By: Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis
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What happens these days in today’s world demonstrates very well that Muslims and Christians have been caught victims of an unnecessary and malicious plan.

Muslims gullibly believe that several Western nations, notably France, England and the US, have engaged a war against Islam by colonizing first and controlling afterwards all the Muslim countries. This is erroneously perceived as a clash with Christianity.

At the other end, Christians in Europe and America have been misled — through an incessant brainwash orchestrated by their mass media, politicians and intellectuals — and believe that the average Muslim has been radicalized, and is now ready for a Jihad against Christianity and the West.

This is all wrong. In fact, it is a false debate where both clashing parts have a distorted perception of the “other”, and of themselves. What is at stake involves both religions, all the religions of the world, and the world peace.

What Muslims failed to understand: the West is not Christian.

Muslims seem to forget that the Western countries are not Christian countries; they are merely countries with Christian populations, but the principles and the ideas of Christianity have been systematically disrespected and marginalized there. These countries were Christian indeed in the past, but confusing 15th century Europe with today’s Anti-Christian Europe is sheer proof of ignorance.

The Muslims confuse Medieval, Christian Europe’s Anti-Islamic stance with today’s Europe’s Anti-Islamic delirium. Terrible mistake with calamitous consequences!

Never ever has a Modern Muslim undertaken a critical examination of Europe’ identity; even worse, not a single Muslim today imagines as possible for him to undertake a research based let’s say on Ibn Khaldoun’s systematic investigative approach. Muslim historians have been accustomed with Western analytical methods in their explorations and investigations, thus enslaving themselves to a system that is not theirs, and to conclusions that are genuinely wrong for a Muslim to draw.

Simple observation and criticism would however be enough for a Muslim to understand that all the Christian values, principles and concepts on which the Christian Western societies were based have totally disappeared. These values, principles and concepts may perhaps be shared by many average people in the West, but they ceased to be the axis around which evolve the Western societies, their administrations and policy-making.

In fact, the values, principles and concepts that form the essence of today’s Western ruling class mindset, policy making and Weltanschauung are at the very antipodes of Christianity. Materialism, consumerism, immoral behaviour, corruption, relativism, nihilism, conformism, conventionalism, formalism, evolutionism and individualism prevail along with a foolish inclination for technological innovation, luxurious leisure, debauchery, incommensurable selfishness and overwhelming hypocrisy.

The driving force that eliminated Christianity brought forth the aforementioned, purely Anti-Christian situation. All this is due to the subversive tactics of Free Masonry, an ages-old society that in the process of its opposition to Vatican and to the official Christianity was transformed from inside and turned to an apostate guild. The subversive tactics undertaken by the Apostate Freemasonic Lodge in its search for prevalence condemned it to apostasy. Without deeply understanding these developments, no one can understand the evolution of the Western societies, and the phenomena of colonization (as practiced mainly by France and England) and globalization (as practiced mainly by America).

This subversion makes it possible that even in an institution that has been traditionally opposed to Freemasonry, like Vatican, one can possibly find members of the organization — and at times its head — who are Freemasons and act subversively in order to control and guide at will the organization in question.

This is precisely what happens with Vatican today; the present pope has been repeatedly accused by important Christian organizations as being a Freemason, which is absolutely incompatible with the quality of a Christian, and of a Muslim as well (http://www.virgo-maria.org/#). This imposes differentiation policies, and if they are not introduced, Muslims will simply fail in their approach to Europe, America and the Western world.

What Christians failed to understand: the East is not Islamic.

Similarly, Christians seem to forget that the Eastern countries are not Islamic / Muslim countries; they are countries with Muslim populations but the principles and the ideas of Islam have been systematically disrespected and marginalized at the level of the ruling elites, their mindset, lifestyle, behavioural system, administrative choices and policies, and more particularly their foreign policy making. These countries were Muslim indeed, but confusing 16th century Ottoman Empire with today’s pseudo-Muslim states is sheer proof of ignorance.

The Christians confuse Islamic Ages’ Islamic expansion at the detriment of Christianity with today’s Islamic World’s Anti-Western rhetoric. Terrible mistake with calamitous consequences!

Even worse, few Christians realize in the West that the same forces that demolished systematically the Christian values for the past three centuries, principles and concepts are those who shaped and imposed an interpretative method of the Oriental civilizations (Islamic included), which was adjusted to their sociopolitical, economic and global interests, and therefore is absolutely untrue.

Christians in the West failed to understand that one of the nefarious counterparts of Darwinism and evolutionism was the Orientalist doctrine of Islamology, which was geared to both, prevent Westerners from knowing the true Islam and let Muslim scholars persist on their obsolete analyses and approaches that further drag them to irrevocable ignorance and permanent impotence.

Christians in the West failed to understand that the inventors of the fallacious term “Arab — Muslim civilization” (civilisation arabo-musulmane) are identical with the promoters of the gay marriages in the West; even worse, real Catholic and Orthodox Christians failed to overtly accuse of apostasy the pseudo-Christian Evangelical puppets of the Freemasons who are those who promote both, the Zionisation of Christianity and the Anti-Islamic hysteria that deepens the unnecessary chasm between Christians and Muslims.

