The Thanks America Gets

It seems the FBI foiled an Islamist plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey when the potential terrorist masterminds took a tape of themselves firing assault weapons and yelling “Allahu Akbar” to the local video store for dubbing onto DVD format. The quick-thinking clerk called the cops, who called the FBI, who arrested the men and averted the attack.

The really interesting thing to me here is that, according to the story, four of the perpetrators were born in the former Yugoslavia. Being Muslims, that most likely means they’re either Bosnian or Kosovar Albanians, both of which were populations that the United States protected from Serbian violence through direct military action. Even today, the U.S. maintains a military presence in the area to keep ethnic conflict from flaring up again.

The Muslim world today is awash in anti-American sentiment. Yet if there’s any group of people that the West could expect to offer a counterweight to the jihadist hate, it would seem to be the two Muslim populations that NATO intervened militarily to protect less than ten years ago. Yet even after the U.S. and European militaries essentially act as the Bosnian Muslim / Kosovar air force and save scores of lives, Muslims from this community are still pissed enough to attempt a direct attack on the United States. We’re hardly talking about a parallel to the Iraq War in those conflicts; the impacted populations actually did “greet us as liberators”, or at least as forceful protectors.

I doubt that I’m alone in this sentiment, but after this, what more can the U.S. even hope to do to convince the Muslim world that we aren’t out to get them?