Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network

The so-called ‘anti-war movement’ against the intervention of the US and its allies in Iraq has involved the forging of some peculiar new alliances, none of which is more incongruous than the alliance of radical Islamists, right-wing libertarians and radical leftists that makes up the movement’s more extremist wing. One of the ironies of this is that the same left-wing and right-wing militants who are now marching alongside their Islamist comrades in a common jihad against the US-led coalition, frequently claim that it is hypocritical for the US to be waging war against Islamic terrorism given the US record in the Balkans: the US, they claim, supported Islamists in Bosnia and Kosovo against the Serbs. This, of course, begs the obvious response: if the US support for Islamists in Bosnia and Kosovo was objectionable, why are leading lights of the ‘anti-war movement’ themselves now supporting the Islamist ‘resistance’ in Iraq? Since the ‘anti-war movement’ is in reality an anti-American movement, it is hardly surprising that its celebrities support the right of Islamists to kill Americans, but object to their killing of Serbs who, in their eyes, were merely defending the principles of national sovereignty and/or revolutionary socialism from the evils of NATO, the US and the EU. ‘Anti- war’ activists condemn the alleged US-Islamist alliance in the Balkans not because they fundamentally dislike Islamists, but because they fundamentally dislike the US (or, in the case of the right-wing libertarians among them, the US’s support for democracy abroad.)

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