"Kosovo is not better than Palestine," he added. "If the whole world, the United States, the European Union, the majority of its states, have embraced the independence of Kosovo, why shouldn't this happen with Palestine as well?"
--Yasser Abed Rabbo, a Palestinian negotiator and top aide to Abbas

1. Even if one were to accept the notion of an independent Kosovo for the sake of temporary argument, that leaves two Albanian states, and one Serbia, a Serbia that in size and ability to defend itself is more than a match for both Albanian states.

But in the case of this "Palestine," there are already not one or two but twenty-two Arab states. Israel possesses a land area 1/1,000th that possessed by the Arabs; it has no natural resources while the Arabs have been the beneficiaries of ten trillion dollars, since 1973 alone, from a mere accident of geology, with trillions more to come, and a few trillion dollars have been spent by them on the most colossal arms-buying in human history, on campaigns of propaganda against Israel, on establishing armies of Western hirelings among those who formerly or even now hold positions of influence in policy-making, and even in outright bribery of diplomats and heads of state, including a few in Africa who, like Idi Amin, became not only supporters of the Arab "cause" but themselves became Muslims.

2. The men who represented the advanced and civilized world, in the post-World War I settlement determined by the League of Nations, agreed that in the vast territories that had formerly been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, not only the Arabs, but other smaller peoples, either non-Muslim or non-Arab, were nonetheless entitled to a place where they could find their own national expression and, if need be, a sanctuary. There was no place to be found, in the crazy quilt pattern of the MIddle East, where "only" Jews or "only" Kurds or "only" Armenians or "only" Maronites could be found, but that did not mean that the Jews were not entitled to a state, that the Kurds were not entitled, that the Armenians were not entitled (and the Allies originally intended, after World War I, to create the conditions, through the Mandate system, for the ultimate coming-into-existence of a Jewish state, a Kurdish state, an Armenian state, and of course an "Arab State." The vast territories we have been inveigled into calling "the Arab world" is nothing of the sort, though the phrase came into being thanks mainly to ARAMCO doing its master's bidding, and the inattention to, and palpable lack of understanding of, all the non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East, and even the non-Arab Muslim minorities in the Middle East, is one of the reasons for the unimaginative and certainly unrealistic policies that have been based, ever since the Dulles brothers under Eisenhower, on a complete misapprehension of Islam.

3. The existence of a Kosovo dominated by Muslims is an affront to Serbia, and to Serbian history, and to the history of the Balkans, and of what Serbians had to endure under Ottoman Turkish rule, and what they fear, or even sense, may happen if Turkey is admitted into the E.U., or if the demographic conquest of Western Europe by Muslims now settled deep within the Bilad al-kufr continues unrecognized, and unopposed.

An affront Kosovo is, and a pity it is, and certainly it poses a geopolitical danger in the longer term, but it is not, as an independent "Palestine" ripped out of the much-diminished land area, that of Western Palestine alone, which in the end, once the foolish calculations of the British to provide a state for the Hashemite princeling Abdullah (so that he would not get into trouble attacking French interests in Syria, and thereby causing Anglo-French discord) caused them to cease to apply the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine to Eastern Palestine, renamed the Emirate of Transjordan, including those about encouraging Jewish immigration and close Jewish settlement on the land.

Only those who wish to continue to ignore Islam -- learnedly discussing a performance of Hamlet without the Prince -- and to make policy as if Muslims did not care about Islam, when Islam is such a strong, suffusing presence, such a Total System, where religion and the state are not separated (and it is this, above all, that non-Muslims have difficulty understanding, or imagining, so poor are their intellects, so impoverished and creaky, haven fallen into desuetude their imaginations - and historical imagination based on knowledge and historical sense, is an indispensable instrument for those who claim a superior understanding of things, that entitles them to assume the role of instructing, and protecting, others.

4. Serbia's interests are indeed threatened by the existence of Kosovo, but Serbia is not surrounded on all land sides by those intent on destroying it, and intent on destroying it no matter what its size, or what the nature of its government. But Israel is so surrounded. And a simple glance at the map, with a little squinting to find that nearly-invisible sliver known as Israel, would show that a "Palestine" would care out of Israel territory leaving it with a ratio of length of border to national territory that would be the largest in the world, leaving it eight miles wide at its waist, with every single airfield in Israel within range of arms fired from Kalkilya, and with a nightmare situation that no Western country would permit its own people for one minute to be asked to endure.

