After all, someone’s got to keep up the jihad against teachers, rubber tappers, telephone workers, and fathers and daughters, just to name a few.
If they were into bumper stickers, the might run off a few thousand urging: “Keep Thailand Restive.”
“Envoy: Thai workers in Malaysia funding insurgents,” from the Bangkok Post, September 10 (thanks to Twostellas):
A Thai diplomat in a northern Malaysian state has said his countrymen working in Malaysia are funding insurgents in Thailand’s restive southern provinces, according to a report Friday.
Thai consul general Surapon Petch-Vra, who is based in Kelantan state, told the New Straits Times newspaper Thai workers have been sending back money to groups involved in the violence in the country’s south which flared up six years ago.
The southern region was once an autonomous Malay sultanate until Buddhist Thailand annexed it a century ago, provoking decades of tension that flared up into the present insurgency.
Just an “autonomous Malay sultanate,” minding its own business? More on the rest of the story can be found here. In a nutshell, it’s another case where the jihadists lost, and they want a do-over.
“Admittedly, a few of our citizens who are earning an income in Malaysia are sending their money to certain perpetrators of violence,” he was quoted as telling the paper.
“However, it has to be emphasised that the majority of our citizens working in Malaysia are only using their income to support themselves and their families,” he added.
Surapon said about 200,000 Thais from the south’s Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani, Songkhla and Satun provinces were working in Malaysia, in various sectors including the construction industry, the paper reported. The consul-general could not be reached for comment.
Surapon’s comments follow the killing of five people in southern Thailand on Tuesday in a string of attacks by suspected militants as the military raided an insurgent training camp.
Guns, knives, Malaysian currency, medical supplies and two-way radios were among the items discovered in the eight temporary shelters surrounding the camp’s communal meeting room….