Even worse, never ever has a Modern Christian undertaken a critical examination of the Islamic World’s identity, other than the Islamological Orientalist fallacy of the Freemasons; even worse, not a single Christian today imagines as possible for him to undertake a research based on let’s say Theophanes’, George Syncellus’, Michel Psellos’ or John Damascenus’ theoretical approaches. Christian Western historians have been accustomed to use Freemasonic Orientalist analytical methods in their explorations and investigations, thus enslaving themselves to a system that is not theirs, and to conclusions that are genuinely wrong for a Christian to draw.

Simple observation and criticism would however be enough for a Christian to understand that all the Islamic values, principles and concepts on which the Islamic societies were traditionally based have by now disappeared. These values, principles and concepts may perhaps be shared by average people in many Muslim countries, but they ceased to be the axis around which the Muslim societies, their administrations and policy-making evolve.

In fact, the values, principles and concepts that form the essence of the Modern Muslim ruling classes mindset, policy making and Weltanschauung are at the very antipodes of genuine, traditional Islam. Filthy liars and bogus sheikhs ready to justify anything are therefore hired in the Islamic World’s leading mosques and universities in order to serve their criminal and pseudo-Islamic presidents, tyrants, emirs and bogus-kings, and they lecture the besotted masses that one Muslim can play football, spend his holidays in 5 stars hotels, organize Marketing campaigns for Coca Cola and Mc Donald’s, and go shopping in the malls.

Islam is thus reduced to a meaningless pseudo-prayer and the besotted pseudo-Muslim masses are told that this is enough to ensure good judgment in the Hereafter. At the same time, due to the advanced Westernization of the pseudo-Muslim societies, materialism, consumerism, immoral behaviour, corruption, relativism, nihilism, conformism, conventionalism, formalism, evolutionism and individualism prevail among pseudo-Muslims along with a foolish inclination for technological innovation, luxurious leisure, debauchery, incommensurable selfishness and overwhelming hypocrisy.

In fact, Islam had fallen into desuetude and coma before Napoleon arrived in Egypt, and even before the English set foot in India. The decadence was due to the rise in force of several negative and nefarious elements and doctrines that at first had been rejected and castigated; however, quite unfortunately, these doctrines managed to survive, expand and even give birth to lower and more degraded doctrinal systems. From Ahmed Ibn Hanbal to Ibn Taimiya and thence to Abdel Wahhab, a grave deterioration of thought, intellect, mental and intellectual processes, and a dramatic degradation and elimination of wisdom, knowledge, art, research and behaviour turned the Islamic civilization into a filthy realm of fanaticism, ignorance, hatred, negativism, and barbarism. This became the realm where tolerance is customarily shown for every attempt of lowering, vulgarizing and bestializing the human being. When Napoleon arrived in Egypt, the Islamic civilization — as assimilated, assessed, expanded and elevated by Masters of the World Thought like Tabari, Khwarismi, Ferdowsi, Ibn Sina, Qurtubi, Mohyieldin Ibn Arabi, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd and many others — simply did not exist anymore.

The early Orientalists, who were all European Freemasons and, under the pretext of search and exploration, did their best to offer false interpretations of the historical phenomena (not only those pertaining to the Islamic Ages), noticed the aforementioned disastrous fall of the Islamic world, and to capitalize on their early colonial success, they triggered among the Muslim societies a series of socioeconomic, political and intellectual, pre-calculated reactions that pushed the colonized Muslim societies further deeper in the bottom. Through this, the Freemasonic Orientalist academia of England and France managed to control and exploit the Muslim societies in a way that made them stronger back home.

Robbing Muslims’ Wealth to Destroy Christianity: Typically Freemasonic

This is the truth that obliges today Christians and Muslims to merge against their common enemy: the wealth extracted from occupied Muslim lands was indeed used by the Freemasonic socioeconomic and political establishment of the West in order to finance the destruction of Christianity in the West.

The driving force that perpetuated Islam’s putrefaction is identical with those who destroyed the Christian identity of the West, and plunged the Western societies into endless crimes, such as abortion, homosexual marriages, and generalized corruption. The same subversive tactics applied by the criminal Freemasonic establishment in the Islamic World damaged the Christians in the West, although the colonial powers’ victories in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and South Asia were effectively depicted as a success for the entire Christianity.

But what sort of Pyrrhic victory is it for the true Christians of the West the fact of an African becoming Christian, if this person’s children, living in America, carry out a totally Anti-Christian life full of materialism, sexualism, amoral behaviour, consumerism, and oblivion of all faiths?

As a matter of fact, the Ottoman Oil stolen by France, England and the US through the illegal occupation of the Ottoman territories (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Emirates and Oman) was not “good” for the Christians in the West. It merely helped elect Freemasonic popes in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and the 2000s.

That is why Christian organizations should form a great platform with Muslims who are able to carry out self-criticism and understand that today’s Muslim fanatics trying to radicalize the Muslim societies and escalate the Christian — Muslim clash are merely playing into the Freemasonic game of Islam’s ultimate disaster and annihilation.

Note — Picture: “Cardinal” O’Connor (an intimate friend of anti-pope John Paul 2) Pictured Smiling with Two Full Aproned Freemasons. From: http://www.todayscatholicworld.com/nov05tcw.htm

About The Author: Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis – is Orientalist, Assyriologist, Egyptologist, Iranologist, Islamologist, Historian and Political Scientist. Dr. Megalommatis, 52, is the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages. [ EXTENDED PROFILE ]

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   By: Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis [ Enlarge ]
Idiotic tourism consumers, pathetic safari travelers, corrupt businessmen, consummate pedophile predators, Anti-African racists, drug dealers, illegal arms dealers, decayed noblesse, homosexual couples, hypocritical missionaries, human traffickers and all sorts of white trash have been addicted to scrapbooking in order to illustrate and commemorate their Kenyan vacations.

