Free Republic

In the current debate on the future of Kosovo, it is often overlooked that hundreds of thousands of Serbs and other non-Albanians had fled the province under Albanian pressure well before the KLA terror campaign of 1996-1998. Under Tito, the Albanians’ share of the population thus rose from 64 percent in 1953 to 77 percent immediately following his death in 1980. To understand the conditions that prompted the exodus of non-Albanians from Kosovo even in peacetime, we don’t need to look further than Cherry Hill, NJ. This prosperous Philadelphia suburb known for good schools is the home to the Duka...

(Partial verbatim transcript) [...] TRIFKOVIC: The problem with his book (The Enemy at Home) is primarily that Dinesh denounces me and my friend Robert Spencer for writing about Islam the way we do. What is truly remarkable for an intellectual is that he does not do so on the basis of any failure on our part to offer empirical evidence for our fundamental thesis – which is that Islam is inherently aggressive, racist, violent, and intolerant – but rather that this shouldn't be allowed to be published, because it undermines the possibility of establishing some mythical alliance with the conservative...

“God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature� is the essential statement in Emperor Manuel’s verbal duel with his Persian interlocutor, which Pope Benedict quoted in his now famous Regensburg lecture last September. “Faith is born of the soul, not the body.� The world outlook based on this simple yet essential adage is light years away from the Verse of the Sword (9:5), the essential message of the Kuran. It is, in fact, so diametrically opposed to it that we may be forgiven for concluding that Muhammad’s “inspiration� was indeed supranatural, but not...

Glazov: Ok, let’s move on to your book. You make the point that the Islamist threat to the West is greater than ever. Can you explain? And this means we are losing the terror war, no? Trifkovic: Losing, absolutely, without a doubt. After Stalingrad Germany was doomed, after Moscow Napoleon was finished, and after Gettysburg the Confederacy could no longer hope to turn the tide. No such turning point has been reached in the misnamed Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). We need a comprehensive strategy of defense not merely against a small jihadist elite but against an inherently aggressive, demographically...

Ahmadinejad and Islamic Judeophobia Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared in Mecca last Wednesday that people in the West “insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces, and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail.” (He was alluding to British historian David Irving, who was recently arrested in Austria for “Holocaust denial.”) “Although we don’t accept this claim,” Ahmadinejad went on, “if we suppose it is true,” then the Europeans should not compensate Jews by giving them Jerusalem, they should...

There is a bloc of voters that may easily decide the forthcoming election. A little over a million Serbian-Americans—their exact number is uncertain but this is a conservative estimate—are likely to vote this year in greater numbers than ever before. The significance of this group becomes obvious if we look at its geographic distribution. After Chicago, the main Serbian-American centers are Pittsburgh, PA; Cleveland, OH; and Milwaukee, WI. There are thousands of retirees in Florida and sizeable pockets in St. Louis (MO) and suburban New Jersey. In each of those states the size of the community exceeds the likely margin...

Switzerland has the toughest naturalization rules in Europe. If you want to become Swiss you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years—and pay taxes, and have no criminal record—before you can apply for citizenship. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, however, and the fact that you were born in Zurich or Lugano does not make any difference. There are no "amnesties" and illegals are deported if caught. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview the applicant...

On September 19 the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune published an article entitled Struggle for the Soul of Islam: A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America. This 5,000-word feature sought to reveal the existence, methods and ultimate goals of the American offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group." The Tribune story is important for revealing the magnitude of the threat America faces no less than for revealing the underlying misunderstanding of that threat by the American elite class in general and the media in particular.The Brotherhood's slogan, ever since it was founded in...

The media in the United States have been oddly fastidious in failing to report one aspect of last week’s horror in Beslan: that several Russian girls were raped by Muslim terrorists in front of their parents and classmates. The failure to report rapes in the Russian school was at odds with the eagerness of American journalists, a decade ago, to report ad nauseam on the entirely fictitious "rape camps" supposedly run by Bosnian Serbs in which Muslim women were allegedly subjected to similar degradation. That Muslim propagandists and their Western abettors should have resorted to this particular whopper is especially...

By "common heritage" we mean the underlying unity of the Eastern and Western wings of the Christian civilization—long split by the tragedy of the Great Schism, and now threatened by the rot of disbelief, Christophobic norms and functional nihilism rampant throughout the Western world, but still one. This beautiful part of the world is an especially apt spot from which to contemplate such unity. Here in Northern California the expansion of the West, the Latin Church—embodied in the conquistadors and missionaries from Spain—achieved its maximum geographic outreach some 250 years ago near San Francisco. Not long thereafter, the eastward expansion...

It is a matter of amply documented record that the policy makers in Washington had not treated Islamic fundamentalist ideology in adversarial terms until it started attacking America. Quite the contrary: their refusal to accept that Islam as such is a threat to national security went hand in hand with the policy of effectively supporting Islamic fundamentalists in pursuit of short-term political or military objectives of the U.S. government. The underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be propped up, used, and if need be eventually discarded like Diem, Noriega, the Shah, the Contras.The Kaiser lived to regret giving passage...

General Alu Alkhanov, Chechen leader who supports his republic’s autonomy within Russia, won a presidential election held last Sunday with over 73 percent of ballots cast. He will succeed Akhmad Kadyrov, another Kremlin loyalist who was assassinated in May. Alkhanov’s closest rival, Movsur Khamidov—who also opposes separatists—received just under 9 percent of the vote. The government’s claim that the turnout was 85 percent appeared exaggerated, but the fact that the election passed peacefully—in spite of earlier warnings by Islamist separatists that they would disrupt the proceedings—represents a success for President Vladimir Putin’s policy of passing authority to trusted local officials...

The best way to determine the course of a war is to look at the offensive potential of the warring parties. After Stalingrad it was obvious that Germany was doomed: having lost the strategic initiative a year earlier at the gates of Moscow, for the remaining two years of bloodshed the Reich was on a downward slide that ended in the ruins of Berlin. After the debacle at Vienna in 1683 the Ottoman Empire rapidly declined and, for the last century of its existence, depended on the good will of a cynical Great Britain for survival; for three subsequent centuries...

Correction of Statements Made On This Site About Serge Trifkovic: Frontpage regrets characterizations of Serge Trifkovic, author of Sword of Islam, that were made in an article by Stephen Schwartz (CAIR's Axis of Evil) to the effect that Trifkovic, is an Islamophobe, is associated with Pravda or Antiwar.com, and "was the main advocate in the West for the regime of Slobodan Milosevic." Serge Trifkovic is not associated with either Pravda or Antiwar.com. He was not a supporter of Slobodan Milsoevic. He is not an Islamophobe nor would Frontpage have given extensive space to a summary of his book if he...