Black Lives Matter in Kenya

While Ferguson Missouri dominates the headlines in the U.S., another tragic slaughter of Kenyan civilians by Al Shabaab took place again in Mandera.  Islamists shot and beheaded 36 laborers at a quarry in north-eastern Kenya just days after a bus was hijacked and all non Muslims were brutally killed in the name of Allah.  Taking responsibility for the security and protection of Kenyan citizens, the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, dismissed his interior minister and allowed his chief of police to step down.

Many headlines out of Kenya cite the heavy handedness with which Kenyan police forces deal with mosques used to recruit youth for Al Shabaab’s war on Kenya.  However, the systematic, political, and tactical design behind Al Shabaab’s slaughtering of Kenyans from the brain washing of the young at the mosques to attacks like those in Mandera and Mombasa, have a clear and discernible intent. The goal is to spread Islam by taking political territory through fear and violence.

President Kenyatta articulated in a televised speech his view on the nature of the war.  “This is a war against Kenya and Kenyans, It is a war that every one of us must fight.  The time has come for each and every one of us to decide and choose – are you on the side of an open, free, democratic Kenya… or do you stand with repressive, intolerant extremists?”

The images, week after week, of dead Kenyan bodies lined on the roadside of people who were killed for failing to quote the Koran somehow fail to compete for the moral indignation and emotion ignited as it was in Ferguson.  The ideological political system that drives the same type of beheading and gruesome mass murders in Iraq and Syria by ISIS and ignites celebration in Palestine when Jewish throats are slit is the driving force behind the mass murder of these Kenyans in Mandera.