Thai relatives outraged

By Lex, On May 1^st, 2004

 

That’s the headline today in my San Diego Tribune. The article discusses a team of 19 soccer players from a Muslim village in southern Thailand – good kids according to their relatives: athletic, hard working, pious.

So one night they get together with about a 100 like-minded friends and, well let Reuters stringer Nopporn Wong-Anan tell you what they did “Three days after defending their annual county soccer title, the “All Stars” team of Baan Susoe village near the Malaysian border mounted nine motorcycles and rode 23 km through the night to launch a dawn attack on a security checkpoint.”

“On that night he came home from his wife’s with a suitcase and told his mother that he would go on a Dahwah,” Pitaya said, referring to an Islamic religious mission.

You know, a religious mission. Sort of like building shelters for poor kids in Mexico, which is what my church’s youth group did last year.

Carrying machetes and firearms, 108 Thai kids attempted to storm police barracks in order to kill a few policemen and seize their weapons, like they had done a couple of times before. Just kid stuff. And would you believe it? Those brutal Thai policemen defended themselves. And after the initial attack was over, they hounded the survivors back to a local mosque, surrounded them and when they wouldn’t surrender, killed them too.

Their parents of course, are outraged. But not at whomever it was who told their children that being members of a religion of peace involved butchering police officers in the middle of the night, the better to steal their firearms. They’re mad at the police for defending themselves, for repulsing an attack.

I’ll freely admit that I’m no expert in Thai internal politics or demography – I don’t really know how or why 108 young men would concoct a plan to kill policemen and steal their weapons. Maybe the police could have waited the men inside the mosque out, although a growing, angry mob at their backs was probably a consideration to their tactics. So I looked up back issues from reporter Nopporn Wong-Anan. The most recent article preceding this attack had this “Two people were killed and 50 public buildings, including 15 schools, set ablaze overnight in one of the worst outbreaks of violence to disrupt Thailand’s restive Muslim south since January, police said on Friday. A village chief was shot dead in his car and a fireman died in hospital after being shot while trying to put out a blaze at one of the burning buildings in the southern province of Narathiwat that borders Malaysia, police said. The night rampage was the worst in three months of unrest that started on January 4 when gunmen burst into an army camp, stealing nearly 400 guns and killing four soldiers, and some 20 schools in Narathiwat were burned. At least 60 people, including three Buddhist monks, have died in the violence, which has rekindled fears of a separatist rebellion in the impoverished region where few people have strong emotional ties to the distant capital, Bangkok.”

Just on a whim, I googled “outrage” cross-referenced by some of the worlds major religions:

• Muslim outrage – 889 hits
• Jewish outrage – 218
• Christian outrage – 155
• Hindu outrage – 46
• Buddhist outrage – 7

Instructive? Perhaps… Anyway, to parse the matter further, I added “murder” as a qualifier to my search, and here’s what I got:

• Muslim – 131 hits
• Jewish – 63
• Christian – 35
• Hindu – 14
• Buddhist – 0

This is all very unscientific of course. Several of the references to Jewish outrage went back to the time of the Roman Empire, and there’s nothing in there which defines whether the murder in question was committed by the faithful or upon them. But still, this tracks rather well with our preconceptions as well as our observations, doesn’t it? Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard professor of strategic studies, wrote in his book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” that Islam has bloody borders. Huntington posited (back in 1998) that the old struggles of ethnicity, class and nationality were being swept aside by new clashes of religious orthodoxy. For this sweeping generalization, he was roundly criticized by the usual multi-cultural suspects in the literary press and liberal intelligentsia. Miguel. B. Llora , a “Top 500 reviewer” at Amazon.com, sniffs that Huntington was guilty of oversimplification, and ends his summary with the insightful inanity of , “Civilizations do not clash, people do.”

In social sciences, as in others, we formulate hypotheses, or models which we then attempt to disprove. To the extent that these models tend to work in the observable world, they are given theoretical weight. “Laws” are discovered when every possible contrary model is proven false. Since the social sciences are somewhat squishy, it is very difficult to prove theories or models, so it’s sometimes useful to counter-pose the opposite of the model, and see what shakes out: “Islam does not have bloody borders.” (Map courtesy of National Geographic).

So, let’s start disproving that Islam has bloody borders. Starting from the west-northwest:
Morocco abuts Spain. Check .

Algeria shares the Mediterranean with southern Europe. Check.

Tunisia? Nothing since a synagogue bombing in 2002 . Ally in the war on terror.

Libya? Past state sponsor of terror. Renounces WMD.

Egypt? Ruthless suppressor of domestic jihadists . Surviving jihadis move to other, more hospitable climes.

Jordan, Syria and Lebanon? Let’s just take them as read, shall we?

Balkans and Caucasus? Bloody – an open question on whom is the sinner, and whom the sinned against, but undeniably bloody. That last geographic generalization pretty much takes us east to the Pakistan / China border, where the PRC is having it’s own struggle with Uighur separatists .

But Pakistan, an ally in the war on terror, also shares a border with India. Perhaps you’ve heard of it ?

Next stop – Bangladesh. Check.

Check (although the Megawati government is doing what it can).

Sweeping back to west again, and omitting the Islamic heartland since we’re talking about borders, takes us to Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan.

Patience now, we’re almost home. What about Chad , Niger and Mali? Border states. Bloody borders, in two out of three cases. Mali apparently is only being used as a place for the Salifist Group for Preaching and Combat to duck into, when the heat is on in Algeria.

So how do you think the model works, so far?

Is there a point to all this? I think so…

Many of these are poor countries. Some have a bone to pick with America, some are on side. Mexico certainly has its share of the desperately poor, and a long-standing grievance with the USA. Nonetheless, I think we’d all be awfully surprised to find that any Delta Airlines flights were highjacked by Mechafanatics and flown into skyscrapers.

There’s something different going on than the spouting of “root cause” platitudes then. People are pirating what had been a proud (Arab) intellectual and spiritual (Islamic) tradition, and turning impressionable members of that faith into suicidal murderers. There can’t be a future in that, and it’s time, past time, when the mothers of these children save their outrage for those who would send their children off to kill and die. The very pinnacle of miscalculation is evident in Osama bin Laden’s cherished goal to provoke Huntington’s clash of civilizations, because while this is a struggle that can be fought by the Islamists, it cannot be won by them. The imbalance of forces is too great. What’s the sense of allowing children to die for a cause that cannot be won? And how many more must die before there has been enough killing? Since there is no central authority to the Islamic faith, no Pope to determine dogma, mothers, fathers and social institutions need to step in.

And in case there are any lurking moral relativists that would wish to draw a parallel between those southern Thai mothers whose sons played soccer in the day, and wielded machetes at night, and the American mothers who have kissed their sons good-bye, and welcomed their flag draped caskets home in tears, please keep this in mind: The terrorists goal is achieved when the killing starts, ours when the killing stops.

Because at the end of the day, the terrorists’ desire to die for the cause of destroying our civilization is not, cannot be stronger than our desire to stop them from doing so.

By whatever means necessary.

 

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