The anti-Semitic nature of the statement below is also noted with the phrase “Kenya government of the Jews”. And the hate toward Christians is evident with “worshippers of the cross”. The term “cross worshippers” is a favorite for Muslims bent on killing Christians. AQ used this term in their magazines, prior to the creation of the “Inspire” magazine. Across the globe, Christians are being targeted by Muslims. Jews are being targeted by Muslims. We send up a yawn when a church is bombed in Peshawar. It seems so far removed from the U.S. We barely notice the war against Western civilization.
The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has said it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” following Kuwait’s moves to ban their construction.
Hearing him talk after the Church attack, it is clear that Mr Khan is no ‘apologist’. An apologist makes excuses, often in an oblique manner for the acts of another, after the commission of the act. Mr Khan does no such thing. He is crystal clear in his absolute defense of the terrorists. And more importantly, he pre-approves of all future murderers.
In terms of the British media, it may have something to do with the fact that Britain is home to at the very least 1.2 million Pakistani Muslims. The other reason is that the plight of Pakistani Christians is largely overlooked by our mainstream media — both tabloid and ‘serious’. As for the British government, the plight of Christians in Pakistan is almost literally completely ignored.
American Thinker may have overlooked the “just like us” factor and how the online chatyping and journaling classes may have better related to the comparatively affluent, educated, and sophisticated consumers doing their western thing in the romantic and predominantly Christian capital of Kenya while finding Peshawar yet remote in space and time, a curiosity flickering yet a little farther from the center of consciousness and concern.
Credit Paul Austin Murphy, however, for looking into the other mirror: the history of long-transmitted Muslim attitudes toward Jews and Christians and others.
It’s no surprise, then, that al-Shabaab singled out Muslims for life and the rest for death in this latest event in the 1,400-year-long jihad against the ‘unbeliever’. Witnesses have said that the killers told all the Muslims to leave. One Kenyan survivor, a Elijah Lamau, said: “They came and said: ‘If you are Muslim, stand up. We’ve come to rescue you’.”
Such extreme violence against minorities tends to be perpetrated by the country’s many and various militant organisations. The group that claimed responsibility for this latest attack has links to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and said it was acting in retaliation for drone strikes. Yet the problem runs far deeper than a few rogue elements. Disturbingly, these extremist groups, which have been allowed to operate by successive governments, do have an impact on the national debate. This has contributed to increasing intolerance across society.
In south central Pennsylvania this afternoon, the news on the television mounted in a corner beneath the ceiling of the diner where I was enjoying a late lunch hung on the tragedy playing out in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall. This other story involving a death toll greater than Westgate — 85 as opposed to 68 — and targeting a Christian community and its sacred space may have had a different presence, less visceral, less important for having taken place in Muslim-majority Pakistan and having involved a less affluent and cosmopolitan community.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps we are more used to hearing of Islamist outrages in Pakistan — something in the realm of Islamic arm twisting and terror happens every day or every other day in Pakistan’s part of the Islamic Small Wars — and then, again, it’s a Muslim state and one with an outlook very different from Christian Kenya’s with its historic and decent relationship with Israel.
***
Their 52-year-old father had been looking forward to it, particularly the period after the service when the congregation spills out into the enclosed courtyard to chat.
“He was looking forward to seeing his friends,” said Joel.
It’s convenient, I suppose, for this old bleeding heart to bleed for everyone at the desktop: in my pseudo-solopsist online existence, all of the Islamic Small Wars (and a few others) occupy the same space, about 24-inches from eyes to screen. In real space, are they not on just one planet? Are they not coinciding, if not colliding, in time?
Is there anything that would make the murder of a 52-year-old father returning to church in Peshawar any less horrific and tragic than that of his doppelgänger gone shopping for a few hours in a mall in Nairobi?