Evil western mass media, functioning under full freemasonic control, excessively featured this fake image of the East African pseudo-country. Thus, they managed to impose a totally false perception of the colonial fabrication ‘Kenya’ among the western societies.

At the same time, persecuted people, oppressed religious minorities, tyrannized ethnic groups and African nations, who have been forcefully incorporated into this fake state that they never felt as theirs, faced the ugly face, the brutal behaviour, and the tribal enmity of the UK-imposed Kikuyu regime, which is in turn controlled by the few Kikuyu who are selected by the evil apostate lodges of London for Freemasonic apprenticeship and Kenya’s top administrative positions.

Socially secluded, politically marginalized, economically deprived, culturally depersonalized and religiously threatened, the unjustly targeted masses of the Kenyan periphery have become shadowy figures confined in the realm of inexistence for many long decades.

It is only normal that their comeback will destroy the colonial fabrication ‘Kenya‘ that was geared to merely serve the West’s illegal interests, facilitate England’s immoral interference in East Africa, and please the fancy of the racists who control the political establishments of Washington, London and Paris.

Before the fabrication of the East African pseudo-nation in the so-called postcolonial era, not a single native African had ever imagined that a state like Kenya could possibly exist. There is nothing to logically unite the Luo, the Maasai, the Borana Oromo, and the Ogaden Somalis with one another and with the Kikuyu and the other Mt. Kenya tribes.

But the English colonial strategists needed to combine their Anti-Islamic hysteria with their Anti-African hatred, thus plunging all the indigenous peoples to a calamitous swamp of misery, underdevelopment, and lamentation. The double target involved:

1.   the avoidance of the emergence of an East African Islamic Republic spanning from Egypt to Mozambique – with the Somali Nation as the focal prodigy, and

2.   the avoidance of the emergence of a Hamitic — Kushitic — Nilo-Saharan Confederation spanning from the sources of the Nile to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – with the Oromos, the Fur, the Nuer, the Nubians, the Tuareg, the Berbers and the Hausa as the principal players.

The colonial method of spreading pestilence, chaos and catastrophe is the same all over the world. It is based on a genuinely silly but viciously inhuman mindset geared to generate colossal profit for the benefiting part and detrimental loss for the injured part. The loss is due to two main factors:

1.   Deprivation of cultural integrity, national historicity, socio-behavioral authenticity, sociopolitical identity, and linguistic distinctiveness

2.   Amalgamation with other ethno-religious groups and nations under conditions of superimposition / subordination, depravity, discrimination, and ultimately tyranny.

In fact, the creation of fake states like Kenya, Tanzania, etc. guaranteed a momentary success for the European and American colonials. This ended up with the systematic persecution of Islam throughout Eastern Africa and the methodic elimination of any perspective which would generate a national renaissance of a Hamitic — Kushitic nation as per the typical European model.

This is the two-fold biased rule of the colonial success:

A.   Ukrainians must be separated from the Russians as an independent nation, but the Oromos must be forced to be amalgamated with the Amhara and the Tigray in Abyssinia, and the Kikuyu in Kenya.

B.   There can be a Christian Democrat Party in Germany, but there cannot be an Islamic Democrat Party in Somalia.

The tyranny and the discrimination lasted for decades but the collapse of Soviet Union, the rise of China as superpower, and consequently, America’s needs for global domination, through an effective encirclement of the Euro-Asiatic landmass, constitute the changing dynamics of the Horn of Africa politics.

America needs spacious land and sea bases in the coastal areas of Yemen and Somalia; the pretext for this is called ‘Islamic Terrorism‘. This term has been coined by the US Secret Services that planned and executed the evil plan of September 11th.

To use the September 11th as pretext, they had prepared the situation in Afghanistan over the span of many years. Pakistani army would have removed the Taliban regime at any given moment in the 90s; but this did not occur. Following September 11th, Afghanistan was summarily held responsible, then ,invaded and ever since occupied.

The creation of a chaotic situation in parts of Somalia and Yemen suggests that, following a second, nuclear September 11th, the so miraculously promoted Shabaab of Somalia will be held responsible, and consequently parts of Somalia and Yemen will be invaded — just like Afghanistan in 2001.

It is therefore critical to understand that America is not opposing but promoting Islamic Terrorism. The pattern / plan is Anglo-French but the implementation process is American. In both cases, Somalia and Yemen, it is evident that America has systematically acted in a way to locally reinforce the extremist Muslims.

Last May, in an article titled ‘The Freemasonic Lerna Hydra Against Somalia: TFG, Al Shabaab, CIA Operative Al Amriki, UN Top Envoy’ (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/102306), writing about Somalia, I said the following:

“The Shabaab — Like the Somali pirates, the Shabaab represent another case of colonial involvement. In this regard, the colonial infiltration took another form. Instead of bribing some tribal authorities and local Mafia lords (which was enough to trigger the Somali piracy epiphenomenon), high tech was utilized by the US secret services. Remote mind control machinery implemented in unconscious CIA operatives, implanted chips, and a bunch of associated technologies ensure the availability of CIA operatives among those who declare open and frontal opposition to America, Europe, Christianity, Judaism, Zionism, and the Western World in its entirety.

