David J. Jonsson
January 26, 2008
Excerpt:
Increasing Islamic Power
As noted previously, over the last ten years Kenya has seen a rapid expansion and growth of the Islamic community and along with it the rise of Militant Islam. A new wave of proselytism has targeted the younger educated and urbanized generation. As a result of the increasing Islamic Power, the candidates discovered that this West-vs.-Islamism political drama attracts money in a way that rural development, say, never could. Kenya is embroiled in an ideological war – a Clash of Ideologies in the Kenyan bush.
As Joshua Hammer commented on December 23, 2008 in the New York Times article: The African Front:
“At the same time, militant Islam has also found a foothold. A sizable, largely poor Muslim population concentrated along the coast — and proximity to the volatile states in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Sudan — have made Kenya especially vulnerable, in the views of counterterrorism experts, to the call for jihad. Since the early 1990s, the mosques of Mombasa and other towns have resonated with militant Islamic rhetoric. Radical imams have preached violence against Westerners, attacked the Kenyan government as the lackey of the United States and Israel and called for the implementation of Shariah. Members of the Qaeda cells that blew up the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, were recruited in mosques near the Indian Ocean beaches where hundreds of thousands of Western tourists flock each year. Kenya is “a good place” for militant Islamists to blend in, I was told by Al Amin Kimathi, the director of the Muslim Human Rights Forum in Nairobi, which accuses the Kenyan government of discrimination against the country’s roughly four million Muslims (in a total population of 37 million). He added, only half in jest: “Even Osama bin Laden could hang around here. He could land at the airport, spread some money around and he’d be walking.”“
“Anti-Western sentiment had begun creeping into the mosques of northern Kenya well before 9/11, Ahmed Kura told me. In the 1990s, the Kuwaiti-backed African Muslim Agency financed the construction of mosques throughout the countryside, including one in Kargi, Harugura’s home village, and in Korr, a trading town near Lake Turkana.”
“The African Muslim Agency’s stated agenda has been to strengthen Islam by spreading the teachings of the Koran, as well as to build hospitals, schools and mosques. But terrorism experts have seen a darker agenda in the group’s good works: according to U.S. investigators, money raised by the charity has gone to finance jihadi groups, including Al Itihaad al Islamiya (A.I.A.I.), a radical Islamic organization, now defunct, that was based in Somalia and led by Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys (who was linked to Al Qaeda and later became a leader of the Islamic Courts Union). A.I.A.I. was declared a terrorist organization by President Bush two weeks after 9/11.” ...
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OBAMA SUPPORTS THE SOMALI MOHAMED ABDID WALI AS CANDIDATE IN KENYA ELECTIONS.LINK.
