Hitler helped Germany stage a surprising recovery, too. Search for "Somalia" at Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch to see how "moderate" the new Somali rulers really are.
"Battle-scarred nation is at peace with itself . . . but still facing war," by Martin Fletcher in the TimesOnline, with thanks to Morgaan Sinclair:
The first surprise came when we landed at Mogadishu’s beachfront airport, freshly painted and newly reclaimed from the scrub. We were greeted by the smiling face of Abdi’Kerrim, a Colin Powell lookalike with three wives who would be our interpreter. “Welcome,” he said. “You’ll be safer than in New York.”We were sceptical, but everyone we have spoken to since — doctors, teachers, journalists, shopkeepers — has talked of a city transformed. Gone are the ubiquitous checkpoints where the warlords’ militias killed, extorted and stole. Gone are their technicals, Jeeps with heavy machineguns mounted on the back. The infamous Bakaro arms markets has been closed. The only guns and technicals now are those of the Sharia courts enforcers, and the reports of violence in the papers were of the Ipswich murders.
For the first time in a generation Somalis can walk around safely, even at night. Children play football in the streets. Squads of Somalis in fluorescent yellow jackets emblazoned “Employment for Peace” are removing mountains of garbage. Shops are painting brightly coloured pictures of their wares — mobiles, satellite dishes, radios — on their walls. The derelict port has been reopened, though every vessel must be unloaded by hand as there are no cranes, and children point excitedly at the sight of aircraft overhead.
Those aircraft are bringing back hundreds of Somalis from exile in Europe and North America. “It’s like paradise compared to even one year ago,” said Mohammed Ahmed, a doctor who used to work at the West Middlesex Hospital. “I’m feeling more safe here than in London.” The Hayat hospital where he works used to treat 20 gunshot victims a day. Last month there were two killings in the whole city....
In backing the Sharia courts last spring Somalis were not embracing militant Islam. “The population had suffered 15 years under the warlords and whoever was willing to challenge and remove them would have earned its support,” said Ali Sharmarke, who runs HornAfric, Somalia’s leading independent radio station.
The jury is still out on the Sharia courts’ de facto government, but to date it has proved less extreme than its Western image would suggest.
It has banned qat, a chewed narcotic that fuelled the violence and rendered half the male population senseless, but that is akin to Western countries banning marijuana. It has banned sexually explicit films. It has dropped plans to curb media freedoms. All women now cover their heads, and some wear naqibs, but Najma Ahmad, 18, a trainee nurse, said the price was worth paying because “peace is everything”. Previously she dared not carry a mobile lest she was killed for it.
The courts have held two public executions, and hundreds packed into a public square to watch. The convicted murderers were bound, blindfolded and made to pray, then shot by an eight-man firing squad. Their bodies were dumped in a pick-up.
The Times twice experienced Sharia justice first-hand. Once one of our bodyguards accosted a driver whose car was blocking our way. We were whisked off to the nearest court, housed in an old police station. After a break for sunset prayers the two men were made to apologise to each other and released. It was quicker and cheaper than a British magistrates’ court.
Later we were taken to another former police station, apparently for entering the cathedral without permission. The matter was resolved quickly, but not before we saw an alleged drug user lying on his stomach in the courtyard with his arms and legs bound together above his back.
Some reports about Mogadishu are untrue. Somalis were not banned from watching the World Cup. Dancing has not been banned. We seldom felt menaced, but Somalis are suspicious. The West did, after all, abandon them to their misery after the Black Hawk disaster. We had stones thrown at us in the Tokyo slum, and were accosted by an angry crowd in the old arms market. When we tried to interview one young SICC commander, he marched us into his headquarters and tried to convert us to Islam....
A war would play into the hands of the extremists who undoubtedly lurk behind the Sharia courts’ more moderate leaders. It would bring foreign jihadists flocking to Somalia. The West still backs the official Government. Its fears that the Sharia courts could turn Somalia into a new Afghanistan may yet prove self-fulfilling.
Gee, Somalia sounds wonderful. I think I will move there since it's so safe and clean.
Apparently, even this jerkwater dungheap has heard of the phrase "Potemkin Village". And if qat rendered half the men senseless in years past sharia will render ALL men and women even more mindless in the years to come. For some funny reason I forsee bad things for this latest version of utopia and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Perhaps it's that ban on qat.
well if sharia law and the sharia courts do not go overboard and recognize human rights and the rights of women in a modern world and do not become like the Taliban and and Saudi Arabia might be okay, but they also in a modern world recognize religious rights of other people who are not Muslim as the reporter said they guy they were working with tried to convert them to Islam, nothing wrong with that as long as the right of Muslims to convert to other religions without penalties if that happens to be a first in show that the sharia courts in Somalia are a good thing
http://clarityandresolve.com/mogadishu.jpg
Yeah, Sharia is great! (irony on)
another example of how the two most anti christian and pro muslim countries on earth including saudi arabia and iran are the US and not so great britain. Check out this article
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/15/bosnian.serbs/index.html
26 serbs arrested in the US.
What a joke.
"Those aircraft are bringing back hundreds of Somalis from exile in Europe and North America."
