The Universal Enemy Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)

But like, okay, I want to ask the audience a question, right? Why would members of the Mujahedin be in Bosnia in the 1990s? And I want to suggest that it might have something to do with the fact that Milosevic was trying to kill every Muslim in the fucking country. He almost did it. He was pretty close to actually doing it. But the sort of like left conspiracy solution is like, no, no, it must have been the CIA. There's no plausible reason why ex-Mujahedin guys would have gone to a country where someone was trying to kill the entire Muslim population. Like what the fuck? Like what the fuck? It's all stuff that's like this. And he also talks about how Milosevic would have testified about the CIA institution of a neoliberal government in Kosovo. And like what? Like Milosevic is the guy who presided - he was one of the architects of de-collectivization in Yugoslavia. He is like - before he was the butcher of Belgrade, he was the butcher of the Yugoslavian socialist state. But you can - and he was just a hardline right-wing Serbian nationalist. But you can sell him to a Western audience by using Islamophobia, by exploiting - by doing this thing where you're like, oh, well, actually, like all of these people were - they were all Al-Qaeda. You can use this to sell the guy who destroyed Yugoslavia as like the leftist savior of Yugoslavia. And I think that the part about this that's really sad is like there was - the sort of last true believers of the old Yugoslavian working class were these - the Yugoslavian anti-war protesters. And these guys, they're protesting to stop the war they see coming that the Serbians are about to unleash. And they just get murdered in the streets by Milosevic. Well, because seven years later, the US decided that they didn't like him. He's become this hero of a bunch of these - like a bunch of Marxist-Leninists. Like see, this guy is a hero. And this is - this is just - this is their big sort of political trick is using the threat of terrifying Muslim terrorists to just legitimize right-wing dictators. I mean, speaking of right-wing dictators.