Perhaps Pakistanis who now must admit the state’s declared religion has been hewed to, commandeered, perverted, or merely exploited (choose any option) by those “who would fly planes into office building” or blow up wedding processions, funerals, or parishioners gathering after services at church should lend attention to the more harmonious and tolerant values of the west and of the Christians. And of the Jews. And, perhaps, infidel others ever so much more at peace with the wide, wide world and themselves.
Israeli interests in Kenya run deep. According to the website of Israel’s embassy in Nairobi, Israel has provided technical assistance in areas such as agriculture and medicine for decades, in some cases going back to the days before Kenyan independence in 1963.
From the following compilation alone, I tallied reports to 246 dead (rebels included) by way of Islamist violence in recent days. I’m sure if I have miscounted, the figure is on the low side.
Let’s round up: should “250 dead” in recent days prove high, somehow, we may wait half a day or a day, seldom more than two, and reality will catch up with it and overtake it.
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AL SHABAAB HITS KENYA, HOLDS HOSTAGES
From a report on the heavily armed assault on the very dangerous civilians shopping (like the one in the above video) at Westgate Mall, Nairobi, Kenya:
Gunmen stormed the mall about noon local time armed with grenades and assault rifles. They asked cornered victims if they were Muslim or non-Muslim, witnesses told the Associated Press. Non-Muslims were held, while Muslims were allowed to go free.
The al-Shabab group said the attacks were in response to a Kenyan military push into Somalia in 2011.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan wearing a security forces uniform turned his weapon against foreign troops Saturday, killing three in eastern Afghanistan, NATO and Afghan officials said, in another apparent attack by a member of the Afghan forces against their international allies.
A TWIN suicide bombing has killed more than 70 people at a church service in northwest Pakistan, the attack believed to be the deadliest on Christians in the country.
The bombers struck at the end of a service at All Saints Church in Peshawar, the main town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province which has borne the brunt of a bloody Islamist insurgency in recent years.
The death toll figure has risen to 78 in many reports:
(Reuters) – A pair of suicide bombers blew themselves up outside a 130-year-old church in Pakistan after Sunday Mass, killing at least 78 people in the deadliest attack on Christians in the predominantly Muslim South Asian country.
Five rebels and a 71-year-old woman were killed Saturday as fighting dragged on in a southern Philippine city between government troops and Muslim insurgents holding out with about 20 civilian hostages, officials said.
Hundreds of fighters under the command of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) have reportedly switched allegiance to al-Qaeda-aligned groups, in a move described as a huge blow to moderate rebel forces.
Activists and military sources have told Al Jazeera that the 11th Division – one of the biggest FSA brigades – has switched allegiance to the al-Nusra Front in Raqqah province, a border province with Turkey.
Two suicide bombers, one in an explosives-laden car and the other on foot, struck a cluster of funeral tents packed with mourning families in a Shia neighbourhood in Baghdad, the deadliest in a string of attacks around Iraq that killed at least 96 people on Saturday.
Iraqi officials say two separate bombings, including a suicide car bomb attack, have killed two security force members and wounded 37 people in the country’s north.
(CNN) — Militants killed 18 soldiers and eight police officers in south Yemen Friday morning, security officials said.
The attacks targeted installations in Shabwa province on Friday morning, the officials said. They said the attackers used car bombs and heavy artillery.
The shoot out took place near the main residential compound for lawmakers in Abuja on Friday and was the first clash involving Islamist militants in the capital this year.
For more than a decade, the U.S. and the West have fought Islamic terrorism predominantly on the military front. Strategists have completely neglected to treat — or even address — the ideological and psychological foundations of the mind.
I sometimes feel alone with this blog when reflecting at lay level+ on relationships involving language, cognition, and behavior, i.e., the psychology of language or, I suppose “psycholinguistics”. It’s therefore most heartening to see Tawfik Hamid similarly engaged, albeit with a different nomenclature.
Call it “Brain-istan” or “Intellectual Battlespace” (thanks, Tammy), reference “psycho-biological” or “psycholinguistics” we’re advancing together along lines addressing pervasive (also archaic and adverse) cultural programming.
