Wall Street Journal publishes a terrorist
Jewish World Review - November 20, 2007

By Julia Gorin

Last week, The Wall Street Journal and its online affiliate OpinionJournal.com published an article on Kosovo's impending unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. The piece attested to the inevitability and rightness of this independence. It was also penned by a terrorist. Specifically, by the "former" terrorist and current "prime minister" of the province, Agim Ceku.

One trusts that when Hamas threatens to declare unilateral Palestinian statehood, the Journal and Opinion Journal will print an unopposed perspective from the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.

To give readers a sense of who Agim Ceku is, he was such a Serb-hunting enthusiast that when the early, Croatian leg of the Balkan wars kicked off, he volunteered to become a colonel in the Croatian Army, leading the 1993 offensive on a Serbian village in Croatia named Medak. As Canadian military journalist Scott Taylor wrote:

It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which [Agim] Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then trained by U.S. instructors as a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact, he was the officer responsible for shelling the Serbian refugee columns and for targeting the UN-declared "safe" city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm. Some 500 innocent civilians perished in those merciless barrages, and senior Canadian officers who witnessed the slaughter demanded that Ceku be indicted. Once again, their pleas fell on deaf ears.

"Throughout the [1999] air campaign against Yugoslavia," continues Taylor, Ceku -- by then commanding KLA terrorists in driving two-thirds of Kosovo's remaining Christian Serbs out along with other non-Albanians -- "was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson."

The Canadian soldiers today suffer physical maladies from the suppression and denial of what they witnessed, and they await justice for Ceku, which the U.S. actively intervenes to prevent every time a move is made in that direction. An article by this monster in the pages of the Wall Street Journal further denies their experience and adds insult to injury.

Chris Deliso's new book The Coming Balkan Caliphate offers a window into how Ceku operates with Kosovo's Western champions and benefactors:

Embarrassingly for Ceku, two of his KPC (Kosovo Protection Corps) men were involved in an ANA (Albanian National Army) bridge bombing attempt on April 12, 2003, near the northern Kosovo town of Zvecin. For the stated goal of making Kosovo a multiethnic society based on rule of law, having members of the civil police moonlighting as terrorists was not auspicious. …

[UN Mission in Kosovo Chief] Harri Holkeri, had infuriated Agim Ceku on December 3 [2004] by ordering the suspension of [the] two KPC generals…over the April bridge bombing debacle. Ceku darkly intoned that "this decision is unacceptable for us."

In writing about the March, 2004 riots throughout Kosovo by the majority-Muslim Albanians, which injured a thousand people and killed over 30 including six NATO troops, according to UN officials in Kosovo whom Deliso interviewed (though not according to mainstream sources, which list 19 civilian deaths and zero NATO deaths), Deliso mentions that:

Most embarrassing for the UNMIK authorities, Agim Ceku's KPC officers actively aided the mobs. The suspicious complicity of leading Kosovo Albanian politicians and KPC commanders was attested to by other internationals, such as the Greek policeman who pondered, "Why did [Hasim] Thaci and [Agim] Ceku not say 'stop' until three days into the riots?…And why, once they did say 'stop,' did everything suddenly stop?"

… A former German soldier in Kosovo explains that… "the Albanians put women and children in front of our barracks as 'human shields' so that our vehicles couldn't get out." …

While the March 2004 riots were seemingly fueled only by ethnic hatred and general frustrations, evidence indicated an Islamist dimension to the violence. The Albanian Muslim rioters did everything from slashing the throats of Serbian farmers' pigs…to the dynamiting, burning, or vandalizing of 35 churches….videotapes glorifying the destruction of such Christian monuments were soon being circulated throughout radical Islamic mosques in Western Europe, for the purpose of jihad fundraising. …

The wiretapped conversations between the jihadi leaders had eerie similarities with those captured by the FBI before 9/11: "It was said, for example, that 'in two or three weeks the party will begin' and that 'in Prizren everything is prepared for a hot party;' then it was asked whether the interlocutor 'can guarantee it will be a blast in Urosevac?'"

These are just a handful of the countless, uncomfortable Balkan truths that are out there, but one is hard-pressed to find any mention of them in mainstream American news outlets. One Balkan truth that did make it past the censors was the May arrest of four Albanian Muslims plotting to massacre American soldiers at Fort Dix. Yet even as mainstream news sources covered this incident, Opinion Journal and Wall Street Journal devoted not a single word to this major news story. There is a pattern here, one that is pathologically anti-Slav and pro-Muslim in the Balkans, the latest example being the Journal's endorsement of the establishment of a narco-terrorist state.

