We must worry about the running out of patience of targets of terrorism

By Barrack Muluka

If some god sends you out to plant bullets in children’s heads and to kill their mothers, you must be told that you worship a defective god. But it is not just a substandard god. It is a devilish deity. We must tell you that your Morning Star is possibly Lucifer, the devil himself.

No matter what your grievances may be, and regardless that they are valid in the extreme, you cannot redress them by wallowing gleefully in the blood of infants who have no quarrel with you. Now this is what some people are doing in the name of mutations of Islam. And these neo-fascists do not want us to speak about it. They threaten you with something called fatwa. You should not as much as lift a finger.

They say that their religion allows them to kill you, even if their quarrel is with somebody else. Their first surprise is going to be that they cannot intimidate us.

But what kind of god sends his soldiers to murder children in a house of prayer? Can this be religion? Can it be Godliness? Religion has taught us that God is the ultimate good. Those who pursue God set out to find the ultimate good in the human soul. Killing babies and their mothers is not part of this. This is what Senator Omar Hassan of Mombasa should know.

Mr Hassan is a gentleman with alleged affinity to human rights. He has previously served as the Deputy Chair of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission. It was a tour of duty that he discharged with rare zeal. So much zeal did he display that you often mistook him for the chair to the commission.

This week Hassan was seething with anger. He said that Muslims in Kenya are undergoing extra-judicial killing. In his reaction to the tragic killing of self-proclaimed advocate of Shabaab killings in Kenya, Said Sharif Abubakar Makaburi, Hassan told the Senate, “We (Muslims) will not be cowed to demand justice. We ask for no favour, nor special consideration. We demand justice enshrined in the Constitution.”

Hassan is a metaphor for what ails the security sector in this country. The nation is in the grip of mortal ailment when respected leaders menacingly apologise for merchants of terror. We have previously seen respected leaders apologising for an international criminal who arrived in Nairobi claiming to be a sheikh from the Caribbean. They lit fires in Nairobi’s CBD because of the fugitive.

But the same people do not make special personal statements in the Senate when terrorists kill us. When a self-proclaimed terrorist is killed by God knows whom, they brandish the mailed fist in everybody’s face. Self-proclaimed Islamic groups were preparing to lead demonstrations in the streets and estates of Mombasa, at the time of filing this column.

We await the outcome.

The killing of Makaburi (lit. Mr Burial Grounds) is reprehensible. Nobody can celebrate it. Coming as it has done in the wake of a “shoot-to-kill call” by a senior police officer at the coast, there is cause to read police complicity in the killing. We should condemn it as Kenyans, not as fist brandishing Muslims. Hassan should have spoken as a Kenyan leader against extra-judicial killing of a Kenyan citizen. Instead he chose the narrow path of religious bigotry. Worse still, he collectivised himself with a self-confessed terrorist, “We will not be cowed. We will fight for our rights  . . .”

Alarming Short Text Messages are everywhere in the country: “They are going to hit the Junction. Avoid it. They are going to strike a leading university. Be careful. They are going to bomb a supermarket. Avoid supermarkets.” Can we live like this? What does this mean to the cantankerous people who fill up positions of leadership? Kenyans should not live in perpetual fear of elements of any one religion – no matter whose. Those who feel aggrieved must continue to explore fair avenues for redress.

If, on the other hand, anyone is at war against Kenyans, he may wish to make an open declaration of war. This way we will all know that the country is at war. People will know how to behave. In any event if someone continues slaying us in cold blood, we might as well accept we are at war. In this event, the terms of engagement with our killers may need reviewing to reflect a true war situation. It cannot be business as usual.

Meanwhile people like Hassan should tell us what they mean when they say, “Justice.” Are there varied categories of justice for different people and religions? Is there one form of justice for those who purport to be Muslims and another one for everybody else? What goes on in the mind of an Islamic leader when people claiming to be Muslims to kill us in cold blood in houses of prayer, in our schools and shopping malls? Do they sit well with their religious conscience when the killers say they killed our babies for Islam?

Makaburi is probably in some kind of paradise now. Most likely, he is just now deflowering sundry virgins, as he would appear to have prepared himself. They say that he died a martyr. They buried him without any ablutions, for ease of identification in the assembly of martyrs, in the Hereafter. For, Makaburi courted martyrdom.

He always said he was ready to go. What of the people whose cold-blooded killing he supported? They did not bargain for death. Who speaks for them when senators speak for Makaburi?

There is something else we all ought to be awake to. Nobody has a monopoly of violence. If we must fear something, it is not the sporadic savage blasts. It is not even the taking away of individuals like Makaburi.

The real thing to fear is the running out of patience among those who have been made easy targets of terror attacks. Those who have called for patience and restraint are to be lauded. Yes, we need patience and rational thinking.

The Christian community that has been singled out for terror attacks must continue to pray and hope that wise counsel will prevail and that we could soon sit down to reason together. For, war is itself incongruous. God forbid the day when patience should run out, on the other side. And if I am hearing right, people are truly getting tired.

The writer is a publishing editor, special consultant and advisor on public relations and media relations