The Balkan Chronicle

Many people are wondering how far the Anti-Muslim hysteria in the West will go. A lot of signs indicate that it is exactly that, the hysteria. The recent attack on a New York Muslim cab driver by an innocent-looking-film-student shows how far the anti-Muslim hysteria already grew. As the details of the story emerge, they show that many people now feel that they can go after any Muslim with no impunity.

The deadly fiasco of the Turkish-led “peace flotilla” to Gaza highlighted the deepening strain in the Israeli-Turkish alliance. But it mainly helped expose the deeper, underlying reasons for Turkey’s shift from its Western orientation toward becoming a major player in the Middle East – in alliance with the region’s rogue regimes and radical non-state actors.

Something strange has been going on in the course of events that have been unfolding over more than half a year in Israel’s policy and position in the Balkans, from its Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warning that the Balkans are the next target in a global jihad to the Israeli attack on a flotilla carrying peace activists in international waters off the coast of Gaza.

If we cannot make a clear correlation between these events, we could at least ask about Israel’s aims in the Balkans. The flotilla episode was just the latest, but also a sure sign that a breaking up of relations established decades earlier in the region wider than the Middle East is going on and that Israel is having a hard time acclimatizing to such developments.