Leaping Before We Looked: The Clinton Administration's Bosnian Failure

Better coverage, Schindler says, "would have admitted upfront that all sides were behaving badly and committing atrocities, and the Muslims had no monopoly on virtue or suffering. … While Muslims were certainly expelled from their homes in large numbers, so were Croats (Catholics) and Serbs (Orthodox), but only Muslim victims and refugees were really considered newsworthy. And Croatia effectively got no help at all from NATO and the U.S. when it was attacked by the Serbs in 1991; we stood by and watched."

Schindler takes pains to note that he is not "a congenital Islamophobe. I grew up in a typical postmodern American suburb, beloved of progressives, where all religions were held to be equally (in)valid." But he was appalled by Clintonian self-congratulation following the Dayton Agreement's supposed bringing of peace to the Balkans: "The Clinton administration was uninterested in bad news from Bosnia. Dayton was their diplomatic triumph, and no amount of Islamist criminality was going to undo it."

The media also slept, either alone or with the enemy. "Western journalists failed to note that the (Bosnia) Muslim ruling party, while portraying itself as thoroughly democratic and impressively multicultural, in fact was run by and for Islamists of a radical bent, whose ideal society was revolutionary Iran. … That the Bosnian jihad was considered a major success by al-Qaida was something no journalist uttered."

Many of the Bosnian jihadists -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida planner of Sept. 11 -- went on to attack Western Europe or the U.S. Bosnia itself "has continued its seemingly relentless slide into crime, corruption and extremism. Radical Islam has a stronger hold there than ever before, and it remains a mystery to me why Western governments continue to not give this problem, in the heart of Europe, the attention it deserves."