Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Why no anger at massacres of Christians?

Rosemary Righter





Published at 12:01AM, September 25 2013
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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