Kenya (catch all)

[TheCurmudgeon]

I posted this on my blog http://www.brownpundits.com/2013/09/...ion-is-now-ok/

Extended excerpt (basic question):
This can be classified as a "Mumbai style attack"...armed men attack a city, pick out one or more prominent civilian targets and slaughter any random person that they find, but may make an effort to spare Muslims. The target may have symbolic value. e.g. educated Westernized left-liberal observers will not have difficulty recognizing an upscale mall as a temple of capitalism, a bastion of imperialism and neo-colonialism, or a shrine to consumerism

I have not read enough about Kenya but I don't see it as a "Mumbai style" attack. Mumbai was clearly an attack by a foreign entity for political (and partially religious) reasons. This attack appears to be the opposite - a internally based entity attacked for religious (and partially political) reasons.

So my question is this: Their arguments and actions are horrible, tragic, sad, etc. But are they now so routine that they have become in some sense legitimate? That we accept them as part of the nature of war? after all, when more advanced countries fight each other (or weaker countries) and use aircraft to drop bombs or fire missiles, we sort of take it in our stride. War is bad, but when it does happen (and sometimes it happens), this is just how it is. Will we think about Mumbai-style attacks the same way now?[/I]

What might be more interesting is the question "do the victims not resonate with me enough to care?" or put another way "do I not feel enough affinity to this group to see myself as threatened by the activity of the terrorists?" The average Kenyan probably will not have anything in common with those who could shop in that mall. The average Westerner does not have enough in common with the average Kenyan to care. So you have a very limited audience who were intended to feel the brunt of this attack, if in fact it was a terrorist attack and not simply an act of war by a group who sees wealthy, non-muslim Kenyans as the enemy.

Here we see the intersection of religious identity and national identity that I discussed elsewhere.