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Bosnian Muslims Anti American - Support Terrorists In Iraq
Those Ungrateful Bosnians
We liberated them. Why are they still against us?
By Yaroslav Trofimov
Posted Monday, May 23, 2005, at 10:00 AM PT

...Bosnia is often held up as proof that the United States—despite a deepening belief to the contrary among many Muslims—hasn't embarked on an evil crusade against Islam. After all, here is one place where Americans actually fought to help Muslims, against Christian Serbs.... after several months of training, a multiethnic Bosnian mine-clearing unit numbering about 30 soldiers is slated to begin its Mesopotamian stint next month....In a Friday sermon at Sarajevo's Begova Mosque, the second most senior cleric in the country, Ismet Spahic, decried American actions in Iraq as "genocide."... Kemal Bakovic [editor of a Bosnian paper], met me over a fruit juice in a grim neighborhood of Soviet-style housing blocks, still pockmarked by shrapnel. An Arabic-speaker, he had studied in Zarqa, in Jordan—the hometown, he was pleased to remind me, of the man described by the United States as al-Qaida's chieftain in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.... Some other Bosnian Muslims, he added, had already joined the war...I met Mustafa Ceric, the reis ul-ulema, or chief religious leader, of Bosnia's Muslims. A former ambassador with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he is known as a rare voice of sober, European Islam. But, as our conversation drifted to Iraq, he abandoned the detached professorial tone with which he had greeted me.

Muslims everywhere, Ceric said, are losing the ability to think rationally. "You see every day the scenes of your relatives being killed, and no one is doing anything about it. ... Muslims feel that they are threatened, that the West is trying to enslave them, literally."

I asked Ceric whether he shared his deputy's description of American actions in Iraq as genocide—a loaded word for Bosnia, which itself experienced the real thing so recently. Ceric wouldn't endorse or disavow the imam. Nor would he condemn those Bosnians who head off to join the Iraqi insurgents.





Posted by: mhw 2005-05-24
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=119902