Just an update about the sadistic nature within the religion of peace:
Details are beginning to emerge about the sadistic horrors perpetrated by members of the religion of peace at the Westgate Mall in Kenya. (h/t Rantburg)
According to doctors called to the mall after the end of the siege and from recollections of photos in our possession, the terrorists removed the balls, eyes, nose and ears of hostages. They forced the hostages to use their chopped off hands to write their names.
They ripped noses using pliers and cut fingers with knives and hanged some of the hostages instead of shooting them dead. They also sent chopped limbs down the escalator to people eagerly waiting to rescue hostages.
The terrorists hid behind tinted window panes only to open fire on civilians who were being rescued. When they were being attacked, they used hostages as human shields.
I have read reports that most remaining hostages have been rescued, and threat the UK and Israel have both sent rapid deployment teams to help… the reports are that TODAY the remaining terrorists and will be dealt with.
Another UPDATE:
CNN has changed its wording to the previous statement that Americans were involved. The Blazenotes this:
BBC Africa is reporting Abu Omar, the Al-Shabab military commander in Somalia, has denied reports Americans are involved in the attack.
HotAir is noting however that the State Dept is close to confirming it true:
The US government is close to confirming this, CNN reports:
A senior State Department official told CNN that U.S. officials are trying to confirm whether the names released by Al-Shabaab are Americans, but said they are becoming more confident American citizens were involved in the Kenyan attack….
FireArm Blog goes through some of the pictures and catalogs the guns used, for the curious.
Video from in mall, video description:
Scary, the gun-shots are people dying. The guy holding the camera [phone ?] apparently made it… that is the assumption. If these guys are being pulled from Minnesota and other Western places… when will it happen here in the states?
Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Shabaab is claiming that there are 3 American gunmen among the others in a standoff at the Nairobi Mall in Kenya. They are Ahmed Mohamed Isse, 22, “native” of St. Paul, MN, Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid, 24, of Minneapolis, and Gen Mustafe Noorudiin, 27, of Kansas City, MO. The attack has killed at least 68, including the wife of a U.S. diplomat, and more than 175 have been wounded.
[….]
(PJ Media) …Other gunmen were named as being from locations such as Finland, Canada, the UK., Somalia and Kenya. None of the names were female, even though witnesses reported a white woman among the shooters.
That’s raised speculation about whether “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite, a British widow of one of the 7/7 attackers who became an al-Qaeda paymaster, is involved in the attacks. Last year she was on the run in Kenya as international authorities tried to hunt her down.
Nine names were released; authorities have said 10 to 15 gunmen are still believed to be in the mall holding around 30 hostages, including possibly children. CNN International witnessed one grief-stricken man trying to break police lines to get into the mall, claiming that his kids are still inside.
I tire of the term “senseless” violence, like this is just a fluke. No, it is very directed and concentrated… it is barbarians (the uncivilized) at the gate of humanity.
HotAir has these points near the end of their post:
Update: Don’t forget that al-Shabaabhas done a lot of recruiting in the Twin Cities among the ex-patcommunity here, and a number of young men remain missing. The FBI got quite a bit of cooperation from the Somalis here (no thanks to CAIR) as they tried to keep their sons out of the conflict that they had fled, and the probe has resulted in some indictments. Keep that in mind as we find out who the perpetrators were in this attack.
France said two of its citizens were killed, and Canada said two Canadians died, including a 29-year-old diplomat. Ghanaian diplomat and poet, Kofi Awoonor, was also killed, as was a Chinese woman, according to China’s official news agency.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who offered assistance to Kenya, said several U.S. citizens had been hurt and the wife of a U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development was killed.
Don’t be surprised to see a few of these nations band together for a punishing attack on al-Shabaab in the future. (via the Daily Beast)
An amazing story via Libertarian Republican, take note that in the video seen at LR’s website the shirt being worn is that of Nelson Mandela:
No hyperbole. No exaggeration. This really happened.
Note – it’s not being covered at all in any of the American media. Only here at Libertarian Republican.
From Arutz7, “South African BDS Protesters: ‘Shoot the Jew’ — A South African protest against an Israeli musician quickly deteriorated into a call for the murder of Jews”:
Anti-Israel students and activists showed their “true colors” last Wednesday night, Jewish students at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa said.
Moving quickly from “anti-Zionism” to classic anti-Semitism, a melange of students and BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) activists began screaming “Shoot the Jews” at a concert featuring religious Jewish jazz saxophonist Daniel Zamir.
