Sunday, September 29, 2013

29-Sep-13: Sunday, bloody, bloody Sunday

Last Sunday, under a deliberately ironic headline ["22-Sep-13: A quiet weekend"], we reported on the ghastly weekend actions of Islamist terrorists in several places:
  • Nigeria, where Islamists killed at least 159 humans in two attacks
  • Pakistan where 75 were killed [the toll subsequently rose past 80] and 120 injured in a church attack in Peshawar
  • Kenya, where Islamists were then still in the process of murdering more than 60 people after separating out some of the Moslems among them
  • Iraq where 16 were killed in the name of Islam at a Sunni funeral, a day after 104 people were killed in an attack by Islamists on a Shiite funeral in Baghdad.
That was then. Now this weekend:
The death toll in an attack by gunmen on a college in northeastern Nigeria on Sunday has risen to 40, a Reuters witness said, in a region where Islamist militants have targeted schools and universities. Gunmen stormed the College of Agriculture in Yobe state and shot students as they slept in the early hours of Sunday, state police commissioner Sanusi Rufai said. A Reuters witness counted 40 bodies at the main hospital in Yobe's state capital Damaturu, mostly young men believed to be college students. [Reuters, reporting in the past half hour] Note: AP reports today, as well, that Nigerian Islamists killed at least 30 other civilians during the past week in separate attacks.
and
Twin blasts in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar killed 33 people and wounded 70 on Sunday, a week after two bombings at a church in the frontier city killed scores, police and hospital authorities said... The blasts hit outside a police station in an area crowded with shops and families. Police said it appeared at least one of the explosions had been a car bomb. There was no immediate claim of responsibility... Women sobbed as ambulances pulled up with more bodies... The Taliban [Islamists] have repeatedly rejected Pakistan's constitution and have called for the full implementation of Islamic law and for war with India... [Reuters, reporting in the past hour]
And it's still only Sunday morning in some parts of the world.

2 comments:

in the vanguard said...

You may well disagree, but I think it's a waste of time to dwell on evil. A little light banishes a lot of darkness.

This Ongoing War said...

Thanks for the comment, Vanguard. It's not only true but important to keep in mind what you said about light and darkness. But many of the interactions we have with people reinforce the sense we have that they don't seem to notice how dark the darkness is. This often turns out to be one of the factors that produces denial. If I don't see the gloom, they seem to say, why will I be motivated to try to dispel it? In this blog, we rarely tell people what they don't know already. We write it because we feel the need to channel their attention to the bad, and to encourage better responses to the bad.