports telling the truth about the Sarajevo regime that managed to make it through the censorship screen.’ By which he means, he agrees with this article but doesn’t agree with most articles about Bosnia that were published during the war.

The Bosnian SS Division ‘Handzar’ (or ‘Handschar’) was a unit that existed during World War II, and it is conceivable that there really was a handful of Muslim zealots who, during the recent war, fought on the Bosnian side and grandiloquently named themselves the ‘Handzar Division’ after this historic unit. It is indicative, however, that no other journalist or anyone else seems to have noticed the existence of a unit of ‘up to 6,000 strong’ that named itself after the SS and that was, according to Fox, officered by Albanians and trained by mujahedin veterans from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fox himself appears to have obtained his information about this alleged ‘Handzar Division’ at second hand, from individual UN officials on the ground.

Be this as it may, Fox does not implicate Izetbegovic or Cengic as being in any way connected with this alleged Handzar Division. He writes as follows: ‘Hardline elements of the Bosnian army, like the Handzar, appear to have the backing of an increasingly extreme leadership in Sarajevo, represented by Mr Ejup Ganic, Foreign Minister, Mr Haris Silajdzic, Prime Minister, and Mr Enver Hadzihasanovic, the new army chief.’

Thus, the alleged link between this supposed ‘Handzar Division’ and the Bosnian leadership boils down to the claim that ‘hardline elements of the Bosnian army’ of which the ‘Handzar’ are merely an example, ‘appear to have the backing’ of ‘an increasingly extreme leadership in Sarajevo’. Fox identifies Ejup Ganic as the first among these, but erroneously describes him as ‘Foreign Minister’ when he was in reality a member of the Bosnian Presidency. He also lists Haris Silajdzic as representative of this ‘extreme’ leadership, even though Silajdzic was actually one of the more moderate elements in the Bosnian government, one who himself came under attack from the Muslim hardliners in 1995.

So what we’re left with is a single newspaper article from the ‘imperialist’ media, which describes at second hand a recreated SS ‘Handzar Division’ that nobody else ever noticed, that is merely an example of hardline Bosnian Army elements that in turn merely ‘appear to have the backing’ of an extreme faction in the Bosnian leadership about whose composition the author of the article is himself pretty hazy.

Damning evidence indeed. John R. Schindler, in his book ‘Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad’ (Zenith Press, 2007), pp. 167-168, was sufficiently convinced by Fox’s article to assume its accuracy and repeat the key points, merely tweaking the facts slightly, so that the new ‘Handzar Division’ was no longer simply officered by Albanians, but now had a ‘fair share’ of them in its ranks as well. Yet the worthy gentlemen at Emperor’s Clothes were not satisfied with their scoop, and felt the need to sex up the evidence a bit. So Jared Israel penned an article entitled ‘The Handzar Division lives on in Bosnia’, which turns out to be a report on a series of historical articles about the Handzar Division from World War II that appeared in a Bosnian magazine in 1997: ‘The photos were taken during World War II, but they provide a glimpse of the truth about what really happened during the recent Bosnia war, and what is happening today.’ Indeed, members of this circle often seem genuinely unable to distinguish between the recent war and World War II; thus the extreme conservative Julia Gorin from the US accuses ‘Alijah [sic] Izetbegovic’ of having been ‘part of the Nazi SS Handzar division during World War II’, and helpfully provides her reader with a link to Fox’s article (which says nothing about Izetbegovic’s supposed membership of the World War II Handzar division, and mentions the unit itself only in passing).

Gil-White accused Izetbegovic of having ‘proudly recreated the Nazi SS Handzar Division’, based entirely on Fox’s article, even though Fox did not claim that Izetbegovic had anything to do with either the original World War II division or its alleged 1990s reincarnation. Yet Gil-White is far from the only one to make this factual leap. The amateur historian Carl Savich likewise claims ‘The Bosnian Muslim Army and the Bosnian Muslim Government of Alija Izetbegovic and Ejup Ganic sought to re-establish the World War II Nazi Waffen SS Divisions formed out of Bosnian Muslims’ - again basing this entirely on Fox’s article, which claims no such thing. Yossef Bodansky, the pioneer of Muslim-related Balkan conspiracy theories, writes that ‘ in mid-1993, Sarajevo revived the Handzar Division with all its fascist culture and preoccupation with the division’s role as the worthy successor to its SS predecessors. The Bosnia-Herzegovina Handzar Division provides the praetorian guards for Izetbegovic and other senior leaders of Sarajevo, clearly reflecting their pride in and support for the revival of the old traditions.’ Bodansky provides no sources to support these claims. Another of Bodansky’s unsourced descriptions of the resurrected Handzar division was picked up and repeated by the white-supremacist website Stormfront, which repeated his description of a force that had by now grown to between 8,500 and 10,500, and was now no longer merely officered by Albanians, but composed of them almost entirely. Stormfront describes this as ’sizable Islamist forces involved in subversive and terrorist operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina.’ Bodansky’s claims were also repeated by Shaul Shay in his book ‘Islamic Terror and the Balkans’ (Transaction Publishers, 2007), p. 68 - again no sources.

