Mass Murderers That "Look like America"

Remember the Balkans? That area of southeastern Europe that Bill Clinton supposedly transformed from a war-torn wasteland permanently wracked by a seven-centuries-long religioethnic blood feud into a tranquil Shangri La? And do you also recall how the Left is endlessly insisting that fighting terrorists, as we have been doing in Iraq for quite some time now, only breeds more of them?

Well, once again, what they insist just isn't so, but is in fact the exact opposite of the truth:

In particular, Islamic radicals are looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces to watch for potential terrorists. "They want to look European to carry out operations in Europe," said a Western intelligence agent in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Montenegro, adjacent to Bosnia. "It's yet another evolution in the tools used by terrorists."

Parts of the Balkans, stuck in lawless limbo after years of war in the 1990s, are ripe recruitment territory for Middle East radicals, intelligence officials say. Bosnia is still divided among Muslim, Croat and Serb population areas, even if nominally united under the 10-year-old Dayton peace agreement that ended ethnic warfare.

Muslim enclaves in Serbia are restive, and Muslim-majority Kosovo remains an estranged province campaigning for independence six years after NATO bombing forced out Serb-dominated Yugoslav troops. The Balkans have long been a freeway for smugglers of cigarettes, drugs, weapons and prostitutes. "All the conditions are present. Embittered Muslims, arms, corruption - everything underground operators need to get established," said the Western intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. [emphasis added]

Interesting, huh? The so-called "model for American intervention - low footprint, low investment, and practically ignored," as Cap'n Ed describes it with irony so heavy as to make one's back teeth ache, and not only has it not dealt with the "underlying contributing factors" to the aforementioned blood feuds (as we're doing in Iraq), but it has turned the local Islamists from battling the other local factions to going after the West, and in a way that will make jihadi attackers that much more difficult to identify.

Jim Geraghty noticed a not-so-dry run at this mode of "stealth terrorism":

Mireille, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad.

In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing...

Security sources said that they knew of no other western European women suicide bombers. Al-Qaeda recently appealed for white converts to become suicide bombers, because it was easier for them to travel and evade detection before carrying out their attacks.

Security sources knowing of no other western European (or American, for that matter) women (or male) suicide bombers is, of course, precisely the idea. In the post-9/11 era half a dozen swarthy, furtive young men with names like Khalid and Kama Mustapha and whiplash-inducing facial ticks to match their twisted piety boarding a cross-country flight provides a reasonable opportunity for "security sources" to grab an inkling about what they might be planning. But if it could literally be anybody - the faux Keynian foreign exchange student, the Irish priest that gets the winds from eating beef jerky, the WASP guy in blackface pretending to be a Jamaican, big-breasted Inga from Sweden, some jerk in a gorilla costume (Any Trading Places fans out there...?) - the dilemma of "security sources" would be moved a lot closer to powerlessness vs. de facto martial law.

Kinda harkens back to a consistent theme of the President's - we're fighting the jihadis over there so that we don't have to fight them over here. And with the notorious Muslim cultural penchant for front-running, defeating the enemy over there will reduce their recruitment appeal, regardless of ethnicity, not enhance it.

After all, who wants to jump aboard a bandwagon that will get blown up before you can blow it up yourself?