Easy does it though.
Even though Hamid notes, “Islamic radicals force women to wear bland, shapeless and colorless dresses, and forbid the expression of any physical beauty,” I / you / we / they know that radicalism falls far short of adoption (on that, reference “Shimmer” around here). For rather lovely pictures of colorful Islamic dress, web search images related to the breaking news “Nigerian beauty pageant“.
One may hope for culturally convergent evolution to smooth over the rough edges of distinct cultures. I’d rather witness global peaceful cultural co-evolution — and it’s needed with as many languages and ways intact and included as may be possible — than what’s been going down in Syria (but, hey, that’s just me).
“The Mosques are our barracks; the minarets our bayonets. The domes are our helms. The believers are our soldiers”
This was the Islamist poem quoted by the mayor of Siirt, Turkey in December 1997. Charged with using inflammatory speech, he was ejected from office and sentenced to jail by the Ankara High Court.
Today he is president [STET] of Turkey. During a decade in office, he has slowly but inexorably pushed secular Turkey, a member of NATO, toward an unabashedly Islamist future.
Only a few years ago, conservative “Islamophobes” would raise the call for “moderate Muslims”: where are you? why do you not protest? why are you silent on Osama Bin Laden and so many, too many, murderous acts against unarmed others whom you do not know?
Times change.
Islamic humanism and pluralism, or perhaps I should put the “humanism and pluralism” first, restating all of a contemporary and thoughtful cast as “Humanist and Pluralist” (to be followed by cultural-ethnic-religious affiliation from “Atheist” to “Polytheist”).
One way or the other, we’re stuck with “us” — all of us — and we know that in the main “humanity of humanity” that we are not murderers and should not be so beset by those whom we know are exactly that and nothing much beyond.
He was given a ten-month prison sentence (of which he served less than four months, from 24 March 1999 to 27 July 1999)[21] for reciting a poem in Siirt in December 1997, which, under article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code was regarded as an incitement to commit an offense and incitement to religious or racial hatred.[22] It included verses translated as “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers….”[10] The aforementioned verses, however, are not in the original version of the poem. The poem was from a work written by Ziya Gökalp, a pan-Turkish activist of the early 20th century.[7] Erdoğan claimed the poem had been approved by the education ministry to be published in textbooks.[23] With the conviction, Erdoğan was forced to give up his mayoral position. The conviction also stipulated a political ban, which prevented him from participating in parliamentary elections. He completed his sentence on 24 July 1999.
Note: Turkey’s current President is Abdullah Gül; Erdoğan serves as Prime Minister.
However, I say in full confidence and pride that the secular democracy and civic society that the U.S.A. has produced so far are still the healthiest on earth and the best available attempt to understand God’s pluralistic creation of humanity.
A segment in the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s new award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception” focuses on Islamists and how they try to control public perception. Part of it is by manipulating a lazy and gullible media. But another part is to shut down any criticism of Islamist ideology – the notion that society is best governed by Islamic law.
Without narcissism and vanity, we would not have, say, Cadillacs and golf courses for starters; with too much, control issues — control of others, ambiguities involving locus of control in cultural, personal, and political dimensions — may become prominent, obsessive, and destructive.
The coin “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” serves to define a trait in dictators who so often lead their states to ruin, but in and through it, one may also catch on to the rejection of criticism accompanied by grandiose delusions in the mirroring taking place within more average souls on similarly inspired missions.
Is it there by nature or has it been nurtured?
My briefest brush with someone else’s clinically diagnosed “bipolar disorder” makes a strong case for nature as regards that specific — distinctive, florid, and unmistakable — psychopathology. However, for the purposes of social and political psychology, I would make a case for language-informed “social grammar” constructing or programming a kind of person who would believe himself remiss if he demurred from enforcing what he believes to be divine favor and instruction already undergirded by congruent and unconsciously managed basic attitudes and beliefs.
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