There are strange bedfellows in this bizarre campaign of manufacturing a contemporary SS and demonising the Bosnian Muslims. Ted Belman of the extremist pro-Israel Israpundit website repeats Gil-White’s fabrications about Izetbegovic’s supposed reconstitution of the Handzar Division. Belman seems to equate the Bosnian Muslims with the perceived Muslim and Arab enemy: ‘The comparisons of the destruction of Yugoslavia with the destruction of Israel are chilling and instructive’ (apparently, Israel is not the Jewish state we all thought it to be, but is in fact a multinational federation similar to Yugoslavia). Belman’s fellow Israpundit contributor Felix Quigley draws upon Neil Clark’s ‘excellent historical “lesson”‘ and ‘very hard work’ in compiling a ‘wonderful history’ of the ‘Bosnian Islamofascists’, that naturally includes a reference to Izetbegovic, now promoted to ‘head organizer of a recruiting drive for the infamous, all Muslim, Waffen SS 20,000-strong Handzar or Hanjar Division’ (Quigley appears ignorant of the fact that the original Handzar Division was not ‘all Muslim’, but contained Croats and Germans as well).

Needless to say, none of these principled individuals mentions the fact that the Yugoslav People’s Army, which under Milosevic’s control carried out the attack on Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims, included under its command the paramilitary force known as the ‘Chetniks’ of Vojislav Seselj, named after the Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement of World War II. Seselj was a political friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen. He had been personally decorated by the veteran Chetnik warlord Momcilo Djujic, who had fought alongside the Nazis in World War II. The neo-Nazi Seselj was deputy prime-minister under Milosevic in 1999, while the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovo Albanians was being carried out.

When one takes all this into consideration, Monty Python is a much better source for accurate historical information than Neil Clark and his comrades.

(For further information on Bosnian-war historical revisionism, see the excellent Balkan Witness website and the equally excellent Srebrenica Genocide Blog).

Update: Santa Claus came early for me this year, and deposited through my letter-box a copy of the latest scaremongering book about the Muslim peoples of the Balkans, ‘The coming Balkan caliphate: The threat of radical Islam to Europe and the West’ (Praeger Security International, 2007), by Christopher Deliso of Balkanalysis.com. Deliso writes of ‘Hasan Cengic, a veteran of the World War II SS Handzar Division who reincarnated the unit while serving as Bosnia’s deputy defense minister in the early 1990s.’ (p. 8). As we noted above, Cengic was born in 1957 and Deliso’s accusation that he served in the SS must therefore have been based on some quite spectacularly superficial research; nor does Deliso provide any evidence for his accusation that Cengic ‘reincarnated the unit’ in the 1990s. Elsewhere, Deliso accuses Izetbegovic of having been ‘a recruiter for the Bosnian Muslim Handzar (”Dagger”) Division’ (p. 5), his only source being Vojin Joksimovich’s error-ridden article for the ISSA, mentioned above, though Deliso also cites Robert Fox’s article to ‘prove’ that the Handzar division had been ‘resurrected in the 1990s, during the Presidency of Izetbegovic.’

Based on research of this calibre, it is perhaps not surprising that Deliso should conclude that we are faced with a ‘coming Balkan caliphate’…

On Sunday evening I had the privilege of attending a lecture given by Richard Perle at the Finchley Synagogue, on the topic of whether peace is possible in the Middle East. Perle has been one of a number of US officials who have promoted a progressive vision of US foreign policy. In an earlier era, a US overthrow of a hostile dictator would probably have been followed simply by his replacement with a pro-American dictator, yet it was thanks to the vision of Perle and other neoconservatives that the overthrow of Saddam was followed by the establishment of a democracy in Iraq. An Iraqi democrat who attended last night’s meeting gave his thanks to Perle and his colleagues, describing them as architects who had drawn up a beautiful plan, only to see it spoiled by mistakes during the construction. Perle gave his blessing also to the plea from an Iranian dissident, who was also present, that the US should support the democratic movement in Iran. He has been a principled champion of the defence of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo from Milosevic’s aggression and tyranny and critic of Putin’s brutal repression in Chechnya.

