The Return of the Caliphate

Recommended reading - M. Bozinovich over at Serbianna.com reviews a new book by author Chris Deliso:

Kosovo today, once again under Islamic occupation, is on the verge of getting the nominally Christian West to capitulate and legalize this conquest for Islam, marking the 1912-1999 period of Kosovo's liberty as a temporary blimp in the Islamic conquest of the infidel West that many Muslims across the globe see as the divinely inspired by the Muslim god called Allah.

"... for foreign Islamist proselytizers... Kosovo simply represents a spot on the map to be filled in between Albania and Bosnia - both of which had been successfully penetrated almost a decade earlier," write Chris Deliso in his book The Coming of the Balkan Caliphate.

"In April 2000, London's Sunday Telegraph reported that the KLA's 'divinely inspired' struggle against the Serbs was being extended through 'fundraising events... being held by mosques and internet groups," notes Deliso.

Resurrecting the old Caliphate, divinely inspired, is the modern Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, the subtitle of Deliso's book.

It is the semantics of the resurrection of the Caliphate, and not the coming of it, that is the only criticism one can render of Chris Deliso's book, a superb compilation that spans the Balkan region with the eye of a knowledgeable traveler who brings the analysis of the modern Balkan drama of conflicts, each and every one involving Muslims.

"Right from the beginning [Deliso] shows how major political mistakes have boosted the spreading in the region of the most reactionary and backward interpretations of Islam," writes Loretta Napoleoni in the introduction to Deliso's book.

Backward perhaps, but the Caliphate brand of Islam was intelligent enough to identify the biggest dog in the region, the Serbs, and targeted them with an unprecedented media barrage in which this victim was made into an atrocious victimizer: in Bosnia, it is claimed, Muslims were victims of Serb aggression, and in Kosovo, Serbs initiated a non-existent genocide of Muslim Albanians.

Today, Bosnian Muslims outnumber Serbs, and in Kosovo, Serbs have been forced into NATO-monitored ghettos reminiscent of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Acutely aware of the Islamist spin on history, Deliso's book rejects dogmatically accepted notions of the region and analyzes the decisions policymakers made who's effects were, in a large part, based or supported by precisely the such spin.

"Indeed," writes Deliso "what the American policymakers in the Clinton administration failed to understand was that the military campaign was never the Islamists' real goal. While the United States sought to manipulate the wars in the Balkans... the foreign sponsors of the mujahedin had an entirely different vision. For them, the war... was just a handy excuse to get into the country and establish presence."

The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West