The Kenyan elections: "There is a Christian I am fighting against..."
I'm sure you've heard about the elections in Kenya. And the reports of voting irregularities and riots in the streets. All tribal unrest this. And ethnic rioting that...
Funny, you don't read much about the ISLAMISTS...
From an excellent piece in the NY Times entitled The African Front.
These are some of the most extraordinary and unsettling times in Kenya’s post-independence history. The country is in the middle of a boom, its 5.7 percent annual growth rate among the highest in Africa. Shopping malls and office towers are rising in nearly every corner of Nairobi; S.U.V.’s and luxury cars fill the streets, and the traffic has gotten bad enough to invite comparisons with Bangkok. Kenya’s tourism industry has been highly sensitive to both domestic and international terrorism but is now flourishing. And while the country is still plagued by corruption, tribalism and poverty, the one-party rule that gripped Kenya for four decades — first under Jomo Kenyatta, then under President
At the same time, militant Islam has also found a foothold. A sizable, largely poor Muslim population concentrated along the coast — and proximity to the volatile states in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Sudan — have made Kenya especially vulnerable, in the views of counter-terrorism experts, to the call for jihad. Since the early 1990s, the mosques of Mombasa and other towns have resonated with militant Islamic rhetoric. Radical imams have preached violence against Westerners, attacked the Kenyan government as the lackey of the United States and Israel and called for the implementation of Shariah. Members of the Qaeda cells that blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, were recruited in mosques near the Indian Ocean beaches where hundreds of thousands of Western tourists flock each year.
Kenya is “a good place” for militant Islamists to blend in, I was told by Al Amin Kimathi, the director of the Muslim Human Rights Forum in Nairobi, which accuses the Kenyan government of discrimination against the country’s roughly four million Muslims (in a total population of 37 million). He added, only half in jest: “Even Osama Bin Laden could hang around here. He could land at the airport, spread some money around and he’d be walking.”
And there's more - including this about two candidates for the Kenyan parliament. One is the incumbent, an American educated Christian and his challenger, an Islamist engineer - who converted to Islam in college and advocates the caliphate.Hardera, a gritty town on the Somali border... is populated almost entirely by ethnic Somalis, many of whom supported the radical Islamists who had just seized control of Mogadishu and who were angry at what they regard as U.S. machinations to unseat them with Ethiopian help. After announcing his candidacy for Kenya’s Parliament, Kura told me, Harugura addressed an outdoor gathering of Somali Muslims in Hardera. “He told the Somalis: ‘There is a Christian I am fighting against. I want to bring about an environment where all are Islamic, because our people are lost.’
Do read it all.
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