In his speech last night, Perle highlighted not only the obstacle to Middle Eastern peace represented by traditional US foes like the Iranian and Syrian regimes, but also the threat posed by the regime in Saudi Arabia which, as he pointed out, spreads the poison of Islamic extremism across the globe. He criticised the British government for providing the red carpet treatment to Saudi King Abdullah during his recent visit. It is deeply ironic that neoconservatives like Perle have been so vilified by fashionable left-liberal opinion, when it is precisely they who have broken with the prevailing orthodoxy among Western policy-makers, that realpolitik requires the support of brutal dictators who happen to be friendly to the West. Neoconservaties like Perle are doing precisely what traditional leftists should be doing but in most cases are not: agitating against the dictators.

It was in his discussion of the Israel-Palestine question that I found myself disagreeing with Richard; not because I disagreed with his principles, but because I disagree with how he interprets them. Responding to a question from an American graduate student, who asked him whether the US really derived any benefit from the alliance with Israel, he responded that the day the US abandoned a friend to ingratiate itself with the enemies of that friend will be the day that the US loses all moral authority as a superpower, and that it will be perceived globally as having done so. Israel is the US’s friend, it is a democracy and a loyal ally, and the US should support its friend. If I understood correctly, Perle interprets this to mean supporting Israel in all its outstanding areas of dispute with the Palestinians.

I entirely agree that the US should support Israel. The question is: what does ’supporting Israel’ mean ? What does it mean to be a friend ?

A true friend does not just support everything one does, even when one is not in the right. A true friend should be prepared to tell one when one is in the wrong and to dissuade one from a course of action that will lead one to harm. A true friend of Turkey would advise it to withdraw from Cyprus; a true friend of Serbia would advise it to give up Kosovo; a true friend of Iran would advise it to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons. If the US is to be a true friend of Israel, it is not enough just to support Israel against its enemies; it must also guide it away from a self-destructive policy.

Israel’s waging of a territorial conflict with the Palestinians in the West Bank is a self-destructive policy. Because while Israel is in the right in its determination to defend itself from neighbouring regimes or movements that seek its destruction, such as Ahmadinejad’s regime in Tehran or Hezbollah in Lebanon; while it is in the right to face down enemies that deny its right to exist; while it is right to defend its population from suicide bombers; in its policy in the West Bank, Israel is in the wrong. No amount of pointing to the crimes of the other side - great though they are - can hide this fact.

It is often, and rightly, pointed out by Israel’s defenders that critics of Israel, from the ranks of the Islamic world, the left-liberal intelligentsia in the West, and elsewhere, will single out Israeli crimes and misdemeanours for condemnation while ignoring the equal or greater crimes and misdemeanours of neighbouring Muslim states: Syria’s Hama massacre and promotion of the Lebanese civil war; Iran’s persecution of the Ahwazi Arabs; the genocide in Darfur; the brutal oppression of women and absence of democracy in Egypt and Saudia Arabia; and so forth. But it does no good to point out this hypocrisy and condemn all these crimes, and then to turn a blind eye to the utterly unjustifiable Israeli policy of colonisation and settlement building in the West Bank; the denial of human rights to the West Bank Palestinians; the attempt to squeeze them into an ever-smaller slice of their homeland.

The reason it does no good - leaving aside the question of morality - is that it is extremely damaging to us in our life-and-death struggle against Islamist terrorism and the dictatorships that promote it. In this struggle, the propaganda war is all important. A large part of our difficulties in Iraq stem from the fact that - unlike in Kuwait in 1991, Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 - we did not win the propaganda war prior to our military intervention. It might once have been thought that the US was powerful enough simply to forge ahead with its preferred policy regardless of what the world thought, but that does not appear so feasible today. We are waging a struggle with the Islamists for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims across the world, and we cannot afford to be the bad guys anywhere at all. Because our enemies will always highlight our errors - Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and so forth.

