South Korea feels the Spanish pinch. From The Financial Times, with thanks to Jean-Luc:
South Korea's acting president has warned of a "strong" threat of terrorism as the country prepares to send more troops to Iraq next month. Following last week's train bombings in Spain, Goh Kun said countries supporting the US-led coalition in Iraq had become "major targets" of terrorism.South Korea is poised to become the third-biggest member of the occupation force next month when it plans to send an extra 3,000 troops to join its 600 medics and engineers already there.
"We need to be very seriously prepared [for terrorism]. We could be a strong target," said Mr Goh, standing in for president Roh Moo-hyun, who was impeached by parliament last week.
South Korea is the latest US ally to have responded to the Madrid bombings, which appear to have been carried out by Islamic extremists, such as al-Qaeda.
In Australia, John Howard, prime minister, yesterday pledged a further A$400m ($295m, €242m, £163m) in this year's budget to fight terrorism. Japan has pledged to keep ground forces in Iraq whether or not Spain pulls out this summer.
It may come as a surprise to readers of Jihadwatch, but when the Turks contributed soldiers to the Korean War (under the U.N. flag of convenience), those Turks left behind Koreans whom they converted to Islam -- approximately, at this point, something close to 50,000. Da'wa goes on everywhere and always; Islam does not possess formal missionaries; every Muslim is a potential missionary. So if, in Seoul, they are looking for Middle Easterners, they might also examine the Muslims among their own citizens -- and attempt, by all means, to un-convert them. And the C.I.A., and the F.B.I., utterly naive as they are about Islam, and constantly surprised, as they are, about who might be a Muslim, should look into this matter, and not assume that Koreans cannot possibly be Muslim.
Of course, one can only wonder at what would have the reaction of the Reverend Horace Underwood, the Presbyterian minister (and relative of the typewriter tycoons) who singlehandedly converted half of the Korean populaton to Protestantism in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There is hardly a Protestant denomination in the United States that is not, now, mightily supported by its Korean members. The heirs of Underwood are not a threat to anyone; the descendants of those Koreans converted by the Turkish troops, on the other hand, may be-- and precisely to the extent that they accept the central tenets of Islam as a geopolitical system.