Richard, you’re usually so perceptive — how can you fall for this contrived drivel? You buy Totten’s formula that there’s a difference between “ethnic conflict” and “religious conflict” in former Yugoslavia. Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? These people largely share the same racial makeup — so the conflict clearly isn’t racial. Here I’d interject that the Bosnia repugnance at the attempts by Arabs to infiltrate was more a racist reaction than any aversion to Wahhabism, per se, but I digress… So you’ve made a distinction between the “ethnic” groups. What is the basis for their ethnic differences? Isn’t it religious and solely religious? If so, then there’s no distinction, and the parsing of terms seems more designed, as I believe Totten is intent upon, to propagandize the lie that religion, and especially Islam, had nothing to do with the conflict in the region.

Here’s another framework to understand the conflict. For more than 500 years Islam has been attempting to thrust itself further and further into Europe with designs on conquering territory for Islam — aka JIHAD. For most of those 500 years the Ottoman Empire (Caliphate) represented the center of gravity for Islamic powers, military, economic, and social. Even so, trenchant defenders of Western heritage resisted in the mountains of Dalmatia and former Illyria against all attempts by Muslims to murder, and generally rape and plunder their way further into Europe. These people who resisted the sword of Islam formed part of the bastion of Europe, and we owe them A LOT. The Ottoman Turks even made it as far as Vienna, where they were finally repulsed in the late 17th Century. Jihad (*until the late 20th century) never reached this far into Europe again.

Gradually over time, Islam’s influence and powers inevitably waned, and the rest of the world moved well beyond the primitive mindset of the Islam. In fact, at the beginning of the 20th Century, Islam itself was poised for extinction when the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in the turmoil of WW1.

But the accident of oil changed everything. Between WW1 and WW1, and coinciding with the West’s global search for oil resources to feed our growing industrial juggernaut, vast reserves were found under the Arabian desert. During this time, the House of Saud wrested and consolidated control of the Arabian peninsula, Mekkah and Medina, and money began flowing into Muslim coffers for the first time in decades.

Fast forward to the last three decades of the 20th Century. Factor in the inflow of trillions of Western dollars, and quite suddenly the moribund Islamic world is again on the march — Muslims across the globe, after those many decades of constantly growing constantly inflowing revenues – billions of dollars into more and more Muslim coffers, wherever oil was found (Muslims can “produce” oil, terrorism, and babies very nicely… ) and we see what has been wrought.

Totten hears stories of how meek and mild Islam is in Bosnia. It never seems to occur to him that this was a temporary state of affairs, most due to the fact that Islam had nearly died in this region due to its own moribundity. It also makes sense that this last area of the earth to be somewhat messily and incompletely converted into Dar ul Islam might also be one of the last places on earth where the newly invigorated Jihad would finally take root again.

Seen through the lens of massive inflows of loot to make Jihad possible again — all of the rampant Islamic terrorism the world is witnessing has everything to do with Islam and its resurgence. All the petty “ethnic” squabbles, all the Marxist narratives of Colonialization and “oppression”, those these are “confusing the proxy indicator[s] for the real thing”: ISLAM.

I’ve written elsewhere that the Muslims have intermittently been eroding and cleansing the region of non-Muslims since the Ottomans arrived 500 years ago. This is simply an extenuation of a very old Jihad, and I believe we completely backed the wrong side. We’ve now helped birth a Islamic Jihad ministate on the doorstep of Europe — something the Muslims were never capable of in their long history of rapine destruction.