In March 8, 2015, the U.S. State Department honored 10 women from around the world with the International Women of Courage Award. One of these women was the Kosovar journalist Arbana Xharra. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry subsequently authored a piece in the Huffington Post explaining the decision to award this to Mrs. Xharra. He said that she had written "a series of investigative reports on religious extremists in her country. Her tireless efforts uncovered links to foreign terrorist organizations and helped us fight against the rise of a radical extremism threatening global peace and prosperity." Mr. Kerry continued by saying: "Her example galvanized a new generation of journalists working in a nascent democracy to stand up to injustice and corruption."For those who come from the Balkans and monitor developments in Kosovo on a daily basis, Mr. Kerry's statement came as a great surprise. While successive U.S. administrations have tried hard to convince Muslims that America's latest war on terror is not a war against Islam, its actions show the contrary. By honoring Arbana Xharra, the U.S. has left many in the Balkans feeling very bitter. Those who read Mrs. Xharra's articles, or those of her uncle, Fahri Xharra, are fully aware of their constant diatribes against Albanian Muslims, Islam, Arabs, Palestinians and Turkey. These same Muslims have now begun to ask whether U.S. President Barack Obama is lying when he says that the U.S. is not at war with Islam or if his officials in Pristina have simply been misleading him.Arbana Xharra is not against extremism specifically, she is against Islam and Muslims intrinsically. Evidence for this comes in the form of the many articles she has written about Islam and the Muslim community in Kosovo over the past few years. One of her "investigative reports" was even sponsored by the Robert Bosch Stiftung Foundation and the ERSTE Foundation. These, for the most part, are far removed from the idea that she is "galvanizing a new generation of journalists ... to stand up to injustice and corruption" and that she has produced useful "investigative reports on religious extremists," as Mr. Kerry put it. While Mr. Kerry probably does not know who Mrs. Xharra is, and has never been exposed to her vitriolic Facebook postings and insults against Albanian Muslims, Turks and Serbs, he has decided to award her a prize on the recommendations of the U.S. Embassy in Pristina who proposed her name to the State Department. Mr. Kerry, in my opinion, is innocent of having chosen this rank Islamophobe to reward with such a prestigious honor, and I believe that if he had read her articles he would have surely changed his mind.Mrs. Xharra is part of a new cohort of born-again, Islamophobic Christians in Kosovo. She has made a career out of articles and Internet postings that continuously insult Islam and Muslims. While it is true that she writes about the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Kosovars who went to join this group - and whom the Kosovar government initially encouraged to go and fight in Syria when the revolution was in its infancy - in many of her other articles she writes not with facts, but with emotions and hate. For many years she has claimed that Kosovo is endangered by "extremist Islam," and has demanded that Kosovar politicians stop "the hate preaching of radical imams," control and investigate funding of Muslim organizations, outlaw Islamist opposition parties and investigate all the money that comes from Arab countries and the properties of Kosovar imams. She is not able to differentiate, like President Obama does, between normal Muslims and ISIS jihadists, and her undemocratic ideas that call for banning political parties would be applauded by dictators and not democracies like the U.S. Her most infamous posting that drew the ire of the public came on January 23, 2015 when, having seen a group of Kosovar Muslims handing out copies of the Quran on the streets of Pristina, she called them filthy and demanded that authorities stop their "brainwashing activities" for the benefit "of our countrytarget="_blank"'>