Perhaps I’ve scanned Totten’s article, Richard’s observations, and everyone’s comments too quickly but HAS ANYONE MENTIONED THE INFLUENCE OF COMMUNISM?

Totten accurately describes Kosovar Albanians as European, but this should not be viewed as something that magically happened. The Yugoslavian state imposed an artificial unity that suppressed ethnic and religious differences. After the collapse of communism, these differences reasserted themselves in different permutations throughout the former Yugoslavia. Totten views the “muslim lite” phenomenon in Kosovo as if it is permanent. Hey, ethnicity is hard to change (hence the Albanian vs. Serb dynamic here) but religious fervency can change rather quickly.

Look at Turkey, folks. They were officially secular a generation ago and now the nation is lapsing back into its pre-Attaturk identity. Can the same thing happen in Kosovo? It’s foolish to dismiss the possibility as Totten does. Islam does not have a history of peaceful coexistence (spare me the lectures because I took the full syllabus of Islam, Middle East, and Arabic courses at the University of Virginia in the 1980s before the “religion of peace” propaganda was required). Kosovars should reject Islam in its entirety before they start copying Turkey’s downward trend.