Some thoughts — in this regard:

One can notice in this regard that, for some months after the early arrival of the (then uncontrolled by the CIA) Shebaab in Somalia’s southernmost confines, earlier this year, Kenyan army had enough time to eliminate an unnecessary and still weak enemy. In March 2009, it would be a mere promenade for the Kenyan army to invade the southernmost confines of Somalia up to Kismayu and/or Merka and hand over the territory to AMISOM and the forces related with the TFG president.

Who prevented Kenya from undertaking a brief military expedition then?

Certainly those who have planned otherwise.

In fact, the Shabaab have been radicalized after the arrival of Abu Mansoor Al Amriki. Until then, communication channels were open among Sheikh Mukhtar Robow, Sheikh Hassan Turki, and Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. Of course, the formation of different groups (Hizb ul Islam) does not imply either opposition or confrontation. The deterioration in the relationship started after the arrival in Southern Somalia of the top CIA operative Abu Mansoor Al Amriki. Why?

Because if united, the three sheikhs represent a trustful alternative to the fake TFG regime, and supported by a majority of the Somalis, they would be in a position to achieve Somalia’s definite pacification, reunification and rehabilitation — which is precisely what the Freemasonic colonial establishment of London, Paris and Washington does not want.

In fact, the arrival of Abu Mansoor Al Amriki in Somalia is, in and by itself, a scandal. If he is considered as an Al Qaeda operative, why he was not arrested?

Who facilitated the comfortable and highly secured travel of a “terrorist“? Simply all those who want to use this CIA operative against Somalia.

And why publicize the faraway “conference” of a terrorist? Why on earth give space and fame to someone characterized as Islamic extremist who even does not have his own group, and who is alien to the religion he claims to defend and to the country he tries to supposedly save?

Who publicized Abu Mansoor Al Amriki’s 5th of April conference? Those who facilitate the game of Abu Mansoor Al Amriki’s remote instructors.

Who wants to drive the three Somali leaders to opposition, confrontation and reciprocal extermination? Who else but Abu Mansoor Al Amriki’s remote instructors, the forces that implement the policy of Somalia’s annihilation.”

As a matter of fact, the ominous plan for the entire Horn of Africa region, if successfully carried out, will not only spread disaster in Somalia and Yemen; it will cause a far wider destabilization, and there will be no possible containment policy. Kenya, Abyssinia (fake ‘Ethiopia’) and Tanzania will be terribly shaken.

Inter-religious clashes will therefore become frequent, critical and extreme; the idyllic situation that was the myth created by the Western mass media will disappear, and ‘Islamic terrorism’ will be held responsible for the development by the unrepentant, ignorant and malignant Western journalists and analysts.

Today’s Pakistan will then be viewed as an exotic country if compared with the degradation of the situation in Kenya, Abyssinia (fake ‘Ethiopia’) and Tanzania.

That is why today various journalists originating from the fake state of Kenya express merely their imagination and wishful thinking when writing about the fake country’s chances to face “radical Islam”.

I came to notice John Onyando’s editorial ‘Kenya: combatting radical Islam‘; I find it totally misleading and absolutely unrealistic. I republish it at the end of the present article as an example to avoid.

The idea that the US will change its Somali policy to save Kenya is ludicrous.

The author admits the existence of a “profound radicalization” and fails to understand that this is the logical and rightful result of the existence – for many long decades – of the absolutely illegal, totally unjustified, and — note this — inherently anti-Islamic state of Kenya. The forgery of Kenya is a direct act against the existence of Islam; to deny this means to contribute to the worsening of the overall situation.

The idea of Kenya (or any African country) working “closely” with the US is itself criminal, immoral and inhuman; it testifies to bribery, corruption, betrayal of all African nations. Any African who imagines possible any sort of interaction, let alone collaboration, with the colonial powers, England and France, and their current substitute and offspring, the regime of Washington, and propagates this idea, perpetrates an act of high treason, because the said powers have ceaselessly worked over the past two centuries to physically exterminate, politically enslave and culturally / religiously disfigure all Africans.

Sheikh Abdullah Al-Faisal’s imprisonment is in itself a minor and marginal issue. One can describe it as the evident peak of a huge, mostly hidden, iceberg. What was done against Islam, and above all, against East African Muslims’ rightful desire to politically, culturally and nationally control the entire coast of Eastern Africa cannot and will not be forgotten.

The thought that “repression makes Kenya no good” seems logical and rightful but it is not; it belongs to a naïve analyst who insists on avoiding to see the plain truth. Fabricated because of colonial interests against the diverse nations that have been forcefully imprisoned inside this Freemasonic Hell, formed against its Muslim population’s will, and geared to eradicate Islam, Kenya could not have a chance in the trillion not to be repressive. The moment repression ends in Kenya, that moment will be its last.

How ignorant of his own country must the author be! He boasts that “Thanks to cooperation with America, Kenya has good counterterrorism systems”! How comical! Kenyan police and army smuggle arms into the Somali South to empower the CIA-sponsored Shabaab to prevail over the authentic patriotic Somali front Hezb ul Islam. But for John Onyando this means “good counterterrorism systems”!

