Regarding the usual mainstream media bias in this story, Jihad Watch reader LDT sets the historical record straight: "The claim that the south of Thailand was 'annexed by Thailand a century ago' is WRONG. The Sultanate was destroyed during the Thai war against Burma in the mid 1700s because it had sided with the Burmese against the Siamese. By this time the Sultanate was in decline. The Siamese conquered the area and have ruled it since. And whether they took the land 100 or 250 years ago is beside the point. What right does that give anyone to randomly bomb and kill anyone?" Indeed. And that makes it clear that Thailand was entitled to this land by right of conquest, which has been universally recognized throughout human history -- except, of course, when it comes to Israel, and apparently, to any Muslim land that is conquered by non-Muslims.
"8 Thai Soldiers Die in Ambush; Muslim Rebels Suspected," by Sumeth Panpetch for Associated Press (thanks to Sr. Soph):
NARATHIWAT, Thailand, Jan. 14 -- Suspected Muslim insurgents ambushed an army patrol in Thailand's restive south Monday, killing all eight soldiers and then beheading one of them, in a rebellion that has entered its fifth year.The soldiers were on a morning patrol when a bomb hidden on the road exploded and flipped their vehicle over, according to an army spokesman, Col. Akara Thiprote. The attackers, hiding in roadside brush, then opened fire, leaving no survivors, he said.
More than 2,800 people have been killed in the past four years in Thailand's southernmost provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat and some parts of neighboring Songkhla. Many in the predominantly Muslim area feel they are treated unfairly by the country's Buddhist majority....
More than 30 people have been decapitated during the insurgency, many of them civilians. The object appears to be to terrorize Buddhists into leaving the region.
The insurgents do not issue public statements, but researchers who have had contact with them believe they seek a separate Islamic state. The region was a sultanate until it was annexed by Thailand in the early 1900s, and most of its Muslim residents are ethnic Malays who have more in common with the people of neighboring Malaysia.
The degree of influence on the insurgents by outside Islamic extremist groups is still a matter of debate, though many experts agree that the rebellion is a homegrown reaction to decades of disenchantment over misrule and discrimination by Thailand's central government.
No one there has the idea that any non-Muslim rule over Muslims is illegitimate and must be resisted violently. Oh, no. It's all about Thai misrule. Good governments ends jihad, doncha know.
The insurgency flared on Jan. 4, 2004, with a raid by unidentified gunmen on an army weapons depot in Narathiwat in which four soldiers were killed and hundreds of guns were stolen. A government crackdown accelerated the violence, and the region was soon beset with drive-by shootings and small bombings. Most of those killed have been civilians....Critics of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted in a 2006 coup, argue that his government exacerbated tensions with a hard-line approach. But the military-installed interim government that succeeded him has done no better after pledging to take a more nuanced approach that would not alienate southern Muslims.
Yes, he was a real hardliner, old Thaksin was. Those origami were brutal. Brutal!
And anyway, if it's all Thaksin's fault, why is it still going on? The new leader is a Muslim, and the "hardline" tactics, such as they were, are a thing of the past.
[A bomb exploded at a southern Thai market Tuesday, injuring at least 27 people, officials said. The bomb was hidden in a motorcycle in the capital of Yala province. Officials suspect Muslim rebels.]
"Most of those killed have been civilians.... "
....the preferred target of radical Islam...
"NARATHIWAT, Thailand, Jan. 14 -- Suspected Muslim insurgents ambushed an army patrol in Thailand's restive south Monday, killing all eight soldiers and then beheading one of them, in a rebellion that has entered its fifth year."
Could someone please explain why it is "restive south"? What does it mean? Why is it in every report? Is is a code word? I don't get it.
"Could someone please explain why it is "restive south"? What does it mean? Why is it in every report? Is is a code word? I don't get it.
Posted by: pr126 "
...it sounds softer than "Muslim invasion"..
Here we go again. "Restive". "Insurgents".
Why don't they call these murdering bastards what they are? And quit blaming everyone and everything else for the reason behind the violence, when the blame should be placed squarely where it belongs, on the superiority complex of islam and the hatred it spawns.
This disinformation by the MSM is frightening.
It is Orwellian and infuriating.
Not one article without this garbage, that this 'southern province has been annexed 100 years ago'- which somehow tells us that it belongs to Islam by right and that all Thai Buddhists should vacate the area, just like the 'restive south' rubbish and the 'shadowy rebels' that have, somehow, no motive doing what they're doing other then 'defend the impoverished people who feel neglected' by the Thai government.
This shit stinks to high heaven.
Parroting the party line, in this case and others using words like "restive" and "insurgents," instead of doing a little bit of research and honest reporting, is better for one's career, apparently. Witness, Major Coughlin at the Pentagon.
