Charlie Hebdo Began a Month Ago for Kenya

In terms of body counts, Africans suffer the most in the jihad against the West.

In this third day of mayhem since the attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office, media outlets have learned more about the al Qaeda links and personal networks of the Kaouchi brothers who carried out the executions.  We are all watching how different parts of Western society try to process and explain the nature and motivations of the Al Qaeda connected attacks.  In the interest of being specific, Cherif and Said Kaouchi in their minds, were executing justice under the system of law they were raised to understand as moral.  They were not crazy.  They were behaving rationally within a belief system in which the freedom expressed by Charlie Hebdo is defined as an injustice.  The editors at Charlie Hebdo were executed being found in violation of Islamic Law by assets of al Qaeda.

Politicians and media pundits describe the attacks on a spectrum ranging from ‘retaliation against the secular war on Muslims in France’ to ‘an attack against civilization, freedom, and Western values.’  Those who take the trouble to be precise, do a fair treatment on political Islam or Sharia law.   Here is the problem.  As pundits and media on the left and right recount the short list of such attacks against the West, they include the series of car attacks on crowds in France, the hostage crisis in Sydney, the lone shooter at the Canadian Parliament, and the Synagogue slayings in Jerusalem.  These are mostly places which are geographically in the West. Yet, 2000 Nigerians were slain by Boko Haram this past week.  In late November of last year, just over a month ago, al Shabaab gunmen boarded a bus and shot and beheaded those who could not cite the Koran or answer Koranic trivia questions.  Twenty eight Kenyan lives were taken specifically because they were not Muslims.  Then, a week later, thirty six quarry workers were shot and beheaded after being sorted out and exterminated as non-Muslims.  The front lines of Western civilization are in Africa and the war is hot.

The media coverage of Kenya’s counter terrorism efforts often betray an elitist or even racist double standard in the European press.  They portray al Shabaab’s recruiters of Kenyan youth as victims of authoritarian government, giving them the false legitimacy of moral equivalence.  The fact is that many African democracies find themselves in a bloody terrorist war amidst other challenges of governance without the benefit of inheriting a secure and stable democracy from long dead ancestors as their critics in the press do.  The fact remains that the likes of Said and Cherif Kaouchi are causing tragic suffering on a large scale in Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, Algeria, Libya, Uganda, and Somalia.  The victims of the jihad in Baga, Nigeria, and Mandera, Kenya should be mourned by the West alongside the satirists of Charlie Hebdo.  Their deaths equally symbolize the threat to freedom everywhere.