In true terms, Kenya’s murderous dictator Kibaki, a shameful Freemason who made an oath to irrevocably bury Africa (racism is the epitome of the Freemasonic dogmas), overtly promotes his masters’ pro-terrorist schemes.

The historical truth and the political reality of Kenya are however hidden in a simple sentence of Onyando’s text: “Changes in the Kenyan economy are recasting the role of the Coastal regions, which the International Organisation of Migration has found to be fertile grounds for extremist elements”!

The aforementioned means simply this: an extensive program of financial corruption has been elaborated to be soon implemented in the coastal regions where the local population, consisted in its majority of oppressed and marginalized Muslims, reject their forced inclusion in the Hell of Freemason Kibaki’s Kenya, and actively support locally based liberation fronts to achieve secession and independence through the ultimate collapse of the Cemetery of Nations “Kenya”.

As it is worldwide known, the fighters, who act to implement the Freemasonic agenda, are shamelessly called “liberators” by the Satanic mass media of the West; contrarily, those who act against the Freemasonic agenda, are disgracefully labeled “extremist elements”.

I can easly hypothesize that some Kenyan “extremist elements” have every reason to remember the name of John Onyando during the forthcoming fascinating period of East Africa’s map redrawing.

Kenya: combatting radical Islam
http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/john-onyando/kenya-combatting-radical-islam

By John Onyando
(A journalist working in Nairobi, Kenya)

Before Kenya can succeed in stemming the radicalisation of its Muslim minority, the US will have to change its Somali policy.

The protest in Nairobi on 15 January by a handful of Muslim youth, in which four people were killed, revealed a profound radicalisation and inter-faith resentment among Nairobi’s Muslims. Kenya must address this if it is going to avoid Nigeria-style violence in the future. It should work closely with the United States, which apart from being an important player in Somalia is involved in interconnected regional initiatives.

The protests shook the foundations of tolerance in Kenya as nothing has before. It prompted some civilians to cheer the police, which is generally reviled for its many crimes against the people. Vigilantes even joined the battle on their side. But on the other hand it led to an armed protester — believed to have smuggled a gun into the protest — shooting at a policeman. The authorities have denied reports of the officer’s death, but have confirmed the sacking of a Muslim officer who defied orders to charge into the protesters.

These riots reopen interfaith differences at a time when Kenyans — in the middle of a constitutional review — least need them. Consequently, the government has announced a comprehensive and urgent investigation. To its credit it has persuaded its Muslim allies to condemn the killings and the demonstration’s organisers, whose leader has now been arrested. That the protesters were fighting over a foreigner, Sheik Abdullah Al-Faisal, who is being held on terrorism charges, fuelled much of the public rage.

Failure to engage

One symptom of Kenya’s chronic failure in the fight against extremism is its refusal to engage with the groups that actually speak for Muslims. Days before the protest Muslim groups had voiced genuine concerns over Al-Faisal’s illegal confinement and hysterical statements by Immigration Minister Otieno Kajwang about the man being a terror suspect. The government ignored them, and unleashed the police when they protested.

Another symptom is the delusion that Kenya can have two sets of laws, one for Muslims and one for the rest. Repression does Kenya no good. By killing Muslims it plays into the hands of extremists. Instead of meting out force on innocents, Kenya would do better to deploy her many strategic strengths in the fight against extremism.

The first step should be to tackle problems in the police force, whose penchant for bribes exposes the country to terrorism risks by allowing dubious people across the borders. Thanks to cooperation with America, Kenya has good counterterrorism systems. It should be able to prevent events like Al-Faisal’s entry by enforcing strict border patrol, airline security, and immigration screening or simply by sharing intelligence with other agencies.

Authorities who have publicised Faisal’s terrorist orientation have little to say on how he entered Kenya overland from Tanzania unnoticed at the Lunga Lunga border point. They tell us that the database with the watch list on it was being replaced at the time. This excuse will not wash. If that were true, the officers would have examined the records of the few hundred travellers they had allowed in immediately once the system was reinstalled. Instead, it took the Americans to alert Kenya of Al-Faisal’s presence, by which time he was already in a mosque preaching!

Even then, Kenya did not use the information prudently. Rather than deport the man — Faisal broke no law and can’t be charged — ministers ran amok, publicising the man’s terror credentials and his extremist orientation. Their botched attempt at deportation flouted international norms. The Tanzanians rejected the cleric at Lunga Lunga border point on grounds that Kenya did not notify them in time. The Nigerians, with their own problems following the Christmas Day bombing frenzy, were in no position to take in another terrorist.

So Kenya has had to host Faisal for ten days, during which time it has been accusing Britain and the US, who are supposedly better placed to handle his case, of forsaking the country at its hour of need. In actual fact, Kenya exaggerated the risk Al-Faisal posed here, generating a furore that it has failed to manage.

None of this is to deny that Faisal is a dangerous man. Britain claims that his preaching inspired one of the 7/7 London bombers, and even Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab. He may have contacts with Al Qaeda in Somalia, which the US says is rapidly expanding into an ambitious regional network.