In last week's Journal article, Ceku speaks of cooperating with Serbia in fighting "organized crime." Yet no editorial red flag went up over the fact that this comes from the head of a "state" founded on organized crime. Ceku and other Kosovo leaders hold regular meetings to manage their criminal rackets at Pristina's Grand Hotel, according to German intelligence (BND).

Ceku also gives the usual spiel that independence is "inevitable" and can't be delayed. Why is that so? He doesn't say. And Journal editors don't ask. Perhaps it's for the same reason that a Hungarian member of the EU parliament bluntly said, "Because we're afraid of them," when asked why the U.S. and EU are giving the Kosovo Albanians what they want unconditionally.

Ceku refers to suffering of "all the people of Kosovo in the 1990s", the oft-used justification for Kosovo to never again be ruled from Belgrade. What many people suffered from-Albanians and Serbs alike-were ceaseless attacks by the KLA even during ceasefires and pullouts by the Serbs as per Western-mediated agreements. And why are sufferings in the 1990s -- which the KLA fomented with a terrorist insurgency -- more relevant than the "peacetime" suffering post-1999? Ceku also speaks of "guarantees for 'minority' citizens." Based on post-1999 life in Kosovo for non-Albanians, why should anyone believe those guarantees? Do other democratic states in Europe (including Serbia) need guarantees for minorities enforced by outside powers, or are they simply expected to behave according to civilized standards?

One is reminded of something that was said of the writer and communist fellow traveler, Lillian Hellman: You can't believe a word she says. Not even "the" or "and".

I've tried to interest both the Wall Street Journal and Opinion Journal in the issue of Kosovo in order to call attention to our self-destructive misadventures there and elsewhere in the Balkans. When approaching the hard-copy paper, the response has been: "Balkans material? Try the European edition."

That is, the edition that goes out to the people who already have a clue, unlike Americans -- whose country initiated the NATO war against Christians on behalf of Muslims. The European edition is also the one that ran the following piece two months after September 11, 2001 -- an article of conspicuous insignificance to the main edition, which did not deign to print it:

For the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the Balkan wars came originally from Chechnya, a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part. …

By 1994, major Balkan terrorist training camps included Zenica, and Malisevo and Mitrovica in Kosovo…In Albania, the main training camp included even the property of former Albanian premier Sali Berisha in Tropje, Albania, who was then very close to the Kosovo Liberation Army. …

Islamist infiltration of the Kosovo Liberation Army advanced, meanwhile. Bin Laden is said to have visited Albania in 1996 and 1997, according to the murder-trial testimony of an Algerian-born French national, Claude Kader, himself an Afghanistan-trained mujahideen fronting at the Albanian-Arab Islamic Bank. He recruited some Albanians to fight with the KLA in Kosovo, according to the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues. …

Albanian separatism in Kosovo and Metohija was formally characterized as a "jihad" in October 1998 at an annual international Islamic conference in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the 25,000 strong KLA continued to receive official NATO/U.S. arms and training support and, at the talks in Rambouillet, France, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shook hands with "freedom fighter" Hashim Thaci, a KLA leader. As this was taking place, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was preparing a scathing report on the connection between the KLA and international drug gangs. Even Robert Gelbard, America's special envoy to Bosnia, officially described the KLA as Islamic terrorists.

Just as I'd approached Wall Street Journal, I also approached Opinion Journal in the hopes of warning about the dangers of ignoring and/or supporting the drive toward Kosovo independence. I was repeatedly told by the editor, James Taranto, that Kosovo simply wasn't on his "radar." Taranto has stated his ignorance on, and disinterest in, the subject of Kosovo repeatedly -- and rather pompously. Well this is what happens when Kosovo isn't on an editor's radar: he ends up giving his readership the terrorist perspective. Terrorists who used violent provocations to win an intervention and now demand independence, with the full blessing of the U.S. government. Opinion Journal added a romantic touch to the headline, a teaser reading "Toward next month's date with Balkan destiny" -- not understanding, of course, that the Balkans' destiny will be our own.

The Wall Street Journal and Opinion Journal have defaulted to the Bush administration's policy on Kosovo, the Bush administration itself having defaulted to the Clinton administration's policy, being too distracted with bigger battles to bother changing course in the Balkans -- even after 9/11 supposedly taught us a few things. And so here we are, with a now institutionalized terror-friendly policy in Kosovo.

Until we start viewing terrorism against Serbs as terrorism, we will continue to be co-targets of the Serbs' enemies. When we betray our Christian kin, just as when we betray our Israeli kin, in a fanatical but futile attempt to win favor with an incompatible society, we curse ourselves.

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