It is, arguably, hypocritical when Muslims complain about the mistreatment of other Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and elsewhere while ignoring the persecution of Muslim populations by Muslim regimes, in Darfur, Khuzestan, eastern Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. But the problem is not that they are highlighting the plight of Palestians, Kashmiris and Chechens, but that they are failing to highlight the persecution of Muslims by other Muslims. Both Muslims and non-Muslims should be highlighting alike the plight of Palestinians and Ahwazi Arabs, Kashmiris and Sudanese, Chechens and Saudi Shias.

For better or for worse, the Palestinian question has come to assume tremendous symbolic importance in the eyes of many Muslims - and indeed of many non-Muslims. Objectively speaking, the oppression of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank forms only a small part of the total oppression that is occurring in the Middle East. But symbolically, the Palestinian question has come to assume an importance out of all proportion to its objective importance in Middle Eastern geopolitics.

Our credibility in the eyes of world opinion, and particularly world Muslim opinion, rests disproportionately on our ability to deliver a just settlement to the Israel-Palestine dispute. Not a pro-Palestinian settlement, but a settlement that is just for both sides.

The Israelis and Palestinians are two great nations; equally worthy of freedom, independence and security. This has nothing to do with the awfulness of the leaderships of one or both of them. The fascistic, anti-Semitic nature of the Hamas movement, the suicide bombings, or the corrupt brutality of Yasser Arafat do not detract from the Palestinian right to national independence, any more than the massive war-crimes of Ariel Sharon, the anti-Arab racism of parts of the Israeli right or the pro-Nazi and terrorist past of Yitzhak Shamir detract from the right of Israel to security and self-defence.

I have yet to hear, let alone be convinced by, any Israeli justification for the existence of the West Bank settlements, or for exclusive Israeli possession of Jerusalem. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank may have made military sense when Israel was threatened with the conventional armies of neighbouring Arab states, but today the threat is different: suicide bombers, rocket attacks and potentially a nuclear strike. The occupation of the West Bank does not help Israel to defend itself from these threats, but it does massively alienate world opinion. Furthermore, Israel’s security rests on the sanctity of legally established borders; by questioning the sanctity of these borders in the goal of annexing West Bank territory, Israel is undermining the very institution that underpins its own territorial integrity. The occupation of the West Bank and the abuse of Palestinian human rights that this involves drives ordinary Palestinians into the arms of the extremists. The longer this goes on, the more danger there is of Israel eventually coming to grief at the hands of its enemies. And all for a few small slices of territory that, objectively, it needs less than the Palestinians do.

As an outsider with no personal emotional ties with either Israel or Palestine, any settlement that would award the Palestinians less than 22% of the territory of historic Palestine, or that would award all Jerusalem to just one of the two nations, would strike me as deeply unjust. No matter how awful the Palestinian leadership is, the Palestinian people deserve better than that. It is only through a just settlement - an Israel secure in its pre-’67 borders, an independent Palestine comprising the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and a Palestinian abandonment of the right to return to pre-’67 Israel in exchange for fair compensation - that a stable peace can be born. A peace that would undercut the appeal of Hamas and other extremists and remove this symbolic injustice in the eyes of world opinion while safeguarding Israel’s security.

If Hamas were to continue to attack Israel from the West Bank following an Israeli withdrawal, Israel would be in an incomparably stronger position strategically than it is today. Because Israel would be unquestionably and totally the good guy; it would lose its negative image in the eyes of all but the extremists; it would enjoy the sympathy of the whole world.

That’s something anyone would want for a friend.

In a well known Bosnian joke, the Bosnian Muslim Suljo is walking in the hills around Sarajevo, when he comes upon his neighbour Mujo and his wife Fata. He is puzzled to note that Fata is walking several paces in front of Mujo.

‘My dear neighbour Mujo, why is your wife walking in front of you ?’, Suljo asks, ’Surely, the Holy Koran commands that a wife walk behind her husband, not in front ?’

‘My dear neighbour Suljo’, replies Mujo, ‘When the Holy Koran was written, there weren’t any landmines.’

This is a joke thought up by Muslims, about Muslims. It humorously illustrates the essential truth about Islam and other religions: that they are interpreted by different individuals and generations to suit their own particular needs. The fictional Mujo could be described either as an Islamic conservative or as a progressive, upholding the Koran’s message about the subordination of women to men, but accepting that the precise rules needed to be modified to suit modern purposes. Mujo’s interpretation of Islam is no more or less valid than anyone else’s; with the Prophet dead, nobody can say for sure exactly how the Koran should be interpreted, or what God really wanted. Yet there are plenty of individuals, on opposite sides of the contemporary debate about Islam, who assume the mantle of the Prophet, and try to tell the rest of us that their own version of Islam is the only valid one. The irony is that apparently bitter political enemies - Islamophobes and Islamofascists - have an identical interpretation of ‘true’ Islam. Islamophobia and Islamofascism feed off each other - they are two sides of the same coin.

