A global conflict

[Prospero]

Leaving aside the pointless and trivial squabble between me and Sataros, this report from the Independent newspaper is truly troubling - upsetting and sad.

Also the BBC reported today that the Imam who is the main recruiter for al-Shabaab in Kenya said the massacre was "the right thing to do", but that he cannot be prosecuted. Strange world.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...r-8842509.html

Kenya shopping mall attack: Nairobi hostages were tortured before they were killed, says police doctor
Rumours of rapes, disfigurement and beheadings are rife in Kenya’s capital

A police doctor scouring Nairobi’s Westgate mall for bodies after a four-day siege by Islamist gunmen that claimed dozens of lives has said victims were tortured before they died, according to a Kenyan newspaper.

“Those are not allegations. Those are f****** truths,” the doctor, a forensics expert, told The Star newspaper. “They removed balls, eyes, ears, nose. They get your hand and sharpen it like a pencil then they tell you to write your name with the blood. They drive knives inside a child’s body. Actually, if you look at all the bodies, unless those ones that were escaping, fingers are cut by pliers, the noses are ripped by pliers.”

The information could not be independently verified, but William Pike, the British editor of The Star, said the reporters working on the story had been given similar accounts from other sources. “We have [the source] on a recording,” Mr Pike said. “He was talking very graphically, and he was very angry.”

The horrifying details of what may be the last moments of some of the hostages at the hands of terrorists from Somalia’s al-Shabaab movement come amid mounting public anger over the authorities silence about the details of the siege. Many questions remain, such as what happened to the potentially dozens of hostages still unaccounted for? What happened to the attackers? And what caused parts of Westgate to collapse in the final hours of the siege?

Police have asked for patience as they begin the painstaking work of gathering evidence and searching for bodies, with Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku warning it could take up to a week to complete the search. He has said that an “insignificant” number of bodies are still trapped.

Gunmen armed with machine guns and grenades stormed the Westgate mall on Saturday lunchtime, shooting indiscriminately, and killing at least 61 people. A further six security officers died in attempts to rout the militants. During the siege, rescuers evacuated many survivors, but reports suggested hostages were being held by militants. Kenya’s Red Cross says that 71 people are still listed as missing.

Ghoulish accounts on the fate of the hostages have circulated Nairobi and there have been claims that the military was forced to blow up part of the Westgate complex not just to bring the siege to an end, but to end the appalling suffering of hostages amid reports that hostages were raped, and others beheaded and their heads thrown out of the windows.


None of these reports could be verified amid what is a febrile atmosphere in the city following the worst terrorist attack on Kenyan soil since the US embassy bombings by Al-Qa’ida in 1998 that killed more han 200.

Allegations of rape are not commonly linked with Islamist militants, although there are increasing numbers of rape cases reported in Somalia after long years of conflict.

Meanwhile, Kenyan authorities are also facing questions over whether they had any intelligence on an impending attack, which a Somali al-Shabaab chief said was a “message to Westerners” who had “backed Kenya’s invasion [of Somalia],” a reference to Kenya’s 2011 incursion aimed at crushing the militant movement.

Kenya’s National Intelligence Agency (NIS), widely accused by politicians of failing to pick up chatter about the attack, has insisted it did warn the police and officials inside the President’s office before the Westgate siege, but its warnings went unheeded, The Star reported.

According to the same report, a pregnant policewoman avoided Westgate after her brother, who works for Kenyan intelligence, warned her of a terror attack. “She has told police that her brother who is a NIS officer warned her not to visit Westgate that Saturday because she would not be able to run,” a senior officer was quoted as saying

[dderek123]

That is totally fucked up.

[Ben]

Author David Swanson: "When the World Outlawed War"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=pBa361BB8hU

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=Prospero;1395456]

The islamists seek to impose a version of Sharia that is backward and aqainst any notion of human rights and social justice as we understand it in the West.
--You could have added, 'against any notion of human rights and social justice as understood in Islam' on the basis that much of the aggressive Islam which underpins the beliefs of the radical groups is actually anti-Islamic, not only does it depart from a religious understanding of Islam as the love of God, it encourages attacks on Islam from within it and from without, by acts of violence, and intimidation at the social and cultural level. As Bassam Tibi put it:
One need not be an expert on Islamic movements to know how weak and divided these movements are, in relative terms, and to infer from their weakness their inability to bring about the new world order they proclaim with such electrifying rhetoric. To be sure fundamentalists can engineer frightening levels of terrorism and otherwise throw the streets into turmoil, but it is difficult to imagine the diverse and rivalrous Islamic fundamentalist movements coming together long enough to create a new order even had they the requisite economic, political, and military wherewithal...(The Challenge of Fundamentalism, 199

