Women with children flee Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya
2013.09.22 (Baghdad, Iraq) – A sectarian suicide bomber hits a funeral, killing at least sixteen mourners.
2013.09.22 (Peshawar, Pakistan) – Two Jundullah suicide bombers obliterate over eighty [Christian] worshippers at a church service, including many women and children.
2013.09.21 (Azamiyah, Iraq) – Fundamentalist gunmen kill four people at a store selling alcohol.
2013.09.21 (Nairobi, Kenya) – Nearly sixty shoppers are murdered by Islamic activists in a targeted attack on non-Muslims at a shopping mall [now at least 69].
2013.09.21 (Sadr City, Iraq) – Women and children are amply represented among over seventy people massacred by a Shahid suicide bomber at a funeral.
2013.09.20 (Qalqiliya, Israel) – An Israeli soldier is kidnapped and murdered by Fatah [the majority faction of the PLO, Israel’s ‘peace partner’].
And this list doesn’t include Sgt. Gal Kobi, killed by a sniper in Hevron yesterday. Or who knows how many killed in Syria.
The shopping mall incident is still in progress as I write this, with the attackers holding hostages. According to news reports, the mall is partly owned by Israelis and some Israeli security personnel are at the scene assisting Kenyan police.
Is it ‘blowback’ against years of ‘Western imperialism?’ So the Pakistani Christians were imperialists? And the Iraqi Shiites?
Israel is a special case, always a target. The ideological excuses for killing Israeli Jews are multiple: they combine the religious motive, Arab honor, imperialism-colonialism-apartheid (thank the KGB for this), etc. But note that Palestinian nationalism developed as a response to Jewish sovereignty. The Arabs of Palestine didn’t target the Ottoman Turks that exploited them for hundreds of years, nor did they demand a Palestinian state from Jordan and Egypt between 1948 and 1967.
In Kenya, the attackers specifically targeted non-Muslims. Witnesses said that people were asked the name of the Prophet’s mother (Aminah bint Wahab — remember this the next time you are a hostage), and shot if they answered incorrectly.
I think we have a general problem here, which is that a significant number of Muslims think that it is a proper expression of their grievances to murder people of different religious persuasions, including the ‘wrong’ form of Islam.
I wonder if this would stop if the various Islamic authorities — the Ulama of Al-Azhar in Egypt, for example, and the Shiite Ayatollas, as well as local scholars and Imams would issue fatwas saying, more or less, “don’t kill people for religious reasons.”
This isn’t a “tiny minority of fanatics.” It costs money to support and arm all of these terrorists and to carry out attacks. The jihadist factions in Syria, Gaza and the Sinai are well-armed, the fighters are paid. Somebody provides the Kalashnikovs, grenades, RPGs, etc. that are in their hands. I am not even talking about the NATO-level armament in the hands of Hizballah!
The Sunni factions are financed by wealthy individuals in the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, and by money collected all over the Muslim world (even in Europe and the US) and funneled through a network of helpful banks and Islamic finance institutions. Money is collected at the annual Haj to Mecca and at local mosques. The Shiites have Iran.
This is a Muslim problem that Muslims must solve. The rest of us need to aggressively — and preemptively — defend ourselves.