Changes in the Kenyan economy are recasting the role of the Coastal regions, which the International Organisation of Migration has found to be fertile grounds for extremist elements. While Kenya attracts badly-needed foreign investment, it must take care to establish the backgrounds of foreign investors, some of whom have criminal ties. Al-Faisal himself was legally allowed to enter Kenya. Ongoing swoops on Somali neighbourhoods smack of racial profiling. It is difficult to understand why a government that routinely welcomes dubious businessmen and tourists should harass refugees fleeing a grave humanitarian crisis imposed upon them by a needless war.

Kenya should distinguish itself from the repressive policing of Ethiopia, as such tactics strengthen the hand of extremists. With each new protest against genuine grievances, and each draconian response by the police, it becomes harder to argue that Kenya is not repressing Muslims. This is the propaganda that Al Shabaab needs. Live television transmission of the protest incited a bigger albeit peaceful demo in Mombasa. Scenes of police firing tear gas into Nairobi’s main mosque are outright insensitive, but also fuels the radicalisation that helps extremists.

Changing US policy

To check Al Shabaab, Kenya needs to persuade America to calibrate its policy in a way that makes the prospect of unifying the Somalis realistic. The Somali crisis is a political problem, with Al Shabaab one of the key players. While Kenya cannot change America’s policy or interests, no country is better placed than Kenya, which is most at most risk from the radicalisation of Somali youth, to persuade the US to find a solution that meets the legitimate aspirations of all Somalis.

As a senator and presidential candidate, President Obama had fabulous ideas about Somalia which need testing in light of the negative results of Bush-era military-led policy, which was escalated last year. Al Shabaab is growing primarily because the spectre of American intervention arouses anger and damages further the pitiable reputation of the Transitional Federal Government.

The continuation of the failed military policy may be partly due to the new presidency’s limited choices and his reliance on the policies he has inherited. It might also be that, without a strategic understanding of the evolving crisis, the US is uncertain and paralysed about how to proceed. Why else would it rehabilitate Sheik Sharif, a former Islamic Courts leader it deposed in 2006?

America’s strong national interest in Somalia would be better met by investing in a realistic roadmap for peace, something President Obama must crucially be in need of, and which Kenya should take a key role in formulating. What the international community needs is a Somalia policy that takes into account the internal dynamics in the Horn of Africa as a whole.

In the meantime, no one wants Kenya to roll back on democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law, so the US should make a real investment in reforming the Kenyan police. This is an absolute pre-requisite to returning to the rule of law. For the inability of the state to provide essential protections is the main cause of the vigilantism which reached a dangerous level on Friday. Corruption within the force and its ephemeral organizations impedes its capacity to fight organised crimes. America is the best placed country to help Kenya address this important issue.

Note – The real face of Kenya: http://www.demotix.com/news/222517/nairobi-police-open-fire-al-faisal-supporters

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The Ghosts of Empire Are Returning To Haunt Britain – and the U.S.

   By: Johann Hari
In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with pliers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as “baboons,” “barbarians” and “terrorists.” They will come bearing the story of how Britain invaded a country, stole its land, and imprisoned an entire civilian population in detention camps – and they ask only for justice, after all this time.

As a small symbol of how we as a country have not come to terms with our history, compare the bemused reaction to the arrival of these Kenyan survivors of Britain’s gulags to the recent campaign supporting the Gurkhas. We have all waxed lyrical over the Nepalese mercenaries who were, for two centuries, hired by the British Empire to fight its least savory battles. Sometimes they were used in great causes, like the defeat of Nazism. Sometimes they were used to viciously crush democratic movements in India or Malaya or Pakistan. But they obediently did the bidding of the Empire – so they are a rare bunch of foreigners who the right will turn moist over and welcome to our island.

I too strongly supported their rights to reside in Britain, out of simple humanity – if they’re good enough to die for us, they’re good enough to live with us. But isn’t it revealing that even in 2009, we can cheer the servants of Empire but blank the people mutilated and murdered by it? There will be no press campaigns or celebrity endorsements for the survivors of the Kenyan suppression when they issue a reparations claim in London next month. They will be met with a bemused shrug. Yet their story tells us far more.

The British arrived in Kenya in the 1880s, at a time when our economic dominance was waning and new colonies were needed. The Colonial Office sent in waves of white settlers to seize the land from the local “apes” and mark it with the Union Jack. Francis Hall was the officer of the East India Company tasked with mounting armed raids against the Kikuyu – the most populous local tribe – to break their resistance. He said: “There is only one way of improving the [Kikuyu] and that is to wipe them out; I would only be too delighted to do so but we have to depend on them for food supplies.”

The British troops stole over sixty thousand acres from the Kikuyu, and renamed the area “the White Highlands.” But the white settlers were aristocratic dilettantes with little experience of farming, and they were soon outraged to discover that the “primitives” were growing food far more efficiently on the reserves they had been driven into. So they forced the local black population to work “their” land, and passed a law banning the local Africans from independently growing the most profitable cash crops – tea, coffee, and sisal.

The people of Kenya objected, and tried to repel the invaders. They called for “ithaka na wiyathi” – land and freedom. After peaceful protests were met with violence, they formed a group, dubbed the Mau Mau, to stop the suppression any way they could. They started killing the leaders appointed by the British, and some of the settlers too. As a result, the London press described them as “evil savages” and “terrorists” motivated by hatred of Christianity and civilisation. They had been “brainwashed” by “Mau Mau cult leaders,” the reports shrieked.

