The following editorial appeared in today's Globe and Mail, Toronto, comparing the Islamists to Mafia.
Mafia-like Islamists
While people in North America obsess over what they can take on an airplane (books, thankfully, will be permitted), nearly one million hungry people in Somalia are losing their major source of food aid because of terrorist extortion. The United Nations World Food Program is suspending its deliveries indefinitely, and who can blame it?
The militants in southern Somalia demanded a supposed security fee of $20,000 every six months. They ordered that women be barred from working on food aid, that their approval be sought for all projects, that any celebrations to mark Christmas, or International Women's Day, or World AIDS Day, be banned. The UN agency would have been turned into a social-service branch of al-Shabab, a group linked to al-Qaeda, if it had said yes to these conditions. To say no would have been to risk deadly reprisals. Instead it is closing six of its offices, and will try to supply more food across the border in Kenya, expecting that hungry people will leave the country.
Although clothed in religious garb, the Islamic terrorist evil is as remorseless as any Mafia organization, and much more deadly. That evil seeks to dominate and destroy, for its own purposes, any society where it is able to gain a foothold. It is as likely to kill Muslims as non-Muslims. Not for that reason alone, it needs to be as opposed and resisted as much by Muslims as by non-Muslims.
In northwest Pakistan, people did try to resist, forming militias to drive out the radicals. But a suicide bomber drove a truck filled with 250 kilograms of explosives into a volleyball tournament and killed 88 people, including eight children, on Jan. 1. A day later in Denmark, Kurt Westergaard, a 75-year-old cartoonist whose depiction of a bearded man with a bomb in his turban sparked riots four years ago, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.
The philosophy of al-Qaeda and its adherents supports perpetual, worldwide war. It lends itself as easily to a clash within civilizations as one between civilizations. It is as likely to drive one million hungry Somalis from their country in search of food as it is to incite an attack on Western jet travellers.
Most alarming of all, it continues to lure the young to take up its cause.
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