Mick Hartley

Michael J. Totten meets an Israeli cafe owner in Kosovo:

Jews and Israelis in Muslim-majority countries are like canaries in coal mines, as are women in Muslim-majority countries. You can tell a lot about a place by observing how each are treated. The Taliban impose an oppressive dress code on women at gunpoint, for instance, and the Hamas Charter is explicitly genocidal. It’s possible to take the radical Islamist temperature of a Muslim society simply by measuring the misogyny and anti-semitism at both the government level and among the general population. The only country in the entire Middle East that isn’t anti-semitic at the government level, the popular level, or both, is the state of Israel.

Kosovo is clearly well outside the mainstream of the Middle East. At the same time, it is one of the few countries even in Europe that isn’t at least anti-Israel, if not blatantly anti-semitic, at the government or popular level.