So when i say there is a crisis in islam it is across the Umma and particularly between the discourses that dominate most Muslims who live outside the Muslim majority countries and those who have no wish to live in harmony but insted cleave to the sort of vision inspired by Sayyed al-Qutb, the Muslim Brtherhood, the Salafist, the Wahhabi tendency and others. They are a menace.
--But the problem rests with us as much as the 'Umma' you refer to. But yes, they are a menace, because they have an ability to create disorder. Isn't that the point of conjuncture with the Red Brigades and the Red Army Fraction for whom the creation of a Communist revolution first needed a repressive state apparatus that would alienate 'the masses'? In these cases, the dream of a final state is but a dream, the glory is in the struggle to create the preconditions for it, even though there is an aversion to violence among the very 'masses' in whose name atrocities are committed.

--If I object to the word 'crisis' (which is also how Tibi expressed it in 199 it is because the word suggests a need for urgent action, whereas I see these radical movements whether or not they take their cue from Qutb as reacting against 'modernization' while practising it at the same time. And this has been part of the 'revolt of Islam' since Napleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 if not before that (cf Nikkie Keddie's article 'The Revolt of Islam, from 1700-1993' in Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol 36, no 3 (1994). The contradiction is again expressed well by Tibi:
Fundamentalism is a Weltanschaung or worldview that seeks to establish its own order, and thus to separate the peoples of Islamic civilization from the rest of humanity while claiming for their worldview a universal standing'.

But there is also an underpinning religious vision as well.
--I don't see it that way. Because I tend to see both the origin of Islam and the development of its extreme variants as reactions to a relationship to other cultures and beliefs, but where the 'crisis' is invented for political purposes. For these people there has always been a 'crisis', rather like the 'crisis in capitalism' Trostsykists have been telling us about since the 1930s.
I see these trends in the context of two thousand years. That may sound callous and impractical in the context of real events in which people are horribly killed, but it is a mistake to see these events as 'we and they' or 'them and us' because that is precisely the framework used by the radicals to try and separate Muslims from non-Muslims, and particular sects of Islam from each other, and it has nothing much to do with religion except as a branding exercise. After all, when you set aside the Protestant and Catholic criticisms of religious practice, the core problem is/was the political status of the Pope and whether or not obedience should be made to the Pope or the government, this was at the root of the religious violence which swept through England under Henry VIII and continued in a reverse fashion with Queen Mary and to a lesser extent Elizabeth 1 and led ultimately to Catholics being legally barred from holding public office (until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1822). A similar problem arises with young British Muslims who refuse to recognise the Law of England but only 'Allah's Law', absurd though the concept is in theory and practice.
The Arabs have had to work their way through a variety of political regimes most of which failed to deliver sufficient economic prosperity, social justice and stability to prevent the emergence of violent opposition; radical groups have tended to step into a vacuum vacated by the state -the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is in reality a popular social movement which has served its supporters with education and welfare precisely because the State failed to do so, much as the Cosa Nostra was built in Sicily in the vacuum of power that followed the collapse of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in 1816 and the indifference of Rome to its periphery.

The popular reaction against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the popularity of the (now defunct) Islamic Courts in Somalia as opposed to the Shebab, the Awakening movement in Iraq -what these movements show is that radical Islamic groups are a dead end; they can be destructive, they can create disorder and civil war, and carry their violence into our own streets, and they emerge in the power vacuums that open up when decades of dictatorship is replaced by chaos -but the experience of the Islamic State so far has been poor, and people know it. Right now the real fear in 'the west' is not so much Iran and Syria, but Saudi Arabia, as the Saudi Royal Family's hold on power is not tenable in the long term, but where any unified opposition is lacking precisely because a diversity of opinion and indeed, political activity is crushed throughout the kingdom. But this post is already too long on a topic that has no finality. We are stuck with this violent rage for some time to come.

[Stavros]

Leaving aside the pointless and trivial squabble between me and Sataros, this report from the Independent newspaper is truly troubling - upsetting and sad.

But is it true? There is now theory that a lot of the destruction was caused by the army when it entered the Mall, and that they set off bombs and were firing weapons as a cover while soldiers looted the shops of electrical goods, cameras, computers and the most expensive clothing....a lot of facts still to come on this incident it seems...