[….]
Of course, the South African blacks were urged on by Muslims in the crowd.
Continuing:
Dozens of South African Muslims and BDS supporters gathered outside Wits’ Great Hall, with security personnel keeping them outside. Several scuffles were reported, and concert-goers were subject to a great deal of verbal abuse.
At that point, said witnesses, the protesters broke into a sing-song chant of “kill the Jews,” (“Dubula e Juda” in Zulu), a take-off on a protest song sung in the 80s against whites. When questioned, Muhammed Desai, coordinator of the protest and leader of “BDS South Africa,” said that the protesters did not mean the term “kill the Jews” literally. (Emphasis added.)
Note – this “Kill Whites” song has been sung at political rallies by numerous political leaders in the South African left, including Nelson Mandela.
In this March 29, 2013 photo provided by the French Army’s images division, ECPAD, a French soldier holds the launch tube of an SA-7 surface-to-air missile before its destruction in Timbuktu, northern Mali. The knowledge that the terrorists have the weapon has already changed the way the French are carrying out their five-month-old offensive in Mali. (AP Photo/ECPAD, Olivier Debes)
TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like Xeroxed, stapled handouts for a class.
Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.
The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
“The existence of what apparently constitutes a ‘Dummies Guide to MANPADS’ is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb having the missiles,” said Atlantic Council analyst Peter Pham, a former adviser to the United States’ military command in Africa and an instructor to U.S. Special Forces. “Why else bother to write the guide if you don’t have the weapons? … If AQIM not only has the MANPADS, but also fighters who know how to use them effectively,” he added, “then the impact is significant, not only on the current conflict, but on security throughout North and West Africa, and possibly beyond.”
The United States was so worried about this particular weapon ending up in the hands of terrorists that the State Department set up a task force to track and destroy it as far back as 2006. In the spring of 2011, before the fighting in Tripoli had even stopped, a U.S. team flew to Libya to secure Gadhafi’s stockpile of thousands of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles.
By the time they got there, many had already been looted.
Money from rich countries has trapped many African nations in a cycle of corruption, slower economic growth and poverty. Cutting off the flow would be far more beneficial, says Dambisa Moyo.
(Long interview of Miss Moyo follows article)
A month ago I visited Kibera, the largest slum in Africa. This suburb of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is home to more than one million people, who eke out a living in an area of about one square mile — roughly 75% the size of New York’s Central Park. It is a sea of aluminum and cardboard shacks that forgotten families call home. The idea of a slum conjures up an image of children playing amidst piles of garbage, with no running water and the rank, rife stench of sewage. Kibera does not disappoint.
What is incredibly disappointing is the fact that just a few yards from Kibera stands the headquarters of the United Nations’ agency for human settlements which, with an annual budget of millions of dollars, is mandated to “promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.” Kibera festers in Kenya, a country that has one of the highest ratios of development workers per capita. This is also the country where in 2004, British envoy Sir Edward Clay apologized for underestimating the scale of government corruption and failing to speak out earlier.
Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time — millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.
Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.
[….]
Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.
Prager Interview
Dennis Prager interviews Miss Moyo on his radio program ~ about half-an-hour.
Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. In order to keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of African education and health care. Well-meaning calls to cancel debt mean little when the cancellation is met with the fresh infusion of aid, and the vicious cycle starts up once again.
[….]
In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2004, Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Northwestern University, argued that the World Bank had participated in the corruption of roughly $100 billion of its loan funds intended for development.
As recently as 2002, the African Union, an organization of African nations, estimated that corruption was costing the continent $150 billion a year, as international donors were apparently turning a blind eye to the simple fact that aid money was inadvertently fueling graft. With few or no strings attached, it has been all too easy for the funds to be used for anything, save the developmental purpose for which they were intended.
In Zaire — known today as the Democratic Republic of Congo — Irwin Blumenthal (whom the IMF had appointed to a post in the country’s central bank) warned in 1978 that the system was so corrupt that there was “no (repeat, no) prospect for Zaire’s creditors to get their money back.” Still, the IMF soon gave the country the largest loan it had ever given an African nation. According to corruption watchdog agency Transparency International, Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s president from 1965 to 1997, is reputed to have stolen at least $5 billion from the country.
