by Raymond Ibrahim, April 3, 2015
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Al Shabaab’s Mohamed Mohamud,
wanted by Kenya’s government for role
in recent slaughter of college Christians
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Muslim wholesale slaughter of Christians struck again on April 2 in Kenya. Gunmen from the Somali Islamic group, Al Shabaab—“the youth”—stormed Garissa University, singled out Christian students, and murdered them, some beheaded. A total of 147 people were killed in the attack—making this jihad more spectacular than the 2013 Al Shabaab attack on the Nairobi mall, which left 67 people dead (then, Islamic gunmen also singled out Christians for slaughter).
According to eyewitnesses present at Garissa University, the Islamic gunmen were careful to separate Christians from Muslims before they began the carnage of the former. After all, although Kenya is 83% Christian, it is still approximately 11% Muslim. Joel Ayora, who survived the attack, said gunmen burst into a Christian service, seized worshippers, and then “proceeded to the hostels, shooting anybody they came across except their fellows, the Muslims.”
Collins Wetangula, vice chairman of the student union, said he could hear from inside his room where he was hiding the gunmen opening doors and inquiring if the people inside were Muslims or Christians: “If you were a Christian you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun I thought I was going to die.”
The fact that Christians were singled out and slaughtered has received little attention in the mainstream media: most mention it, but only towards the very bottom as an incidental, peripheral matter of little significance (see for example the BBC’s minimal treatment); others portray it as a new tactic or phenomenon.
In fact, Al Shabaab has a long history of singling Christians out from among Muslims for slaughter. The following are just a few examples from Kenya that took place over the last few months, most never reported on any mainstream media:
- December 2, 2014: Al Shabaab gunmen launched an early morning raid on quarry workers sleeping in their worksite tents near the city of Mandera, along the Somali border. Christians and Muslims were separated before the Christians, thirty-six of them, were beheaded or shot dead.
- November 22, 2014: Al Shabaab attacked a bus and massacred 28 of its Christian passengers. Again, Muslim passengers were separated and left unharmed.
- August 24, 2014: Al Shabaab abducted a group of traders near the island of Lamu. The militants eventually released three of them, because they were Muslims, but beheaded the fourth, a Christian.
- June 15, 2014: Approximately 50 militants from Al Shabaab went on a killing spree in Mpeketoni, a predominantly Christian town on Kenya’s coast. They chanted “Allahu Akbar,” killed whoever could not recite verses from the Koran, and went door-to-door asking residents their religion, killing those who answered “Christian.” More than 57 people were killed, including six children of church pastors.
The only time in Kenya that Muslim jihadis do not inquire about the religious identity of their potential victims is when they attack churches—such as when they set fire to Covenant Church and roasted Christians alive (they destroyed a Catholic church on the same night); or when two heavily armed jihadis entered the Joy in Jesus Church in Monbasa during Sunday service and “sprayed the congregation with bullets, killing at least seven Christians”; or when “youths,” in the words of Reuters, “threw petrol bombs at two Kenyan churches on Christmas day.”
The logic is that whoever is inside a church—visiting Muslim or practicing Christian, man, woman, or child—deserves death without question.
Separating Muslims from “infidels” and releasing the former occurs with great frequency during jihadi attacks and is hardly limited to Al Shabaab’s incursions in Kenya (inasmuch as it is good to kill an infidel, it is bad to kill a fellow Muslim, according to Islamic law).
Thirteen of the 21 Coptic Christians who were beheaded by ISIS last February in Libya were abducted in similar fashion. On January 3, around 2:30 a.m., masked men burst into a housing complex in Sirte, Libya. They went room to room checking ID cards to separate Muslims from Christians, handcuffed the latter and rode off with them. According to Hanna Aziz, a Copt who was concealed in his room when the other Christians were seized in Libya, “While checking IDs, Muslims were left aside while Christians were grabbed…. I heard my friends screaming but they were quickly shushed at gunpoint. After that, we heard nothing.”
Last October 2012 in Nigeria, Boko Haram Islamic jihadis stormed the Federal Polytechnic College, “separated the Christian students from the Muslim students, addressed each victim by name, questioned them, and then proceeded to shoot them or slit their throat,” killing up to 30 Christians.
This is the jihad on Christians that is raging all around the world wherever Muslims make for sizable populations—the jihad that will eventually go viral in the West according to Islam’s unwavering Rule of Numbers.