In her brilliant autobiography, Infidel, the Somali intellectual and Muslim apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that Osama bin Laden, in his murderous injunctions about slaughtering Jews and other infidels, is simply interpreting the Koran correctly. She writes that ‘the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant’, while in reality: ’True Islam, as a rigid belief system and a moral framework, leads to cruelty. The inhuman act of those nineteen hijackers was the logical outcome of this detailed system for regulating human behaviour.’ (Infidel, p. 272). She strongly implies that Islam is inherently more problematic than other religions such as Christianity or Judaism. Hirsi Ali has got into a lot of trouble because of these and other observations. She has been denounced as an ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ and become a bee in the bonnet of various representatives of wishy-washy left-liberalism. And she has been portrayed as an Islamophobe.

Hirsi Ali is not an Islamophobe. A ‘phobia’ is defined by the New Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something’. There is no evidence to suggest that Hirsi Ali is afraid of Islam; indeed, all the evidence suggests that she is much less afraid of it than the vast majority of Western intellectuals. Nor is her opposition to Islam an ‘aversion’ or ‘irrational’; we are not talking here about an instinct or emotion that wells up from her subconscious, nor of a blind and ignorant prejudice, but of an entirely calm and rational position born of extensive scholarly research and reflection. There is nothing ’extreme’ about Hirsi Ali’s position; she does not argue that Islam should be banned, nor that its followers be persecuted. She simply sees it as a problem, and wants to free Muslim women from the abuse inflicted upon them in the name of Islam. So Hirsi Ali does not qualify as an Islamophobe on any count.

Contrary to myth, Hirsi Ali is very well aware that there is nothing in the Koran that sanctions genital mutilation; she simply points out that the name of Islam, as interpreted by traditional societies, is upheld to justify such abuses. And the Koran really does appear to sanction other abuses such as wife-beating: ‘Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them’ (The Koran, 4:34). In pointing this out, Hirsi Ali is simply indicating a very real problem: that the abuse of women in Islamic societies is underpinned by religion. Hirsi Ali is a principled and courageous individual who deserves full solidarity in her campaign against the abuse of women and against those who would silence her. Nevertheless, she goes slightly too far.

Of all the countries in Nazi-occupied Europe, the single best record in the rescuing of Jews from the Nazis was achieved by Muslim-majority Albania (with the possible - and I stress the word ‘possible’ - exception of Denmark). In the words of Mordechai Paldiel, Director of the Department for the Righteous at Israel’s Yad Vashem:

‘The story of the Albanian rescuers is unique in several ways. Firstly, in that the persons saved were mostly not Albanian citizens, but Jews who had fled to that country when it was ruled by the Italians, and now found themselves in danger of deportation to concentration camps when the Germans took over, in September 1943. Secondly, the rescuers who were overwhelmingly of the Islamic faith felt a religious obligation to assist and save those who had sought refuge in their country and were unjustly persecuted; in other words, it was a behaviour motivated by the Islamic religion, as wisely interpreted by the rescuers.’

In Bosnia-Hercegovina during World War II, when the Croat fascists, or Ustashas, began a genocidal persecution of Orthodox Serbs, Jews and gypsies, they were opposed by Islamic religious figures across the country. One Muslim proclamation, whose list of signatories was headed by five imams, opposed the crimes of the Ustashas on the grounds that ‘For hundreds of years the Bosnian Muslims have lived in unity and love with all Bosnians regardless of religion, just as exalted Islam commands’. The proclamation appealed to the Bosnian people: ‘Let religion not divide us, let it rather unite us by acting beneficially upon all of us to be, above all, people who do not permit that they be ruled by the awaked animal instincts of killing and plundering, which a cultured person should restrain.’ This and other similar appeals inspired by Islamic and other sentiments were made, it should be remembered, under a genocidal dictatorship that was entirely ready to - and did - murder Muslims for acts of disobedience. 

