Amid the Right’s current romance with Senator Joe Lieberman who, admittedly, has lapses into integrity, we should remember that Lieberman is a man of highly compromised principles. Many conservative sites hail Lieberman for “getting it” regarding terrorism. One site highlights some of his remarks at AIPAC’s recent National Policy Conference:

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism.

There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran.

And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies.

But Lieberman didn’t have a problem abandoning our allies of World Wars I and II — who saved 500 downed U.S. pilots in the latter — the Serbs. Instead, he bought into Muslim propaganda and joined the world in appeasing the Muslim world at the expense of the Serbs, who started fighting Islamic terror on their soil before it was chic. About the lawless, bloodthirsty, Marxist, self-purging, tribalistic, mob-justice-ruled Albanian terrorists known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, Lieberman said in 1999:

The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles…Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.

Talk about accommodating our enemies! The Kosovo Albanians have been engaging NATO in intermittent gun battles for the past six years, they’ve been bombing UN installations in Kosovo, and they supplied the weapons used in the recent rocket-grenade attack on the U.S. embassy in Greece (not to mention the explosives used on London and Madrid). They’ve also been threatening war against the EU, UN and NATO (that includes U.S. troops) if they don’t get exactly what they want.

Saying what Lieberman said about the KLA was bad enough in 1999, but perhaps forgivable once a person came to his senses after 9/11. But Lieberman never did. This past February, he and seven other U.S. lawmakers visited Kosovo and praised the Albanians, who have been picking off the remaining Serbs (including nuns) one by one and two by two since our intervention there. And they’ve been doing it with impunity, since Serb-killing generally isn’t prosecuted in Kosovo. From the AP, with emphasis added:

The delegation, led by independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, included Republican senators John McCain, Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham and Johnny Isakson, together with Congressmen Howard Berman, Mark Udall and Dave Reichert.

They were in Kosovo on a brief, fact-finding mission, and met with Kosovo’s Prime Minister Agim Ceku [an indicted war criminal of legendary brutality]…

U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari unveiled a proposal for the future status of Kosovo, which envisages that the majority ethnic Albanian province be granted internationally supervised self-rule with the trappings of
statehood. The proposal also offers a high degree of self-rule to the Serb minority living in isolated enclaves in the province.
…
“This is a critical period now,” Lieberman told reporters. “We’re looking forward to the implementation of those recommendations as Kosovo moves on to achieve its rightful status as an independent nation.”

For a Jewish senator to be advocating statehood before standards is interesting indeed. Let the record show that Lieberman is for rewarding terror with independence. Palestine, take note.

Many on the Right say that Joe Lieberman is a Democrat of rare integrity. But integrity is when you don’t make exceptions for terrorism in the Balkans. The names Trent Franks, Rick Santorum and James Inhofe come to mind.

The problem is that Lieberman, like John McCain, Eliot Engel, Tom Lantos, Joe Biden, Bob Dole (early on), Wesley Clark and possibly all the lawmakers who accompanied Lieberman on that Kosovo trip mentioned above, has received hefty campaign contributions over the years from the Albanian lobby, whose KLA were partly trained and financed by Osama bin Laden and Iran.

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