Thaksin: did the jihad reach into his government?
A prominent Thai governing official has been arrested in connection with jihad attacks in southern Thailand. From The Straits Times, with thanks to Nicolei:
A prominent member of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's ruling party faced treason charges yesterday over a deadly January attack on an army base in the Muslim south after a court ordered his arrest.Najmuddin Umar, a Muslim member of Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party, was implicated by one of five people arrested last month over the highly planned raid in Narathiwat province which left four soldiers dead.
'The court has approved the arrest warrants for Najmuddin and eight others,' a court official said, declining to identify the co-accused.
The charges relate to treason, rebellion, separatist activities and the theft of weapons, he said.
Najmuddin, along with another Thai Rak Thai parliamentarian and a senator, were named by police investigating the Jan 4 attack which sparked a spate of violence in the region that the government is struggling to control.
More than 50 people including soldiers, police, government officials and even Buddhist monks have been killed this year.
Suspicions about Najmuddin's involvement - which surfaced earlier this month - have severely embarrassed Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party.
He told reporters yesterday that he was not concerned about the allegation against his party member.
'We're not going to look at the political angle because even though I'm the head of a political party, I have to put the nation first,' he said.
According to police documents submitted to court, Najmuddin took part in three secret meetings to plan the raid in Narathiwat province.
The police had also sought arrest warrants against another Thai Rak Thai lawmaker and a non-partisan senator, but the request was turned down by the court.
Najmuddin said earlier yesterday that he would not use political privilege to avoid arrest.
A decades-old separatist movement in the south was contained in the late 1980s, but violence resurfaced two years ago. It intensified after the Jan 4 raid.
Earlier yesterday, a police officer died after he was shot on Wednesday night in Songhkla province, which neighbours the violence-scarred, Muslim-dominated Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala provinces.
The killing raised fears that the violence was spreading to Songhkla, a Buddhist majority province with a sizeable Muslim province.
Old schoolbooks used to report that "Buddhism is no longer found in India, the country of its birth." This puzzling remark was never explained. But the explanation is that Buddhism simply was too pacific, and its adherents too few, to withstand the Muslim invasion. Thousands upon thousands of Buddhist and Hindu temples were destroyed; the Bamiyan Buddhas blown up in Afghanistan were simply the last in a long line of artifacts sacrificed on the altar of Muslim hatred for everything non-Islamic. It should be clear from recent events in Thailand that the Jihad is world-wide; that the killing of a Buddhist monk in Thailand, a Hindu peasant in Kashmir, an Orthodox Serb villager in Kosovo, a family celebrating Passover or out for a night of pizza in Jerusalem, a Copt murdered while he defends a Christian school for the handicapped in Upper Egypt, a Maronite among the hundreds murdered at Damur, in Lebanon, a Sudanese villager taken as a slave, a Jewish disk jockey decaptitated by a Muslim neighbor in Paris,who was braying later about his own "entry into Paradise," Christian missionaries murdered for attempting only to offer physical, not spiritual, succour, to Muslims in southern Lebanon, and in Iraq -- no, the list can be extended for a very long time. But the example of Thailand is important. Muslims make up a very small -- less than 10% -- of the populatin. This has not inhibited them from killing Buddhist monks, villagers, and even for a Muslim cabinent minister, it seems, for placing -- as place he must, of course -- solidarity with Muslimn causes such as Jihad before any other loyalty (indeed, for a Muslim, there can be no other loyalty -- it is not a question of "dual loyalties" but rather of a "single loyalty -- to Islam." Of course, to the extent that one is a non-believing, non-observant "Muslim," and precisesly to that extent, loyalty to the nation-state may possibly exist).
One wonders if the BBC will delicately drop a word about the attacks on Buddhist monks and villagers (Oh, those aggressive Buddhists! They had it coming, didn't they, Judy Swallow!) by Muslims. Is the story just too trivial or too far away to cover? The BBC, or NPR, just can't spare a journalist or two from the West Bank or Gaza, to report to listeners on other examples of a "cycle of violence"?
What do you expect from an Islamist? Their no. 1 allegiance is not to their country, it's to their religion.