We picture ourselves at Kenya’s shopping mall but greater outrages fail to move us
“Humankind,
mused T. S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality”, and reality in this
bloodiest of summers has been more than normally unbearable. For the
past four days we have been transfixed by the massacre at Nairobi’s
Westgate shopping mall. Understandably so, and not only because our own
countrymen are among the dead (and possibly among the perpetrators).
Saturday at the supermarket is so familiar a family routine that we can
almost feel the panic; those parents throwing their children to the
floor behind the tills are us. Nairobi got to us here in Britain in ways
that the Assad regime’s use of poison gas to murder twenty times as
many Syrians appears, quite extraordinarily, not to have done.
Al-Shabaab,
the Somalia-based extremist force that has claimed responsibility, is a
smallish cog in an Islamist killing machine. Compared with a couple of
years ago, when it dominated the Somali capital Mogadishu, much of
southern Somalia and piracy operations off the East African coast,
al-Shabaab today is on the back foot. A dogged military effort involving
Kenyan, Ugandan and Ethiopian forces has pushed al-Shabaab’s estimated
7,000 fighters into the rural hinterlands. The writ of the fragile
Somali Government is being slowly expanded and Somalis are closer to
experiencing some semblance of normal life than they have been for two
decades.
Al-Shabaab
has responded by swearing allegiance to al-Qaeda, launching a series of
terrorist attacks in Kenya’s northeastern province along the Somali
border and, it would appear, preparing for “spectaculars” of which the
Nairobi shopping mall atrocity may only be the first.
Kenya
will need all the help it can get to counter the threat. European
politicians must get over their queasiness about co-operating with a
government whose president, Uhuru Kenyatta, is charged by the
International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity for his
alleged role in post-election violence in 2007.
The
much broader challenge of resurgent al-Qaeda can be met only if the
White House comes off the hallucinogenic drug that befuddles Barack
Obama’s foreign policy. And for that to happen, I suspect, something is
going to have to change in all of us, because our political leaders are
proving all too “responsive” to public opinion. We must brace ourselves
to bear a bit more reality.
Because
this grisly weekend presented a troubling question. While disagreeing, I
can understand that a sense that we have “done our bit” in Iraq and
failed may account for our indifference to the violence there: 800
Iraqis met their deaths in August. Yet was a natural shrinking from
unspeakable suffering the reason that, even as we glued our eyes to the
footage out of Kenya, most of us failed even to register Sunday’s still
deadlier Islamist outrage in Pakistan? There, as around 350 worshippers
filed out of All Saints in Peshawar into the morning sun, two suicide
bombers detonated their vests, killing more than 80 and wounding more
than 120, half of them women and children, in the most terrible assault
on Christians in Pakistan’s history.
Most
Pakistanis are appalled; yet most Pakistanis also support blasphemy
laws that have been exploited to persecute scores of Christians. Western
governments have had pathetically little to say about the increasingly
suffocating religious intolerance that Pakistan’s Christians endure.
Similarly, we tend to shrug off as a “local” matter the deadly targeting
of Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria by the Islamist fanatics
of Boko Haram (literally, “Western education is forbidden”). Days before
the Nairobi shootings, Boko Haram sacked Benisheik town in Borno State
and killed at least 161 people — many of them slaughtered at a roadblock
as they fled. Even in Egypt, just across the Mediterranean, we fail to
be outraged at the torching of churches and destruction of whole Coptic
Christian communities.
It
is hard to avoid the conclusion that, when Christians are the victims,
we in the West have become apologetic, even embarrassed, about speaking
out. If this is so, it is worse than morally indefensible. It is a grave
mistake. With what credibility can we appeal to the moderate Muslim
majority to speak out against such atrocities if we, out of a misplaced
nervousness about offending said majority, fail to be at least as robust
in our defence of Christian lives and freedom of worship as we are of
religious terrorism’s Muslim victims?
Counterterrorism
strategy has come a long way since the last Islamist atrocity in
Nairobi, the al-Qaeda assault on the US Embassy in 1998 that
foreshadowed 9/11. But the politics has become ever more blurred, and
collaboration more patchy. In Egypt, our pursemouthed reaction to the
ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood has enraged both Christians and those
moderate Muslims we need as allies, in almost equal measure.
After 9/11, there was a dreadful clarity about what we confront. We need to recover that clarity.
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