Originally Posted by
Raine
Alija Izetbekovic, your nation national hero, was a member of a Muslim youth organization that recruited for the Waffen SS during World War Two, and he wrote the "Islamic Declaration" in 1970, in which he argued that:
"The exhaustive definition of the Islamic Order is: the unity of religion and law, education and force, ideals and interests, spiritual society and State…the Muslim does not exist at all as an independent individual… […] It is not in fact possible for there to be any peace or coexistence between 'the Islamic Religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions."
This is as explicit as Islamic fundamentalism gets. Oh, there is also the matter of Muslim soldiers killed in the Bosnian War being called shahaad, "martyr for the faith," indicating theirs was a Muslim holy war (jihad), not a struggle for some fictitious multi-ethnic utopia. Izetbegovic requested to be buried at the main shahaad cemetery in Sarajevo, next to the holy warriors who died for his vision.
The "Islamic Declaration" makes it clear individual freedom meant nothing to him. To him, peace meant not the absence of violence, but primacy of his violence over that of others. Both the "Islamic Declaration" and Islam between the East and the West, his 1970 pamphlet and 1980 book, reveal a philosophical view of Islam not as a relationship between individuals and the divine, but as a system in which society, religion and state become one. No equality, or peaceful coexistence, was possible for non-believers in such a system, and he said as much. Izetbegovic's vision of Bosnia was not a multi-ethnic democracy, but a multi-caste hierarchy of the kind that existed under the Ottoman Empire, the memories of which were still fresh at his birth in 1925.
Just as Islam dictated Izetbegovic's philosophy, so did his World War Two experience shape his political relations with Bosnia's Christian majority, the Serbs and Croats. Between 1941 and 1945, Bosnia was part of the "Independent State of Croatia," in which Serbs were being persecuted as fiercely as Jews in the Nazi Reich, among others by the Muslim Waffen SS and irregulars, whom Izetbegovic supported.
Bosnia's history is one of conflicts between its various ethnic and religious communities, of which the latest was not the worst. But Izetbegovic's duplicitous ethnic politics – masquerading as democracy, tolerance and civil society – may have poisoned the well of Bosnian coexistence for generations. His jihad-waging, multi-ethnic democratic autocracy is as plausible today as it was in 1992, when Serbs, Croats and not a few Muslims rejected it as nonsense.
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