It’s scarcely better today. A month ago, Malawi’s former President Bakili Muluzi was charged with embezzling aid money worth $12 million. Zambia’s former President Frederick Chiluba (a development darling during his 1991 to 2001 tenure) remains embroiled in a court case that has revealed millions of dollars frittered away from health, education and infrastructure toward his personal cash dispenser. Yet the aid keeps on coming.
[….]
In Ethiopia, where aid constitutes more than 90% of the government budget, a mere 2% of the country’s population has access to mobile phones. (The African country average is around 30%.) Might it not be preferable for the government to earn money by selling its mobile phone license, thereby generating much-needed development income and also providing its citizens with telephone service that could, in turn, spur economic activity?
Look what has happened in Ghana, a country where after decades of military rule brought about by a coup, a pro-market government has yielded encouraging developments. Farmers and fishermen now use mobile phones to communicate with their agents and customers across the country to find out where prices are most competitive. This translates into numerous opportunities for self-sustainability and income generation — which, with encouragement, could be easily replicated across the continent.
To advance a country’s economic prospects, governments need efficient civil service. But civil service is naturally prone to bureaucracy, and there is always the incipient danger of self-serving cronyism and the desire to bind citizens in endless, time-consuming red tape. What aid does is to make that danger a grim reality. This helps to explain why doing business across much of Africa is a nightmare. In Cameroon, it takes a potential investor around 426 days to perform 15 procedures to gain a business license. What entrepreneur wants to spend 119 days filling out forms to start a business in Angola? He’s much more likely to consider the U.S. (40 days and 19 procedures) or South Korea (17 days and 10 procedures).
Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They’ll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities.
In a similar vein has been the approach to food aid, which historically has done little to support African farmers. Under the auspices of the U.S. Food for Peace program, each year millions of dollars are used to buy American-grown food that has to then be shipped across oceans. One wonders how a system of flooding foreign markets with American food, which puts local farmers out of business, actually helps better Africa. A better strategy would be to use aid money to buy food from farmers within the country, and then distribute that food to the local citizens in need.
Then there is the issue of “Dutch disease,” a term that describes how large inflows of money can kill off a country’s export sector, by driving up home prices and thus making their goods too expensive for export. Aid has the same effect. Large dollar-denominated aid windfalls that envelop fragile developing economies cause the domestic currency to strengthen against foreign currencies. This is catastrophic for jobs in the poor country where people’s livelihoods depend on being relatively competitive in the global market.
To fight aid-induced inflation, countries have to issue bonds to soak up the subsequent glut of money swamping the economy. In 2005, for example, Uganda was forced to issue such bonds to mop up excess liquidity to the tune of $700 million. The interest payments alone on this were a staggering $110 million, to be paid annually.
The stigma associated with countries relying on aid should also not be underestimated or ignored. It is the rare investor that wants to risk money in a country that is unable to stand on its own feet and manage its own affairs in a sustainable way.
Many of us believe that aid to Africa is crucial to lift people out of poverty. But not Dambisa Moyo. In a controversial new book, she argues that foreign aid has been a disaster for Africa and must be stopped. Moyo was born and raised in Zambia, but educated at Oxford and Harvard. She has worked for both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. Her book is call “Dead Aid”
A small portion from the article Dennis reads from (to the right):
Yet a growing number of humanitarian and development experts – including former true believers – argue that aid money frequently prolongs wars, props up dictators, impedes democracy, aids oppression and stifles human rights. Nowhere, they say, is this chain of unintended consequences more apparent than in Ethiopia itself.
The starving children of Ethiopia were not the victims of drought, as most people believed at the time. They were the victims of politics. The government of the time was using famine as an instrument of war, and the rebels were more interested in defeating the government than in feeding famine victims. As William Easterly, a leading aid skeptic, puts it, “It’s not the rains, it’s the rulers.” Political famines attract the food aid industry, with the consequence that governments or rebel groups are able to feed their own armies and divert resources to buy more weapons. Humanitarian aid in conflict zones is always problematic. It helps the bad guys as well as the innocent.
“By Monday at the latest, the troops will be there or will have started to arrive,” said Ali Coulibaly, Ivory Coast’s African Integration Minister. “Things are accelerating … The reconquest of the north has already begun.” …. A spokesman for one of Mali’s rebel groups, Ansar Dine, warned that France’s intervention would have repercussions. “There are consequences, not only for French hostages, but also for all French citizens wherever they find themselves in the Muslim world,” Sanda Ould Boumama said. — Reuters
I am sure we will see France’s large Islamists population start to cause a ruckus (beheadings?) in France. The other African nations are down because they see the dangerous fascist doctrine coming to them already or soon.
