Sunday, September 22, 2013

UPDATE: That Massacre in Nairobi

 Gates of Vienna
Some notes and quotes on the killings in Nairobi by a bunch of hoodlums, probably largely from Somalia, bent on revenge…

[I apologize for the lack of narrative flow in this post. I sat by my cat of thirteen years, Lulu, with the computer in my lap, following leads and trying to trace the patterns as I listened for her breathing, occasionally smoothing her cheek. At some point, she died and I retreated to finish this. Yeah, her death was small compared to this barbaric slaughter, but I thanked her for the fitting accompaniment anyway.]

There are no images. You and I have seen so much carnage and destruction delivered by the jihadists over the years that we surely have them memorized by now. Those pictures are jihad porn; they add pleasure for the killers, so I can I omit them here. On Twitter several people are complaining about the New York Times’ many images of bloody bodies. When I come across such pictures, I scroll past them. My first thought is inevitably some version of “oh, I hope the mother/wife/child doesn’t see this last image of their beloved”.
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From All Africa first, and amended by the National Post, some numbers:
At least 26 39 people have been killed or succumbed to injuries following the shooting at the Westgate Shopping mall in Nairobi’s Westlands area. This is according to the Kenya Red Cross service that provided emergency response services.
Red Cross The President also say[s] that a further 50 150 people have been admitted to various hospitals with injuries ranging from gunshot wounds to fractures and cuts.
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Kenya’s president had relatives killed or injured in that massacre. The mall is the most upscale in Kenya…

And here is some of the emptiest political bumpf I’ve seen in print lately as politicians fall all over themselves to offer meaningless assurance:
Deputy President William Ruto has assured Kenyans that the government is doing everything in its power to end the hostage situation that gripped the Westgate mall on Saturday.
[…]
Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph ole Lenku joined the Deputy President in assuring Kenyans that …”Our people have reached most of the floors and taken them over. We have put in place machinery to find the perpetrators of the crime,” he informed the press outside the mall.
Interior Principal Secretary Mutea Iringo said the government had taken the additional step of air surveillance in its bid to bring an end to the hostage situation…
In other words, they haven’t been able to clear the Mall and the terrorists plan to drag this out for maximum damage. They still have hostages.

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The National Post has good background on this story, including that message from Kenya’s president. (I didn’t see one from him at the All Africa site. Such omissions are usually politically-driven, but who knows?)
Terrified shoppers huddled in back hallways and prayed they would not be found by the Islamic extremist gunmen lobbing grenades and firing assault rifles inside Nairobi’s top mall Saturday.
At least 39 people were killed and more than 150 wounded in the assault, Kenya’s president announced on national TV, while disclosing that his close family members were among the dead.
Frank Mugungu, an off-duty army sergeant major, said he saw four male attackers and one female attacker. “One was Somali,” he said, but the others were black, suggesting that they could have been Kenyan or another nationality.
Al-Shabab, on its Twitter feed, said that it has many times warned Kenya’s government that failure to remove its forces from Somalia “would have severe consequences.” The group claimed that its gunmen had killed 100 people, but its assertions are often exaggerated.
“The attack at #WestgateMall is just a very tiny fraction of what Muslims in Somalia experience at the hands of Kenyan invaders,” al-Shabab said. Another tweet said: “For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now it’s time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land #Westgate.”
Notice that al-Shabab has created a Twitter hashtag for their massacre. Social media savvy serving the barbarians. Twitter is known to remove offensive accounts. Surely this one qualifies?
This turned up in Twitter also, from Jihadology so that we now know the full name of these latest Kenyan Muslim killers:
New statement from Ḥarakat al-Shabāb al-Mujāhidīn: “Claiming Responsibility for the Westgate Mall Attack in Nairobi”
They have a few screen caps from HSM, the “press authority” for the mujahedeen. I’ll bet that ‘authority’ is one guy in a turban sitting at a laptop until the generator gives out.
From the National Post story, again:
Al-Shabab threatened in late 2011 to unleash a large-scale attack in Nairobi. Kenya has seen a regular spate of grenade attacks since then but never such a large terrorist assault.
Nairobi’s mortuary superintendent, Sammy Nyongesa Jacob, said Africans, Asians and Caucasians were among the bodies brought to the mortuary.
The United Nations secretary-general’s office said that Ban Ki-moon has spoken with President Uhuru Kenyatta and expressed his concern. British Prime Minister David Cameron also called Kenyatta and offered assistance.
Note: Our Secretary of State is condoling with the survivors but as far as I can ascertain, it’s Radio Silence from the White House. This is Obama’s homeland. What’s up with that?
Kenyan authorities said they have thwarted other large-scale attacks targeting public spaces. Kenyan police said in September 2012 they disrupted a major terrorist attack in its final stages of planning, arresting two people with explosive devices and a cache of weapons and ammunition.
Anti-terror Police Unit boss Boniface Mwaniki said vests found were similar to those used in attacks that killed 76 people in Uganda who gathered to watch the soccer World Cup finals on TV in July 2010. Al-Shabab claimed responsibility for those bombings, saying the attack was in retaliation for Uganda’s participation in the African Union’s peacekeeping mission in Somalia.
The loquacious Obama is missing, even with some Americans involved as victims here, which is strange for a man who has been in and out of Kenya publicly since at least 2006. Here he is in back when he was a mere mortal, trying to rock the vote for one of his corrupt relatives:

There were other appearances in 2008, also captured for posterity on You Tube.
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In 2010, Obama congratulated Kenya for its new constitution, one which supported a carve-out for sharia law. Of course there was talk at the time that he illegally influenced the document and its passage. Here are some reservations by Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who is the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health:
I, together with many others, was counting on a new constitution to provide hope for Kenya’s future by preventing a recurrence of the deadly violence that has followed past elections and by addressing the corruption that plagues this eastern African country. However, the apparent hijacking of this reform process by special interests and the blatantly undemocratic and potentially illegal contribution by the Obama administration give cause for grave concern as to what this document portends for Kenya’s future.
Kenyans are culturally conservative and largely Christian. The pushy socialist agenda of the U.S. is out of place there, and the use of American taxpayer monies to create sharia carve-outs in a foreign nation’s constitution, a nation with a small Muslim minority, is questionable “foreign relations” at best.
That was three years ago. This month, Obama was criticized again regarding Kenya this time for his two-faced policy: pushing voter I.D. in Kenya while fighting it in the US:
A conservative analyst finds it odd that during his recent African tour, President Barack Obama announced support for a citizen ID program in Kenya – yet considers a similar effort in the United States to be racially motivated.
While President Obama and his family toured the African continent earlier in the week, the White House released a Fact Sheet that promotes a $53 million U.S. taxpayer-funded program in Kenya that assists young people to “obtain National identification cards, a prerequisite to voter registration.”
Robert Knight, senior fellow of the American Civil Rights Union, says many who seek to defend against voter fraud in the U.S. are perplexed with Obama’s inconsistencies in regards to the voter ID issue. “The irony is that the president is using taxpayer dollars to promote something in Africa that he is actively suppressing in the United States, and calling people names who are promoting that very thing,” Knight remarks…
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Lastly, Pamela Geller has a collection of some of Kenya’s Muslim terrorism incidents. She calls it Kenya’s Killing Fields. The posts include the one today and go back through 2009. So many Kuffar, so little time. Or, as someone said in an email recently, and which keeps repeating itself in a kind of mantra –
so much of life cannot be explained but only witnessed.

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