Nobody should suggest that these Albanian and Bosnian Muslim heroes were not proper Muslims, and that the ‘real’ Islam is represented by Osama bin Laden. To do so would be wrong both in principle and in practice. In principle, because everyone is free to interpret what Islam ‘really’ means, and nobody has any God-given authority to insist that theirs is the one ‘true’ version. And in practice, because opponents of Islamism would thereby be making propaganda on al-Qaeda’s behalf. If one tells young Muslims that the Koran, correctly interpreted, does indeed command them to slaughter Jews and other infidels, it is unlikely to persuade them to become atheists. It is at least as likely to persuade them to become jihadis.

Muslim Albanians have been staunch allies to Britain and the US in the War on Terror. Bosnia’s Muslims have been victims of genocide at the hands of genuinely Islamophobic Christians, but have nevertheless entirely resisted joining the international Islamist-terrorist movement. The moderate-Islamic Justice and Development Party in Turkey has promoted democracy while fighting fundamentalism and pursuing EU membership. So it is simply untrue that belief in Islam makes people automatically fundamentalists or fascists. Anyone who has spent any time in cities like London, Sarajevo or Istanbul, where large numbers of secularised Muslims live, knows very well that this is nonsense. It would be extremely stupid to alienate decent, moderate Muslims by demonising them and equating them with the fundamentalist minority - do we really want more Muslim enemies ?

It has been argued that Islam is uniquely aggressive and expansionist. We could perhaps draw up a score sheet comparing the crimes of Muslim and Christian conquerors: the great massacres of Timur; the expansionism of the Ottoman Empire and its violence against its subject peoples, culminating in the religiously catalysed Armenian Genocide; set against the Christian enslavement and extermination of the native Americans; the massacres of Muslims and Jews by the crusaders; and so on. The Christians would undoubtedly come out as the quantitatively worse offenders, simply because they occupied a larger portion of the globe. But only a truly self-hating guilty liberal genuinely believes that ‘Islam = good - Christianity = bad’; the point is that these religions are fundamentally similar. So too is Judaism - when the Jews finally got their own modern nation-state, they behaved exactly the same as most Christian and Muslim nations do - which is to say, not very well. As Benjamin Lieberman shows in his book Terrible Fate: Ethnic cleansing and the making of modern Europe, in their propensity to carry out atrocities, Christians, Muslims and Jews resemble nothing so much as each other.

Christopher Hitchens correctly points out that the term ‘Islamophobia’ has been used to stifle criticism of Islam. He is absolutely right to draw attention to the indiscriminate use of the term by paranoid, self-pitying Muslims and guilt-ridden, self-hating Western liberals. But he is wrong to describe the term ‘Islamophobia’ itself as a ’stupid neologism’. Islamophobes exist - they are people who have an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to Islam. They view with suspicion, fear and revulsion even ordinary expressions of piety on the part of practising, non-fundamentalist Muslims. They see even such moderate Muslims as dangerous and unwelcome. This form of bigotry is arguably not quite the same as bigotry directed against someone because of their ethnicity or skin colour. Yet if it results in violence against innocent individuals, it is in the last resort just as bad. Anyone who doubts where this can lead should visit the city of Banja Luka, in Bosnia’s Serb Republic, and try to find the beautiful Ferhadija mosque that once dominated the city centre. The destruction of mosques across Bosnia, by both Serb and Croat Christian fascists, was directed against a Muslim community that, as indicated above, had provided many brave, religiously inspired opponents of genocide and fascism in World War II.

As an atheist, I sympathise with the view of the Marquis de Sade (on this question, at least), who wrote that ‘One must first have lost one’s mind to be able to acknowledge a God, and to have gone completely mad to worship such a thing.’ I consider the idea of a God an affront to my intelligence, and the idea that one should worship a God simply beyond comprehension. The point is, while religion is ultimately ridiculous from an intellectual standpoint, it is not necessarily evil. In a pluralistic society, we are all free to hold ridiculous beliefs. Muslims and Christians are equally free to consider atheism ridiculous if they so wish, which they presumably do; we are free to ridicule their beliefs, and they ours. The division is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between those who respect diversity of belief and freedom of expression and those who do not. Islamophobes do not respect Muslim freedom of conscience; Islamofascists do not respect the freedoms of non-Muslims, or indeed of anybody; less extreme Muslim bigots are not fascists, but nevertheless feel their religion should be above criticism. But moderate Muslims are the natural allies of moderate Christians, Jews, Hindus and others in the struggle against the fundamentalists of all creeds.