February 18, 2008

I’ve been looking for some discussion of the religious motivations behind the new nation of Kosovo but have been disappointed to see it left out of most media coverage. In fact, the headline for today’s frontpager in the LA Times was “Kosovo takes a big leap of faith,” but only offered this reference to religion:

Most of Kosovo’s nearly 2 million people are Muslim but are largely secular and pro-Western. Serbia is an Orthodox Christian nation with historical cultural ties to the Kosovo region, part of the reason it is so valued by Belgrade.

As I imagined, GetReligion has gotten around to a pretty good run down of the the centuries-old conflict. See, the Balkans are viciously, well, balkanized among Albanian Muslims, Croat Catholics and Orthodox Christian Serbs.

(Coincidentally, I spent a bit of time writing about this yesterday for an article for this week’s Jewish Journal about a Muslim from Macedonia who was the first to speak at the Orthodox seminary and helped diffuse a near civil war six years ago. I’m also reading “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” a Pulitzer Prize winner that began with Samantha Power’s years reporting on the Serbian massacres of Muslims in Sarajevo.)

Here, Terry Mattingly of GetReligion quotes from a 1999 column he wrote trying to give context to the Balkans problem and the thugocracy of the late Communist ruler Slobodan Milosevic.

The roots of this crisis are astonishingly complex, ancient and bloody. . . . In 1389, Serbian armies fought — virtually to the death — while losing the Battle of Kosovo, but managed to stop the Ottoman Empire from reaching into Europe. The Kosovo Plain became holy ground.

Leap ahead to World War II, when Nazi Germany tried to use Albanian Muslims and Catholic Croats to crush the Serbs. Then Communists — such as Milosevic — took over. In the mid-1990s, the United States all but encouraged Croat efforts to purge Serbs from Krajina, where they had lived for 500 years. The West has been silent as Turkey expelled waves of Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Since morphing from Communist to nationalist, Milosevic has skillfully used Serbia’s array of fears, hatreds and resentments to justify terror in Kosovo and elsewhere by his paramilitary and police units. The Serbian strongman knows that Kosovo contains 1,300 churches and monasteries, many of them irreplaceable historic sites.

Retired New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, who once won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Eastern Europe, put it this way: “I do not get emotional about the history of Kosovo. I am not a Serb. Serbs do. . . . Serbs are as likely to give up Kosovo willingly because the Albanians want it as Israelis are to give up Jerusalem because the Arabs want it.”

(Map and image)

Translated from Farsi in the February issue of Harper’s, an Iranian journalist’s reaction to director Oliver Stone’s interest in shooting a documentary of President/nut job Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In light of the history of measures by Western media against Iran’s Islamic system and the dominant influence of global Zionism on that media empire, being optimistic about Oliver Stone’s request or hoping that he refrains from deliberate manipulations would be an irreparable mistake.

Oliver Stone is the director of the film Alexander, about Alexander of Macedon. Because of Alexander’s overthrow of the Achaemenid dynasty and the savage mass killings carried out by his army, he is hated by Iranians. Throughout his film World Trade Center, Stone tried to show 9/11 as an attack by the world of Islam against the West. The Doors commemorated one of America’s most perverted, half-mad singers, who enjoyed urinating on the heads of his fans during concerts. ]FK drew a picture of John F. Kennedy as a political saint, as ordered by America’s Democratic Party. The film played an undeniable role in Bill Clinton’s successful run for the White House. In Nixon, an overthrown and warmongering president who initiated several conflicts is shown as an innocent and blameless individual. All these facts leave no room for doubt concerning Oliver Stone’s allegiance to America’s key policies, even if some groups, out of ignorance, call him an independent filmmaker.

How can we voluntarily go under this filmmaker’s knife? The outcome of such a venture will not be a realistic portrayal of Ahmadinejad the intellectual and peacemaker but a portrait of Ahmadinejad according to Stone, Hollywood, and global Zionism.

Yeah, if Ahmadinejad looks bad, it’s the Jews fault. That lovable old dictator is really a pretty decent guy …

I get Vanity Fair, but I guess I missed this article in November. Like this post last month, it revolves around Rich Cohen. But also like this piece, it adds a spice of Hitler.

The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement. Actually wearing a Hitler mustache, as I planned to do—well, that is like yelling racial epithets in a crowded subway. Wasn’t Hitler amazing? Whatever he touched turned to ice. His life ended the long and fabled career of the name Adolf, which had included the stories of Adolph Zukor, Adolphe Menjou, Adolph Ochs, and Adolph Coors. Never again will a pregnant mother innocently consider the name for her son, or imagine shouting it across a teeming playground. As for the Toothbrush mustache, it did not only die with the Führer—it was embalmed with him. It was his essence, and so it has been relegated to the black book of history.

This is the part where I am supposed to explain just why I decided to write this story now. I might talk about the re-emergence of facial hair on the world stage, or the rise of the “new anti-Semitism,” or Holocaust denial in Iran, but, the fact is, my interest in the Hitler mustache never started and never ends. It is always. If you’re a Jew, the Hitler mustache exists in the eternal present. I grew it for the same reason Richard Pryor said the word “n——-.” I wanted to defuse it. I wanted to own it. I wanted to reclaim it for America and for the Jews. My name is Rich Cohen, and I wear a Hitler mustache.