Terrorism in Kenya, Made in the Political Correct U.S.A.
IBDEditorials.com
Terror: George W. Bush took a lot of flak for saying you were either with the U.S. or with the terrorists. Now that Kenya has been attacked by U.S.-based terrorists, maybe it's time to fight Islamofascists, not coddle them.
It was a classic al-Qaida operation in Nairobi over the weekend: a glittering international-grade mall frequented by foreigners, a country that's rising economically in the world and a two-pronged military-style assault aimed at slaughtering everyone who moved, the bloody photographs and footage the terrorists' press release to the news for days on end.
Terrorists tied to al-Qaida's franchise in Somalia, al-Shabab, killed at least 68 people in the attack. At press time, they still held about a dozen people hostage as commandos closed in and smoke billowed from the mall.
On the surface, the motive is simple — Kenya's eastern border is with Somalia, and Kenyan troops in the past year or so have hosed Somali terrorists out of their nests, ruining their dream of taking over a failed state.
But Somali terrorists also eyed Kenya as a target. There's little doubt they saw how Kenyan officials reacted when a major economic target — Nairobi's airport export terminal — was destroyed by fire last August.
Not only were Kenya's first responders disgracefully incompetent — reportedly looting, rather than putting out the fire — Kenyan officials were absurdly quick to rule out terrorism even though the fire occurred on the 15th anniversary to the day of the 1998 al-Qaida terror attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.
We see the same sort of myopia in the U.S., which was the target of 9/11, the biggest al-Qaida terror attack, and which still nominally leads the war on terror — now tellingly renamed "overseas contingency operations."
What should we make of the fact that al-Shabab has gleefully released information on Twitter that at least five Nairobi mall attackers were U.S.-reared Somalis — from Minneapolis, Kansas City, Arizona and Maine?
And will this provoke a rethinking about the U.S. as a sort of conveyor belt for terrorists, not just at home but now abroad?
The implications are disturbing. Not only do we deny the existence of Islamic terrorism when President Obama calls it an "overseas contingency operation" and when U.S. officials claim that the perpetrators are just "violent extremists," but now we seem to be manufacturing our very own homegrown terrorists as well.
At least some of the Somalis who terrorized the Nairobi mall were brought to the U.S. by U.S. policymakers, settled by activist do-gooders such as Catholic Charities, reared on U.S. welfare, and given a relativistic education grounded not in patriotism but in one-culture-is-just-as-good-as-another multiculturalism.
It's worse than just a failure to screen out bad apples. Somalis have warned federal authorities about terrorist recruiting in their midst and, instead of being lauded, have found themselves branded "Islamophobic" as a result of this same climate of denial.
According to a report in The Daily Caller, the chief enforcer of political correctness in the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations repeatedly tried to stop a Minnesota community leader from warning about the dangers an al-Qaida-linked group posed to the Somali-American community prior to the mall massacre.
"I tried to warn America," Abdirizak Bihi told Charles C. Johnson, explaining that he's been trying to stop the radicalization of Minneapolis' 32,000-strong Somali community, only to find his character attacked by the likes of CAIR.
Yet some 50 Somali immigrants to the U.S. have reportedly signed up with al-Shabab, and 20 are believed to be still active. They join other Somalis who've signed on as welfare colonizers in places with generous benefits — such as Finland, the U.K. and Canada — who are also said to be among the attackers on the mall in Kenya.
A Somali terrorist wannabe enrolled as a student at Oregon State University was caught attempting to load a van full of bombs to blow up a Christmas tree-lighting celebration in Portland, Ore., in 2010.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, one that signals that the very terrorists we fight, and are attacked by, are increasingly not brought up in caves but nurtured right here in the U.S.