This is a ruminative post, written after reading a BBC online article by Newsnight's Mark Urban (written in advance of tonight's Newsnight).
It's ruminative because I found Mark Urban's piece interesting and insightful, yet I've got issues.
The piece is headlined Bosnia: The cradle of modern jihadism and makes a persuasive case that the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (rather than Afghanistan in the 1980s) marked the true starting point for the kind of brutal, Western-hating jihadism that we're all far too familiar with today.
A Saudi fighter who went to Bosnia at the time tells Mark that this was the moment when people like him decided that "there is a war between the West and Islam".
Mark details some astonishing stuff about the Muslim Bosnian (Bosniak) government's tolerance of such fighters at the time, and part of the ruling party's continuing ambivalence as regards the very high level of Bosnian Muslims going to fight for Islamic State.
The curious thing is that I, getting my news pretty much entirely through the BBC at the time, saw the Bosnian War as a war between good and evil, victims and perpetrators. The evil perpetrators were the Orthodox Serbs and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Croats. The Bosnian Muslims were the good guys, the victims, ever-suffering. BBC reporter after BBC reporter shared their pain.
I just don't recall the BBC reporting what Mark Urban is now reporting - that the Bosnian Muslims fought alongside foreign Muslim fighters (fighters who beheaded captured Christians), and that they committed atrocities too.
I just don't recall the BBC reporting what Mark Urban is now reporting - that the Bosnian Muslims fought alongside foreign Muslim fighters (fighters who beheaded captured Christians), and that they committed atrocities too.
And from Mark Urban's report, it looks as if we still have a problem in the Balkans (north of Greece) - something I wasn't exactly conscious of either.
The other thing I want to ruminate about is something that Mark Urban failed to note in his piece - one that counters the jihadi line - for, as I remember, the wicked West (NATO) intervened militarily in the mid 1990s to attack the Christian Serbs and defend the Bosnian Muslims and then, in the late 1990s, to attack the Christian Serbs and defend the Muslim Kosovans.
Present day Muslim hatemongers should remember that, and the BBC (including Newsnight) should repeatedly remind them of the fact.
I was aware at the time that the Muslim majority in Kosovo had been violently intimidating the Christian minority - which was why that minority had been reducing year by year.
ReplyDeleteBut, yes, the BBC likes to paint in bright primary colours as we saw in the "so called" Arab Spring (some so calleds are more permissible than others).
I feel I ought to put in a bow to this week's This Week which included the best discussion I have heard to date on TV about Islam, Islamic State and all the rest - thanks largely to Tom Holland and Andrew Neil.
ReplyDeleteIf you didn't see it I would recommend you catch up on I-Player.
Thanks for the recommendation. That was an excellent discussion.
DeleteJust to note at this point that BBC favourites Moazzem Begg, Babar Ahmed and Shaker Aamer were all in Bosnia.
ReplyDeleteThat certainly backs up Mark Urban's main point.
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