Odinga Campaign in the Context of East African Jihad

The Kenyan conflict among Barack Obama’s cousin, Raila Odinga, his Luo tribesmen and the Kikuyus is dangerously easy to dismiss as just another — yawn! — African tribal melee. It’s half a world away. And bloody though it is, tribal warfare has gone on for centuries. But we would be dead wrong if we thought of Kenya’s troubles as unimportant to us here in the United States. There is a time-honored saying that all politics is local. But in jihadist terms, all politics is global.

Sure, the blood-letting could be the settling of scores that deserve to be settled in some fashion. But look at where Kenya is on the map of East Africa. In addition to lying next to the Indian Ocean, it is on the southern and eastern borders of three nations in which Christians have been systematically exterminated by Muslims during the last few decades: in Somalia, Sudan (where over 2,000,000 have died since 1983 — see video), and Uganda, where over 300,000 Christians were butchered in 1971-79.

Ethiopia, split roughly 50/50 between Christians and Muslims has cooperated in the last year with the United States to control al Qaeda elements in Somalia. And control it they must, or their Christian population will be exterminated in the same way as those in Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and now Kenya.

Just east of Uganda is a fifth, Rwanda. Between April and July 1994, after the Rwandan government disarmed the Christian Tutsis, Hutu-led military forces began to systematically massacre the defenseless Christians. Using machetes rather than bullets, the Hutu forces were able to create a state of abject fear and terror within the helpless Christian population as they systematically butchered hundreds of thousands of them.

Kenya’s southern neighbor, Tanzania, is so far peaceful but disturbing tensions are reportedly developing.

Between these countries, over the last forty years, black Christians have been gang-raped, burned, hacked with machetes, starved and slaughtered literally in the millions. The present conflict in Kenya is a continuation of all that has gone before. Although the majority of Luo are Christian, their leaders are Muslim; the Kikuyus are Christian. Under the Kikuyus, Kenya has been stable and pro-Western for roughly half a century, since end of the MauMau terror of the late fifties.

But Kenya appears now to be a new front on the world-wide campaign of global Islamic jihad. And this is the scene into which Barack Obama loudly and voluntarily inserted himself in 2006, on behalf of his cousin, Raila Odinga, who is committed to creating Muslim Sharia courts in every district in Kenya and completely Islamizing Kenya’s coastal region. Obama could hardly be ignorant of the Odinga’s Islamic agenda. Obama owes voters an explanation for his support of it.