The 1.5 million Kikuyu overwhelmingly supported the Mau Mau and independence – so the British declared war on them all. A State of Emergency was announced, and it began with forced removals of all Kikuyu. Anybody living outside the reserves – in any of the cities, for example – was rounded up at gunpoint, packed into lorries, and sent to “transit camps,” There, they were “screened” to see if they were Mau Mau supporters. One of the people locked up this way for months was Barack Obama’s grandfather.

Professor Caroline Elkins, who studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book ‘Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya‘, explains the tactics adopted by the British to snuffle out Mau Mau. “Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire,” she writes. “Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.”

The people judged to be guilty of Mau Mau sympathies were transferred to torture camps. There, each detainee was given a number which they had to wear on a band on their wrist. They were then stripped naked and sent through a cattle dip, before the torture would begin again. “Detainees were frog-marched around the compound and beaten until blood ran from their ears,” Elkins writes.

The Kikuyu survivor Pascasio Macharia describes some of the tortures he witnessed: “The askaris [guards] brought in fire buckets full of water, and the detainees were called on by one, [my friend] Peterson first. The askaris then put his head in the bucket of water and lifted his legs high in the air so he was upside down. That’s when [one of the camp commandants] started cramming sand in Peterson’s anus and stuffed it in with a stick. The other askari would put water in, and then more sand. They kept doing this back and forth… Eventually they finished with Peterson and carried him off, only to start on the next detainee in the compound.”

Another favoured torment was to roll a man in barbed wire and kick him around until he bled to death. Typhoid, dysentery and lice scythed through the population. Castration was common. At least 80,000 people were locked away and tortured like this. When I reported from Kenya earlier this year, I met elderly people who still shake with fear as they talk about the gulags. William Baldwin, a British member of the Kenya Police Reserve, wrote a memoir in which he cheerfully admits to murdering Kikuyu “baboons” in cold blood. He bragged about how he gutted them with knives while other suspects watched. Another British officer, Tony Cross, proudly called their tactics “Gestapo stuff.”

For the civilians outside, life was only slightly better. Women and children were trapped in eight hundred “sealed villages” throughout the countryside. They were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, and forced at gunpoint to dig trenches that sealed them off from the world.

The British Torture Camps in Colonial Kenya

There was always another, honourable Britain who fought against these crimes. The Labour left – especially Barbra Castle and Nye Bevan – fought for the camps to be exposed and shut. They didn’t succeed until the British imperialists were finally forced to scuttle away from the country entirely. We will never know how many people they murdered, because the colonial administration built a bonfire of all the paperwork on their way out the door. Elkins calculates it is far more than the 11,000 claimed by the British government, and could be as many as 300,000.

Yet in Britain today, there is a blood-encrusted blank spot about Empire. On the reality show The Apprentice, the contestants recently had to pick a name for their team, and they said they wanted “something that represented the best of British” – so they settled on “Empire.” Nobody objected. Imagine young Germans blithely naming a team “Reich”: it’s unthinkable, because they have had to study what their fathers and grandfathers did, and expunge these barbarous instincts from their national DNA.

This failure to absorb the lessons of Empire is not only unjust to the victims; it leads us to repeat horrifying mistakes. Today, we are – with the Americans – using unmanned drones to bomb the Pakistan-Afghan borderland, as we did a few years ago in Iraq. Nobody here seems to remember that the British invented aerial counter-insurgency in this very spot – with disastrous consequences. In 1924, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris bragged that all rebellion could be stopped with this tactic. We have shown them “what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed,” he said. Yet instead of “pacifying” them, it radically alienated the population and lead to an uprising. If we knew our history, we would not be running the same script and expecting a different ending.

Gordon Brown said last year (in India, of all places) that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.” The survivors of England’s blanked-out torture camps are entitled to ask: when did we start?

About The Author: Johann Hari is an award-winning journalist who writes twice-weekly for the Independent, one of Britain’s leading newspapers, and the Huffington Post. He also writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique, The New Republic, El Mundo, The Guardian, The Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, South Africa’s Star, The Irish Times, and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines. | More About Johann Hari |

References:

1. Will Obama forgive Britain for his grandfather’s torture? — SIXTY years ago, a Kenyan working for a British Army officer in Nairobi was incarcerated in a high-security prison. The 54-year-old cook had become involved in his country’s struggle for independence and his British captors brutally tortured him to extract information about the insurgency that later became known as the Mau Mau rebellion. British held him for two years during which he was “whipped every morning and evening,” “They would sometimes squeeze his testicles with metal rods,” they recalled. “They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together. He was lucky to survive. Some of his fellow inmates were mutilated with castration pliers and beaten to death with clubs.” That cook, we now know, was Hussein Onyango Obama, the paternal grandfather of the American President Barack Obama. His beatings at the hands of the British Army, alongside whom he’d served in Burma during the Second World War, had left him, his family say, “prematurely aged,” with “permanent physical scars” and “a lifelong loathing of the British.” [ READ MORE ] 2. Mau Mau to sue British government — Mau Mau war veterans “claim” they were tortured: Victims of Kenya’s independence war with Britain 50 years ago are to start proceedings to claim compensation from the British government. Veterans of the Mau Mau – who fought a guerrilla war with their colonial masters – are demanding an apology and an out-of-court financial settlement. [ READ MORE ]

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“The White House is planning a muted observance of Thursday’s National Day of Prayer, a response that has disappointed both Christian conservatives and an atheist group that wants to end the tradition.

