Alas, as at 10 pm (GMT+3) on this Sunday, my contribution to the conversation (which I sent over 8 hours ago to await editorial approval) has not been added to the online conversation invited by the Daily Nation. The Editor probably does not have as good a reason for not including it as I have for posting it on my blog. So here below it is, in full and as originally sent:
Franceschi
is not diagnosing terrorism, which is what scholars are supposed to do. He is
clumsily justifying it -- with patchy chronology, zero logic and near-zero
dialectical thinking. As the current saying goes, the terrorists are right here
among us. Franceschi has a knack for meeting them, and they for meeting him. He
is empathetic to their way of seeing things, and hostile to the way the
ordinary Kenyan reacts to Al-Shabaab massacres. He seems to ask Kenyans to
accept the deaths perpetrated by terrorists as a necessary and unavoidable fact
of life.
We all
know that Al-Shabaab are an extreme, pathological wing of Islam, and the great
majority of Kenyan Muslims are just as horrified by its murderous orgies. I
happen to think that most ordinary Muslims in Kenya are more terrified by
extremists among them, than by Christians -- even in these hard times. I dare
say that it is impossible in the circumstances for there to be a religious war
in Kenya, pitting non-Muslim against Muslim. Those who think there might be are
hallucinating. So terror can be confronted, robustly, without things getting
out of hand. The fight against Mungiki did not lead to intra-ethnic war in
Central Kenya.
In
America, the habitual and disproportionate killing of black youths by white
policemen sparks recurrent outrage, and the hastag #BlackLivesMatter is
currently trending. Yet not all or even most white policemen are murderous
racists. Everyone knows that, and so nobody worries that condemning or going
after the murderers, "with firmness in the right and justice for
all", will spark a racial war.
In
Kenya, whenever Al-Shabaab single out non-Muslims for cold-blooded murder,
everyone -- Senator and Dean included -- rushes to ask us to 'chill', seeking
to reassure us with little if any logic that religion is not the criterion for
the killings. it's not religious at all, since in Somalia they do kill Muslims
- you know. Franceschi and those who think like him want the victims to accept their fate, and roll with the
deadly point-blank shots, and the families to not try to pinpoint who did the
killing and why? Alternatively, they want us all to be like the VietNamese
buffalo put in a trance (shorn of all reason and all sense) by means of
quasi-religious chants prior to an impending butchery.
Franceshi's last three sentences are a veritable Jihadist
call to arms, and couldn't have been written better by Ai-Shabaab themselves.
I don't
know if Franceschi is the new face of Opus Dei at Strathmore. I don't know
which country he comes from, or if he's still welcome there. I don't know where
he was before he came here. I don't know why he is so obviously and so
blatantly hostile to Kenya, and Kenyans. If Kenya is so bad, why is he here?