BAMAKO/PARIS (Reuters) – French fighter jets bombed Islamist rebels in Mali for a third day on Sunday as Paris poured more troops into the capital Bamako, awaiting the arrival of a West African force to dislodge al Qaeda-linked insurgents from the country’s north.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said France’s dramatic intervention on Friday to bomb a convoy of heavily armed Islamist fighters sweeping southwards had stopped them from seizing Mali’s capital Bamako within days.
Western countries fear Islamists could use Mali as a base for attacks on the West, forming a link with al Qaeda militants in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa….
[….]
A French pilot was killed on Friday when rebels in Mali shot down his helicopter.
President Francois Hollande has made it clear that France’s aim in Mali is to support the deployment of a West African mission to retake the north, endorsed by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
The 15-nation West African bloc ECOWAS convened a summit for Saturday in Ivory Coast to discuss the military campaign.
With Paris pressing West African nations to deploy troops quickly, Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara, who holds the rotating ECOWAS chairmanship, has kick-started the operation to deploy some 3,300 African soldiers.
Ouattara was himself installed in power with French military backing in 2011 after a brief civil war triggered by former president Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to step aside after losing a late 2010 election.
“The troops will start arriving in Bamako today and tomorrow,” Ali Coulibaly, Ivory Coast’s African Integration Minister, said. “They will be convoyed to the front at Sevare.”
HOUSE-TO-HOUSE SEARCHES
Under cover from French fighter planes and attack helicopters on Friday, Malian troops drove the Islamists out of the strategic central town of Konna, which they had seized a day earlier. A senior Malian army official said more than 100 rebel fighters had been killed.
Military analysts expressed doubt, however, that this was the start of a swift operation to retake the whole of northern Mali – a harsh, sparsely populated terrain the size of France – as neither equipment nor ground troops were ready.
In Nigeria, which will lead the ECOWAS force, a military official who asked not to be identified said it would take time to train and equip the troops.
Here is also some commentary from Creeping Shariaon those many killed in the Ivory Coast:
Take note, Obama and the Ummah United Nations are behind Ouattara even though the winner of the election is in dispute. When it’s time to choose his poison, Obama always sides with the Muslim.
Patrick Nicholson, of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, said workers visited Duekoue last Wednesday and found hundreds of bodies of civilians killed by bullets from small-arms fire and hacked to death with machetes. He said they estimated that more than 1,000 civilians had been killed.
Nicholson, the Caritas spokesman, said the killings occurred over three days in a neighbourhood controlled by fighters loyal to internationally recognised president Alassane Ouattara, though it was not clear who the perpetrators were.
[This is]…the second source claiming no clue on who killed 1,000 people even though fighters loyal to the Muslim leader captured the town.
To catch the reader up on the issues in that part of Africa,one article explains why we find this tension growing:
Background
A civil war began on September 19, 2002 due to several unresolved social, political, and military issues the government of the Ivory Coast had not proactively dealt with. One of the largest of these issues remains the increasingly grim “ethnic problem” that has led to violence around attempted pre-election periods. It is estimated that over 20% of the national population is of foreign descent, which has led to a national disunity concerning voting rights. The underlying problem of the voting rights issue is the indecision surrounding if foreigners, many from Burkina Faso, have the right to vote.
During the 30-year reign of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, ethnic tensions had been suppressed under the strong leadership of the government despite a growing influx of foreigners from other African nations. After Houphouët-Boigny, the nation struggled to integrate democracy into the fragmenting society largely due to a growing dislike of the “non-Ivoirity” population. Over the past several years, this term has been used as increasingly racist and is often used in the rampant nationalist, xenophobic politics to represent the population of the southeastern portion of the country, particularly in the capital of Abidjan.
As last century drew to a close, ethnic violence began to increase as the economy of the Ivory Coast continued to sink, forcing many urban workers to return to the growing fields that had originally made Ivory Coast a regional powerhouse. However, many of the farmers were immigrants from other African nations who had been drawn to the wealth of the Ivory Coast. This further exacerbated heightening tensions between ethnic groups, leading to frequent riots on plantation farms.