Look on the bright side. If things are that good over there than our Somalia problem may diminish.
*hoping*
This is the most positive thing of the article
"Those aircraft are bringing back hundreds of Somalis from exile in Europe and North America."
Of course, Somalia is better than before, a goverment is better than anarchy, but what a price! many times, I ask me if democracy is so bad that it seems, but the freedom is very difficult to contain. But my regime wouldn´t be this islamist regime, I am clear in it.
The Times is actually full of a few good stories today.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3933-2506823.html
Britain the new banana republic
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2507368,00.html
"The West still backs the official Government. Its fears that the Sharia courts could turn Somalia into a new Afghanistan may yet prove self-fulfilling."
I'm fed up with this kind of arrogance. Somalis are capable of establishing an absolutist Islamic supremacist state on their own. "The West" isn't causing it. The ICU is a proactive movement, not a reaction to "the West".
Dead on! This is actually a very amazing piece. In a via negativa kind of way.
"The West still backs the official Government. Its fears that the Sharia courts could turn Somalia into a new Afghanistan may yet prove self-fulfilling."
This is typical lazy journo-speak. How can fears be "self-fulfilling"? So if we don't fear that Somalia will become the new Afghanistan it will be less likely to happen? Can't see the logic of this.
Like Martians landing and observing human life forms for the first time -- the Western Media covers all the goings on in the Muslim world like other worldly aliens with a clueless insensate equanimity.
How nice of fletcher's "Colin Powell lookalike with three wives " to lead him around on this orchestrated charade. Maybe Colin's imams even suspended the 'failure-to-pray-5-times-a-day-beheadings' while the tour was in progress. Top-notch investigative journalism, to be sure.
'Surprising'? Now I wonder, what do they think the 'surprise' IS??
When the Somalis launch a major terror attack against a neighboring nation I'll bet they'll REALLY be 'surprised' over at the TImes!!!!!!!
Keith Ellison is a Colin Powell look-alike, too!
"When the Somalis launch a major terror attack against a neighboring nation I'll bet they'll REALLY be 'surprised' over at the TImes!!!!!!!"
They say it begins on Tuesday.
That is so lame. How do you spin a pig into a Cinderella? Lecture at 7pm. Have your essays completed by Monday. BBC Headquarters. All staff must attend.
If somalia is such a wonderful place to live, why haven't all the somalis in the us and europe move back to somalia?
Law and order back in Somalia. People feel safe walking the streets. No more bandits running around. Now was'nt that the same situation when the Taleban took over in Afghanistan?
But what the heck, if Muslims like brutal dictators, and that is the only way one can keep check on the natural propensity of Muslims to start waging war on each other, then who are we to say no. The bright side is that Somalis may even leave the West.
The evidence is overwhelming. Those freshly-painted walls in Mogadishu, "newly reclaimed from the scrub." The "city transformed." "Gone are the ubiquitous checkpoints." Gone "the technicals." The "infamous Bakaro arms market" is closed.
And that's not all:
"For the first time in a generation Somalis can walk around safely, even at night. Children play football in the streets. Squads of Somalis in fluorescent yellow jackets emblazoned “Employment for Peace” are removing mountains of garbage. Shops are painting brightly coloured pictures of their wares — mobiles, satellite dishes, radios — on their walls. The derelict port has been reopened, though every vessel must be unloaded by hand as there are no cranes, and children point excitedly at the sight of aircraft overhead."
Hundreds of Somalis are returning to Somalia.
Why only "hundreds"? Why not hundreds of thousands? Why should not all the Somalis who claimed they needed "refuge" in the West, and who drained the slender resources of the not-very-well-off town of Lewiston, Maine, or who have been driving cabs at Logan and boasting of their twenty children by several wives on the dole to one passenger too many, or who have, in a certain Congressional district in Minneapolis, voted as the blockiest of blocks for a fellow Muslim, one Keith Ellison, last seen conferring with imams at a CAIR conference -- why should they all now not be asked if it wouldn't be appropriate for them to return to wonderful Shari'a-ruled Somalia where they can best lead their Muslim existences without worrying about the undue influence of decadent, intolerable, infidel Infidels?
Let Somalia be Somalia. But not a dollar in aid. Not a dollar in anything from the Infidels. Let all the money come from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arabs. They have hundreds of billions floating around. Make clear to Somalis that they are owed that money by their fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya. They must share, rich and poor Muslims alike. Isn't that the "social justice" we keep being told about in Islam? Let's see it at work.
Somalia for the Somalis -- especially all those Somalis now in the United States and Canada and Great Britain. Muslim money -- now for some reason appropriated, in such large amounts, by the Al-Saud family who seem to think that the oil that belongs to all of Islam really belongs to them -- for Somalia too.
Somalia will be -- no, it already is, after these brief shining hours so far of life-saving Shari'a -- wonderful.
Was this f*ckwit bribed to write this stuff, or was he simply threatened instead?
I mean, surely not even a Western 'journalist' could be quite as stupid as this, could he?
Didn't that nice Mr. Mussollini get the trains running on time?