Israel's survival is, was, always will be tenuous. But its disappearance is almost certain to follow, sooner or later, if the Israelis cannot control, to the fullest extent, the territory we now call, so carelessly and lazily and unthinkingly, the "West Bank." You can prate all you want about a "two-state solution." But Islam does not tell its followers that they can ever accept, not in the midst of Dar al-Islam, on land once possessed by Muslims, and not, in the long run, anywhere in the world, the Infidels permanently running their own affairs, as independently and proudly, for that is not right, that goes against the explicit texts -- the immutable text, the uncreated text, of the Qur'an, and the related texts which offer the words and deeds of Muhammad, words and deeds that gloss the Qur'anic texts, and if anything, make them more, rather than less, menacing, for Infidels).

5. Without asking Serbia to accept, now or ever, the state of Kosovo, one can nonetheless recognize that for now, Serbia will no longer have a bullseye placed over its national existence -- or rather, will be threatened, but not almost uniquely so, in the intensity of Muslim energy and hatred directed at it. But if "Palestine" comes into existence, there will be demand after demand after demand, for such a triumph will lead Muslim Arabs to believe that they can press the point, and that what should be their transparent attempts to undo Israel will be met with success, and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah will be just a little less slow, though careful for now, and for the next few years, never to quite equal the truth-telling, about ultimate intentions, of the Fast Jihadists of Hamas.

One can see the handwriting -- mene mene tekel upharsin -- on the wall of that building on the East River, the one constructed with such high hopes. The corrupt and corrupting United Nations, for the past three decades has been increasingly brought under the control, hardly recognized though everywhere obvious, of an Islamintern International. That Islamintern International, consisting of both diplomats and permanent U.N. staff, and of both Muslims and islamisant sympathizers (who are exactly the kind of people who would not raise any objections by Muslim representatives, or their agents in the U.N. bureaucracy who are well-placed everywhere, and keen to sniff out those who might not get with the Islamic program, might actually be genuinely sympathetic, for example, to Israel's permanent plight -- such people exist, but they never rise in the ranks of the U.N. But the admirers even of Ayatollah Khomeini, such as the egregious Edward Mortimer, become chief speechwriters and "advisers" to Kofi Annan, and to others.

In the U.N. of today, where Israel is made the whipping-boy on every occasion, the subject -- or is it object? -- of nine out of ten resolutions, in a kangaroo court that, in New York, or in Geneva (at the Human Rights Commission) or in Durban (at that U.N. lynch-mob meeting which took place just before the 9/11/2001 attacks), is held in continuous session to keep sentencing and keep executing, and keep sentencing and executing again and again and again, the people and state of Israel, while everything else under the sun -- the mass-murders in the southern Sudan and now in Darfur, poverty in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, anthropogenic climate change -- always are an afterthought to the "plight of the 'Palestinians'" and the "monstrous behavior of Israel." Sometimes, just to camouflage what is too obviously a gang-up and a crime scene, some U.N. official will primly note a "cycle of violence" by which, say, hundreds of rockets shot into Israel's Sderot are treated as "just as deplorable" as Israel's attempts to prevent those rockets from being fired by destroying the places where they are thought to be hidden or manufactured or smuggled in, and also in attempting to pre-empt further attacks, and punish those whose lives are spent, full-time, in thinking of ways to kill the Jews of Israel, by actually daring to attack them in turn.

Those are some of the differences between the existence of Kosovo as an independent state (unacceptable to Serbia and to those who wish for historical understanding and justice for the Serbs, and for other non-Muslims in the Balkans) and the coming-into-being of a "Palestine" that would be merely a vehicle for the destruction of Israel, just as the invention of the "Palestinian people" does not reflect any real desire by other Arabs or Muslims to, in practical ways, assuage the lot of the local Arabs, but rather to use them more effectively, as instruments of the desire not to help anyone, but to score points against Israel in the Lesser Jihad, a Jihad without end, conducted by the Muslim Arabs to erase or efface the outrage of this Infidel nation-state in their midst.