The final straw came before the 2000 elections, which required that both parents of any presidential candidate be born within sovereign territory of the Ivory Coast. This excluded northern presidential candidate Alassane Ouattara, a serious contender for the presidency from the race, who represented much of the immigrant community.
On September 19, 2002, northern troops mutinied and launched multiple attacks across Abidjan. By that night, much of the north was under their control despite a failure to take over Abidjan. French troops soon moved in to separate the two sides and evacuate expatriates. Despite a ceasefire soon afterwords, additional rebel groups appeared in the west of the country and fears of a nationwide security meltdown led to UN troops being deployed throughout the country. Sporadic violence has kept the Ivory Coast in a state of tension into 2010.
Currently, the international community is enforcing an arms and diamond embargo on the Ivory Coast, as well as freezing the assets of anyone standing in the way of peace.
Current Crisis Due to Multiple Unresolved National Issues
The failure of the shaky coalition government to deal with security issues, voting rights, and demobilization of the rebel group New Forces has created an environment that is not safe for free and fair elections to take place.
According to a judicial official, last week Ivory Coast investigators discovered evidence of “fraud” in a voters’ roll, triggering additional protests in the western town of Man, where the local court was ransacked by hundreds of angry civilians. The Independent Electoral Commission denied the allegations despite previous acknowledgements of major problems in providing fair elections.[see video near bottom]
“Rioters in western Ivory Coast burned down a local government building on Tuesday during a demonstration against the government’s handling of voter registration in a much delayed election. Witnesses said more than a thousand demonstrators marched through the city of Vavoua as local security forces tried unsuccessfully to disperse them by firing shots in the air…
Political tensions are rising as West Africa’s former economic giant looks set to miss another deadline for holding presidential elections needed to end years of political crisis…
President Laurent Gbagbo is locked in a row with electoral commissioner Robert Mambe, whom he accuses of trying to add around 430,000 names to the final voter list that were not properly vetted to check their Ivorian nationality.”
As violence and riots continue to mount, the spokesman for the ex-rebel group New Forces Sidiki Konate stated that the Ivory Coast is at a renewed risk for civil war:
“We have today in places a real danger to the peaceful coexistence of our communities. The communities are looking daggers at each other, ready to attack. The seeds of civil war are there, each one is already preparing its munitions.”
Such rhetoric, along with the ever-growing ethnic, political, and social issues such as:
a government failure to deal with security issues
voting rights
demobilization of the New Forces
raises sincere concerns that not only will a national election be delayed yet again, but also that this time civil war could be resumed by it.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, quoted this morning by Fox News:
President Laurent Gbagbo to step down immediately,” she said. “His continuing refusal to cede power to the rightful winner of the November 2010 elections, Alassane Ouattara, has led to open violence in the streets, chaos in Abidjan and throughout the country… Gbagbo is pushing Cote d’Ivoire into lawlessness. The path forward is clear. He must leave now so the conflict may end.
When I first read about this (thanks to Drudge) the very first thing I did was follow the rabbit trail. I typed in “Alassane Ouattara Muslim” in Google search… guess what? These followers of Ouattara and Ouattara himself are Muslims. I thought to myself that most likely the people murdered were Christians. Guess what, Libertarian Republican has this story.
….From the UK Telegraph “Ivory Coast: aid workers find 1,000 bodies in Duekoue”:
The single biggest atrocity in the long battle for control of Ivory Coast has emerged after aid workers discovered the bodies of up to 1,000 people in the town of Duekoue.
Patrick Nicholson, a spokesman for the Catholic charity Caritas, said his team had counted 1,000 bodies, adding that some had been hacked with machetes.
‘The secretary general expressed particular concern and alarm about reports that pro-Ouattara forces may have killed many civilians in the town of Duekoue in the west of the country,’ the UN said.
The Catholic charity Caritas has said that up to 1,000 people had been massacred in Duekoue, which forces loyal to Ouattara seized earlier this week.
A massacre in a Roman Catholic mission compound in the heart of the Ivory Coast’s cocoa-producing region could come to be seen as a crucial moment in the West African state’s escalating civil war.
Early reports suggested that more than 800 people, largely from the Gbagbo-supporting Gueré tribe, were killed in a single day at the sprawling Salesian Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus mission in Duekoue, 300 miles west of Abidjan towards the Liberian border. The attackers seem to have been largely soldiers descended from Burkina Faso immigrant Muslim families loyal to Ouattara…