Calling attention to what is actually going on or what has been or is being said by supporters of jihad/sharia is also a no-no...witness what is said about Robert Spencer all the time and the uproar over the Islamo-Fascism awareness week.
I'm trying to be dispassionate when I read these types of articles that are nothing less than an attempt to justify murder and terrorism. I question the motivation of this writer. Is he pro-terrorism? Is this an attempt to be "even-handed" again? In the final analysis, what I think is really going on is the leftist agenda to deny any justification to those who want to see action taken against radical Islam, which would strengthen the case of the Right. So the party line is to minimize Muslim terrorism and justify it. Over and over then the same code words appear, those little nuggets that seed the consciousness of those who take in the "news" via the MSM, paralyzing the West, emboldening the murderers, and on it goes. The media is the root of our problem, more so than the jihadists, since the jihadists can be beaten and eradicated if we bring our will to bear, but the MSM saps our will daily, paints those on the front lines of the battle as the bad guys, and justifies these horrific killers. We feel stuck, unable to take decisive action, always being second-guessed and heckled by a media that is looking to sabotage our resolve to defend ourselves.
When its payback time
The muslims whine
A terrible human tragedy occured in Tak Bai, Narathiwat on October 2004. Yet the world still turns a blind eye to suffering of the Patani Malay minority there. Organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Commission of Jurists and the United Nations have fought various causes before and brought the untold suffering of the millions of destitute into the living rooms of the powerful and influential. There is plenty of evidence of the brutality that was shown to the world that day.
THE TRUTH IS MOSLEMS DON,T WANT PEACE
http://illustratedpig.blogspot.com/2006/06/true-story.html
pr126
every time you read the word 'restive' in an article about the Muslim Jihad against Buddhists and the Infidel state in Thailand, do what I do: substitute the word 'Jihad-wracked'.
Ask an American Buddhist about the "muslim insurgents" in Thailand and you will get a puzzled look. Ask the Thais in America about them and you will find out that there is no problem, the King will take care of everything. So much for jihad in Thailand.
In another century, Buddhism in Asia will be only a memory and the Buddhists in the USA will all be dhimmis. Of course, most are now anyway.
My post above should read . . .Buddhism in Southeast Asia... One never knows what the Chinese and Japanese will do.
Please excuse my cynicism. I know too many Buddhists.
Some further reflections.
Robert includes a tantalising historical note from another reader - that "the Sultanate [i.e. the region currently wracked by Jihad] was destroyed during the Thai war against Burma in the mid 1700s because it had sided with the Burmese against the Siamese. By this time the Sultanate was in decline. The Siamese conquered the area and have ruled it since".
This is useful, but not all that we need to know. I think it's time one of us here consulted the Really Old Un-PC Books and then shared with the rest of us exactly when and how this area in the south of Thailand BECAME Muslim in the first place.
Because I am assuming that - like the rest of south-east Asia - it was originally Buddhist, Hindu and animist, but was Islamised by a judicious combination of fraud and force somewhere around the 13th/ 15th centuries AD.
Can one of our Thai readers enlighten us here?
Here's an outline of the kind of paragraph we need to be able to mentally insert, every time 'the restive south' of Thailand is mentioned. Indeed, it could be inserted by Jihadwatch, every time a story from the Thai front of the Third Jihad is posted.
"The ethnically Malay residents of this region, originally Hindu, Buddhist and animist, were converted to Islam in the late middle ages (date; circumstances - fraud? force?) and it became the Sultanate of [insert name]. In the mid-1700s this sultanate, already in decline, sided with Burma in the Thai-Burma wars, and attacked the Siamese. In the ensuing war Thailand defeated the sultanate and annexed its territory; the Thai have ruled the area ever since)."
This needs fine-tuning; but the important point is to keep hammering home the fact that this region has NOT been Muslim since forever, as well as the fact that Thailand took it in the course of a war in which the sultanate was the aggressor.
Further - see Robert's note above: "the idea that any non-Muslim rule over Muslims is illegitimate and must be resisted violently".
Perhaps this could read "Muslim theologian/jurist [INSERT NAME] taught that any non-Muslim rule over Muslims is illegitimate and must be resisted, violently if needs be - REFERENCE".
Hassan al-Banna's line - 'Islam is to dominate, and not be dominated' - might do, though one of the older writers on whom he drew would be better, as well as the Quranic verse - 'Persecution is worse than slaughter' which in fact seems to mean 'slaughter (of non-Muslims) is preferable to "persecution (where 'persecution' = non-Muslim rejection of Muslim dominance, or non-Muslims having authority over Muslims)".