Congress established the day in 1952 and in 1988 set the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama would issue such a proclamation Thursday but not hold any public events with religious leaders as President George W. Bush did.” — RYAN J. FOLEY/The Associated Press.

The National Day of Prayer makes a mockery of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone who treasures the Constitution should join atheists and agnostics in demanding that Obama boycott this insidious observance.

Obama must feel awkward acknowledging the National Day of Prayer, or he wouldn’t have scaled back the involvement of the White House. The President needs to stop pussyfooting around, and declare that henceforth his administration will not participate in a religious event that promotes monotheism (particularly Christianity) above the thousands of other religions.

At this critical juncture in our history, with the recession in danger of becoming a depression, Obama should call upon Americans to think clearly and act decisively, and not to bet everything on the efficacy of prayer.

President Obama, America needs change that we can believe in, please set an example by declaring that on the National Day of Prayer you will be hard at work researching solutions to the nation’s seemingly intractable problems, instead of praying.

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The End of Christian America: According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008 – roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) [ READ MORE ]

BOOK REVIEW — God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything — By Christopher Hitchens

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly: Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he’s completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: “monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.” Hitchens’s one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history’s theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers’ weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn’t), or that “Eastern” religions are better (nope). The book’s real strength is Hitchens’s on-the-ground glimpses of religion’s worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons “everything,” which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy. From The Washington Post — Reviewed by Stephen Prothero: A century and a half ago Pope Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors, a rhetorical tour de force against the high crimes and misdemeanors of the modern world. God Is Not Great, by the British journalist and professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens, is the atheists’ equivalent: an unrelenting enumeration of religion’s sins and wickedness, written with much of the rhetorical pomp and all of the imperial condescension of a Vatican encyclical. Hitchens, who once described Mother Teresa as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,” is notorious for making mincemeat out of sacred cows, but in this book it is the sacred itself that is skewered. Religion, Hitchens writes, is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.” Channeling the anti-supernatural spirits of other acolytes of the “new atheism,” Hitchens argues that religion is “man-made” and murderous, originating in fear and sustained by brute force. Like Richard Dawkins, he denounces the religious education of young people as child abuse. Like Sam Harris, he fires away at the Koran as well as the Bible. And like Daniel Dennett, he views faith as wish-fulfillment. Historian George Marsden once described fundamentalism as evangelicalism that is mad about something. If so, these evangelistic atheists have something in common with their fundamentalist foes, and Hitchens is the maddest of the lot. Protestant theologian John Calvin was “a sadist and torturer and killer,” Hitchens writes, and the Bible “contain[s] a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre.” As should be obvious to any reasonable person — unlike Hitchens I do not exclude believers from this category — horrors and good deeds are performed by believers and non-believers alike. But in Hitchens’s Manichaean world, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Indeed, Hitchens arrives at the conclusion that the secular murderousness of Stalin’s purges wasn’t really secular at all, since, as he quotes George Orwell, “a totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” And in North Korea today, what has gone awry is not communism but Confucianism. Hitchens is not so forgiving when it comes to religion’s transgressions. He aims his poison pen at the Dalai Lama, St. Francis and Gandhi. Among religious leaders only the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. comes off well. But in the gospel according to Hitchens whatever good King did accrues to his humanism rather than his Christianity. In fact, King was not actually a Christian at all, argues Hitchens, since he rejected the sadism that characterizes the teachings of Jesus. “No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism” in postwar America, writes Hitchens. But he’s wrong. It was the prophetic faith of black believers that gave them the strength to stand up to the indignities of fire hoses and police dogs. As for those white liberals inspired by Paine, Mencken and Hitchens’s other secular heroes, well, they stood down. Hitchens says a lot of true things in this wrongheaded book. He is right that you can be moral without being religious. He is right to track contemporary sexism and sexual repression to ancient religious beliefs. And his attack on “intelligent design” is not only convincing but comical, coursing as it does through the crude architecture of the appendix and our inconvenient “urinogenital arrangements.” What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself. Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers. If so, he doesn’t know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the way northern racists used to talk about “Negroes” — with feigned knowing and a sneer. God Is Not Great assumes a childish definition of religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery. But it is Hitchens who is the naif. To read this oddly innocent book as gospel is to believe that ordinary Catholics are proud of the Inquisition, that ordinary Hindus view masturbation as an offense against Krishna, and that ordinary Jews cheer when a renegade Orthodox rebbe sucks the blood off a freshly circumcised penis. It is to believe that faith is always blind and rituals always empty — that there is no difference between taking communion and drinking the Kool-Aid (a beverage Hitchens feels compelled to mention no fewer than three times). If this is religion, then by all means we should have less of it. But the only people who believe that religion is about believing blindly in a God who blesses and curses on demand and sees science and reason as spawns of Satan are unlettered fundamentalists and their atheistic doppelgangers. Hitchens describes the religious mind as “literal and limited” and the atheistic mind as “ironic and inquiring.” Readers with any sense of irony — and here I do not exclude believers — will be surprised to see how little inquiring Hitchens has done and how limited and literal is his own ill-prepared reduction of religion. Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant man, and there is no living journalist I more enjoy reading. But I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of Hitchens’s pet themes — the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep. See all Editorial Reviews

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