Although Kosovo set a terrifying precedent for Israel, at least two Jews are happy about it. In a recent Wall St. Journal-Europe piece titled Balkan Choice", Morton Abramowitz and Mark Schneider write that Serbian President Vojislav Kostunica's opposition to Kosovo independence risks making his country an "international pariah."

Have these two been asleep for 15 years? Serbia has been a pariah since it began fighting Islamo-nationalist terror without the West's permission. Serbs were the first ones fingered in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the ones bombed by Bill Clinton in 1995 for a Sarajevo marketplace massacre - despite British intelligence warnings that a Bosnian-Muslim mortar was responsible. That other pariah state, Israel, is familiar with such frame-ups, and it's no coincidence that Israel quietly aided Serbs militarily, aware of Islamic terrorist ties to the Bosnian army, including Palestinians operating in Bosnia.

When Israel confronts terrorism, it's called self-defense. When Serbia does, it's "poisonous nationalism" - as a Washington Post editorial called it the same week ("Serbia's Intransigence"). Quite strategically, the word "Muslim" appears nowhere in either article, lest the world finally catch on to what we "achieved" in the Balkans. Instead, the authors promote the term "Albanian Kosovar," a flashback to the journalistic ploy that ensured a multi-national war against European Christians on behalf of Muslims.

Abramowitz and Schneider write that Milosevic's "attempted ethnic cleansing [has] made anything less than independence totally unacceptable to the people of Kosovo." The "people of Kosovo" to whom the authors so reverently refer use Serbian children for target practice. Kosovo is dominated by thugs who have attacked Serbs 186 times just since getting the green light for final-status talks last October. The bruises, broken bones and graves of their victims - infant to octogenarian, male or female - are on display in the DVD documentary " Days Made of Fear." As for Milosevic's "attempted ethnic cleansing," all that can be said is that people who haven't followed even a day of a four-year trial shouldn't write op-eds relying on popular mythology.

Abramowitz and Schneider even have the poor taste to repeat the disingenuous assurances of a NATO presence enforcing international guarantees to protect the Serb minority - as if oblivious that NATO hasn't been able to prevent the almost daily kidnappings and attacks on the remaining Serbs, and was helpless even to stop the 2004 pogrom in which NATO troops themselves were attacked by Albanians. Incredibly, the authors write that the Kosovars have "met enough of the standards to get U.N. Security Council endorsement of final status negotiations" - as if one monitoring group after another hasn't exposed the fact that the internationals have simply given up on any standards being met. (The UN is planning to evacuate tens of thousands of Serbs the moment we hand Kosovo to the terrorists this year.)

"Serbia is going to have to accept Kosovo independence" is code-speak for the West buckling under to terrorism in the Balkans as usual. It's all the more unconscionable, given that today we know the London and Madrid explosives came from Kosovo.

The authors conclude by saying that Serbia will be better off "living in peace with a new Kosovo." Just like Israel will be better off living "in peace" with a Hamas-led Palestine.

For its part, The Washington Post criticizes Serbia for "repeatedly [failing] to meet a critical condition for moving forward [toward EU and NATO membership], which is the arrest of indicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic." While fugitive Serbian war criminals are fixated on, Albanian war criminals are allowed to enjoy political careers. Notice that no such criticism is raised about Kosovo's prime minister Agim Ceku - a former KLA commander who is indicted in Serbia for command responsibility in terrorist killings of over 600 Serbs, Roma, Albanians and others, including beheading, torture, mutilation, and abducting more than 500 people, most presumed dead. The KLA, meanwhile, trained in al-Qaeda camps prior to our 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia.

When America is leading a global war on jihad terror, it's difficult to understand how Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly greeted this wanted terrorist in Washington this summer.

We cannot fight terrorism with one hand while abetting it with the other. As UN human rights observer Jiri Dienstbier has noted, "If NATO and the UN can't defeat terrorism in an area the size of one-eighth of the Czech Republic, how do they expect to confront global terrorism?"

Although the intelligence community is fully aware of the Kosovo threat, our political leaders and media are denying it. The Post editors refer to "a firm Western consensus" that the province "should be granted independence before the end of this year." Translation: America and Europe are taking the Wesley Clark approach and appeasing the Albanian violence meant to persuade us that there can be only one outcome - theirs. Recall that the "firm Western consensus" in 1999 was that Kosovo would have autonomy precisely without becoming independent.

To get back into the West's good graces, the beaten-down Serbs have lain prostrate for the past seven years throughout the continuing dismemberment of their country and security. And yet, any leader - no matter how democratic and pro-Western (Kostunica is a Constitutional scholar) - who tries to draw the line with the number of concessions Serbs will make to their tormentors sounds "disturbingly like Slobodan Milosevic," according to The Post.

Terror aside, the criminal rackets (sex slavery, the heroin trade) in Kosovo are closely linked to the KLA leadership that dominates the local Albanian administration operating under UN auspices, and are already a menace to Europe. If organized crime is uncontrolled under UN and NATO supervision, how will Kosovo's independence improve things when the racketeers become the sovereign government?

It's time to stop writing in a vacuum about the Balkan region and our handiwork there. It happens to be the most key region nearest us in the War on Terror. As the 9/11 Commission found, it was in 1990s Bosnia that the "groundwork for a true terrorist network was being laid." That network is today known as al Qaeda.

This year, we continue the march toward a Greater (and eventually Muslim-only) Albania that will usurp Kosovo (and soon Macedonia and parts of Greece). By signing the Christian Serbs' Jerusalem over to the terrorists, we will give terrorism the boost it struggled for throughout the 90s. Instead of influencing their government away from such treachery, Americans shrug.

What our media and politicians have successfully striven to keep from the American public is that Serbs have historically been on the front line in halting the advance of barbarism into Europe--first against Islam in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, then against the Third Reich (the Serbian nation lost proportionally more lives fighting the Nazis than any other), and then in the 90s against the Muslim and Croatian heirs of the Nazis--before we tied their hands and inherited their burden.

When the Milosevic trial opened in February 2002, the former Serbian "disproportionate force" president showed photos of disembodied Serbian heads. The late Judge Richard May had little patience for this display, calling it irrelevant. To which Milosevic replied:

"It's not on the screens that the public sees. Right. I see it on this screen now. But this internal screen only. So he is holding a head, the head of a Serb that he cut off. So those are the 20,000 Mujahedin that were brought to the European theatre of war through Clinton's policy, and most of them remained there and some went to America and to other countries, and they went all around Europe. And then when they start beheading your own people in wars to come, then you will know what this is all about."

I thought we'd gotten the memo by now. CRO

This piece first appeared at JewishWorldReview.com