Regarding the attack on Garissa University College in Garissa, which
is 90 miles from the Kenyan-Somali border; Two people found hiding on
campus were arrested as suspected terrorists. That would bring the
number of terrorists in the attack to six. One was an Tanzanian who
isn't a student and couldn't explain what he was doing there. (Al-Shabab
is lying and claiming that all their terrorists either escaped or were
killed- “martyred,” as they like to say.) The death toll in the
terrorist rampage is 147 but could go higher. (Some reports are saying
148.)
A surviving student says an attacker spoke by phone in
Swahili (not a language spoken in Somalia) to a controller and asked
what to do with some captives. Then he murdered them. Swahili is spoken
in parts of Kenya and Tanzania.
Al-Shabab is demanding as a
condition of ending their terrorism in Kenya that it vacate “Muslim
lands.” “Muslim lands” in their minds includes part of Kenya.(A BBC
reporter says that a referendum in the Kenyan region where the college
that was just ravaged is located, which was held to allow the residents
there to decide whether to join Somalia or remain part of Kenya, was
canceled when it went the wrong way from the Kenyan government's point
of view.)
Since 2011, when Kenya sent troops into Somalia to
back the U.S. efforts there against Al-Shabab, over 100 terrorist
attacks have been launched in Kenya by Al-Shabab.
Uganda announced that a school there is under threat of terrorist attack. Uganda also has troops in Somalia.
Regarding the high number of dead and wounded inflicted by only a half dozen terrorists armed with AK-47 assault rifles, the New York Times
slipped this intriguing sentence into the 18th paragraph of a 25
paragraph story. The last sentence of that paragraph reads, “It was
unclear whether any bystanders had been killed by the security forces.”
The NY Times frequently plays coy like that, with cryptic, opaque statements left dangling without elaboration. [1]
Another
thing they like to do is bury significant information in the third to
last paragraphs of stories, where the fewest number of people will see
it. (Some people skip to the end of articles, the Times editors
correctly figure.) In this story, the 23rd of 25 paragraphs mentions
that Osama bin Laden rejected Al-Shabab's bid to join Al-Qaeda. (It got
in a year after his assassination by a Navy SEAL death squad.) Maybe
they're afraid someone might think bin Laden wasn't so bad?
Bin
Laden thought the Shababoids were too bloodthirsty, and he didn't like
killing Muslims, a problem he also had with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
There is an amusing irony in a Shabab document found in Mali by the Associated Press.
The Shababoids justify their killings of Muslims using the Israeli
“human shields” argument. As Israel claims it kills Palestinian
civilians because Hamas “terrorists” are using them as “human shields,”
Shabab wrote that “all Muslims must stay far away from the enemy and
their installations so as not to become human shields for them,” because
there is “no excuse for those who live or mingle with the enemies.”
Yeah, and it serves those Palestinians right too for voting for Hamas.
The
Kenyan college that suffered the horrendous attack and mass slaughter
is now closed. So the educations of thousands of people has been
disrupted, probably permanently in some cases. Boko Haram (“Western
education is forbidden,” the Nigerian Islamofascist terrorist group)
will probably send a shout-out to Al-Shabab for a job well done.
The
Islamofascists keep proving they are enemies of civilization and
humanity. They consistently violently attack and destroy education, art,
culture, world heritage sites, music, and every form of personal
expression and freedom, such as clothing and personal grooming, and
exalt barbarism, sadism, and sexual slavery. It is eminently reasonable
to try to annihilate these vicious nihilists. The only caveat is that it
should be done in ways that do not harm the innocent (and pay
compensation and sincere apologies to innocent victims- that
would go a long way towards limiting the counterproductive effects
caused by such “collateral damage”) and with great discrimination and
intelligence. I mean intelligence in the sense of a sophisticated
understanding and approach to the task at hand. Of course, this won't
happen, since all the regimes arrayed against the Islamofascists are
venal, all the Arab ones and also the U.S., Israel, Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand. (The U.S. of course being an arch-enemy of humanity
itself, Israel now a quasi-fascist apartheid state, and the latter three
currently ruled by corrupt, dishonest, reactionary regimes headed by
loathsome leaders.) On the one side, cruel and callous power entities.
On the other, maniacal sadists and killers hypnotized by their own
fanatical and remorseless ideology. So it's not a case of Good vs. Evil.
It's Evil vs. Unbelievably Awful Evil. Which puts us in the position of
rooting unenthusiastically for Evil, at best.
The locals in the
region where the school is located are complaining that warnings were
ignored and the Kenyan government hadn't taken protective steps. But
compared to the Westgate Mall fiasco, in which a handful of terrorists
were holed up in the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, for days, and returning
shopkeepers discovered that the Kenyan troops had systematically looted
the place, the performance of Kenyan “security forces” in the college
rampage was a big improvement. (No luxury goods to loot at the college.)
The terrorists were dispatched much more quickly this time, even though
it was claimed the terrorists were posted as snipers.
One
reason the mall siege lasted so long was so the Army could have time to
thoroughly clean out the stores they looted. This fact is never
mentioned by Western media. But that's how Western media rolls. That's
why I call it propaganda, not journalism. It deliberately distorts
reality and is dishonest in the service of its hidden political and
ideological goals.
Other examples of key facts erased from
memory are what precipitated the Iranian “hostage crisis.” It was the
U.S. admitting the fugitive Shah into the country. Omitting that fact is
like discussing the outbreak of World War I without mentioning the
shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. Or the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the
Swedish diplomat who worked to save Jews from Nazis in Hungary during
World War II, who was illegally arrested and imprisoned by the Soviets.
No mention is ever made of the fate of his superior, the man who
authorized his activities. His role in saving Jews can never be
mentioned, and he too is whited out of the story. His name was Count
Folke Bernadotte. Right after World War II, he was serving as UN High
Commissioner in Palestine. There he was murdered by the Jewish terrorist
organization the Stern Gang (LEHI), headed by one Yitzhak Shamir, later
a prime minister of Israel. I needn't explain why in the oft-repeated
tale of the “righteous” Wallenberg and his sad fate, you never hear
about Bernadotte. Wallenberg outlived his superior by many years, but in
Soviet imprisonment, one of the innumerable crimes of the Bolsheviks.
The
Bolsheviks, by the way, were no friends of actual communists and
Marxists, who they vigorously wiped out under Lenin and Stalin. Thus did
the Bolsheviks actually serve capitalism in the long run. No wonder all
those former “communists” of eastern Europe now sit comfortably in the
European Parliament and in positions of power in their home countries as
newly -minted reactionary capitalists. Once an authoritarian oppressor,
always an authoritarian oppressor, I suppose.
1] “Somali Militants Kill 147 at Kenyan University,” New York Times, April 2, 2015.
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