More on Al-Shabab Slaughter at Kenyan College: Ugandan School Now Under Threat

Regarding the attack on Garissa University College in Garissa, which is 90 miles from the Kenyan-Somali border; Two people found hiding on campus were arrested as suspected terrorists. That would bring the number of terrorists in the attack to six. One was an Tanzanian who isn't a student and couldn't explain what he was doing there. (Al-Shabab is lying and claiming that all their terrorists either escaped or were killed- “martyred,” as they like to say.) The death toll in the terrorist rampage is 147 but could go higher. (Some reports are saying 148.)

A surviving student says an attacker spoke by phone in Swahili (not a language spoken in Somalia) to a controller and asked what to do with some captives. Then he murdered them. Swahili is spoken in parts of Kenya and Tanzania.

Al-Shabab is demanding as a condition of ending their terrorism in Kenya that it vacate “Muslim lands.” “Muslim lands” in their minds includes part of Kenya.(A BBC reporter says that a referendum in the Kenyan region where the college that was just ravaged is located, which was held to allow the residents there to decide whether to join Somalia or remain part of Kenya, was canceled when it went the wrong way from the Kenyan government's point of view.)

Since 2011, when Kenya sent troops into Somalia to back the U.S. efforts there against Al-Shabab, over 100 terrorist attacks have been launched in Kenya by Al-Shabab.

Uganda announced that a school there is under threat of terrorist attack. Uganda also has troops in Somalia.

Regarding the high number of dead and wounded inflicted by only a half dozen terrorists armed with AK-47 assault rifles, the New York Times slipped this intriguing sentence into the 18th paragraph of a 25 paragraph story. The last sentence of that paragraph reads, “It was unclear whether any bystanders had been killed by the security forces.” The NY Times frequently plays coy like that, with cryptic, opaque statements left dangling without elaboration. [1]
Another thing they like to do is bury significant information in the third to last paragraphs of stories, where the fewest number of people will see it. (Some people skip to the end of articles, the Times editors correctly figure.) In this story, the 23rd of 25 paragraphs mentions that Osama bin Laden rejected Al-Shabab's bid to join Al-Qaeda. (It got in a year after his assassination by a Navy SEAL death squad.) Maybe they're afraid someone might think bin Laden wasn't so bad?

Bin Laden thought the Shababoids were too bloodthirsty, and he didn't like killing Muslims, a problem he also had with Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

There is an amusing irony in a Shabab document found in Mali by the Associated Press. The Shababoids justify their killings of Muslims using the Israeli “human shields” argument. As Israel claims it kills Palestinian civilians because Hamas “terrorists” are using them as “human shields,” Shabab wrote that “all Muslims must stay far away from the enemy and their installations so as not to become human shields for them,” because there is “no excuse for those who live or mingle with the enemies.”

Yeah, and it serves those Palestinians right too for voting for Hamas.

The Kenyan college that suffered the horrendous attack and mass slaughter is now closed. So the educations of thousands of people has been disrupted, probably permanently in some cases. Boko Haram (“Western education is forbidden,” the Nigerian Islamofascist terrorist group) will probably send a shout-out to Al-Shabab for a job well done.

The Islamofascists keep proving they are enemies of civilization and humanity. They consistently violently attack and destroy education, art, culture, world heritage sites, music, and every form of personal expression and freedom, such as clothing and personal grooming, and exalt barbarism, sadism, and sexual slavery. It is eminently reasonable to try to annihilate these vicious nihilists. The only caveat is that it should be done in ways that do not harm the innocent (and pay compensation and sincere apologies to innocent victims- that would go a long way towards limiting the counterproductive effects caused by such “collateral damage”) and with great discrimination and intelligence. I mean intelligence in the sense of a sophisticated understanding and approach to the task at hand. Of course, this won't happen, since all the regimes arrayed against the Islamofascists are venal, all the Arab ones and also the U.S., Israel, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (The U.S. of course being an arch-enemy of humanity itself, Israel now a quasi-fascist apartheid state, and the latter three currently ruled by corrupt, dishonest, reactionary regimes headed by loathsome leaders.) On the one side, cruel and callous power entities. On the other, maniacal sadists and killers hypnotized by their own fanatical and remorseless ideology. So it's not a case of Good vs. Evil. It's Evil vs. Unbelievably Awful Evil. Which puts us in the position of rooting unenthusiastically for Evil, at best.

The locals in the region where the school is located are complaining that warnings were ignored and the Kenyan government hadn't taken protective steps. But compared to the Westgate Mall fiasco, in which a handful of terrorists were holed up in the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, for days, and returning shopkeepers discovered that the Kenyan troops had systematically looted the place, the performance of Kenyan “security forces” in the college rampage was a big improvement. (No luxury goods to loot at the college.) The terrorists were dispatched much more quickly this time, even though it was claimed the terrorists were posted as snipers.

One reason the mall siege lasted so long was so the Army could have time to thoroughly clean out the stores they looted. This fact is never mentioned by Western media. But that's how Western media rolls. That's why I call it propaganda, not journalism. It deliberately distorts reality and is dishonest in the service of its hidden political and ideological goals.

Other examples of key facts erased from memory are what precipitated the Iranian “hostage crisis.” It was the U.S. admitting the fugitive Shah into the country. Omitting that fact is like discussing the outbreak of World War I without mentioning the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. Or the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who worked to save Jews from Nazis in Hungary during World War II, who was illegally arrested and imprisoned by the Soviets. No mention is ever made of the fate of his superior, the man who authorized his activities. His role in saving Jews can never be mentioned, and he too is whited out of the story. His name was Count Folke Bernadotte. Right after World War II, he was serving as UN High Commissioner in Palestine. There he was murdered by the Jewish terrorist organization the Stern Gang (LEHI), headed by one Yitzhak Shamir, later a prime minister of Israel. I needn't explain why in the oft-repeated tale of the “righteous” Wallenberg and his sad fate, you never hear about Bernadotte. Wallenberg outlived his superior by many years, but in Soviet imprisonment, one of the innumerable crimes of the Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks, by the way, were no friends of actual communists and Marxists, who they vigorously wiped out under Lenin and Stalin. Thus did the Bolsheviks actually serve capitalism in the long run. No wonder all those former “communists” of eastern Europe now sit comfortably in the European Parliament and in positions of power in their home countries as newly -minted reactionary capitalists. Once an authoritarian oppressor, always an authoritarian oppressor, I suppose.

1] “Somali Militants Kill 147 at Kenyan University,” New York Times, April 2, 2015.