Ron Paul Institute Blames America for Muslim Kenya Mall Attack

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On September 30, 2013 @ 11:10 am In The Point | 56 Comments

The Ron Paul Institute is not the institution to which Ron Paul has been committed. It’s the Ron Paul outlet. And it reflects his Blame America for Muslim Terror philosophy.

What happened in Kenya is a terrorist act. But for Obama to tell the rest of the story would undermine his narrative and unravel Washington’s strange relationship with the al-Qaeda affilliated al-Shabaab organization that claimed responsibility for the attack. Al-Shabaab, or “Mujahideen Youth Movement,” in fact owes its birth to US interventionism in Africa, as it sprang up from the ashes of the Islamic Courts Movement that had ruled Somalia until a US-sponsored invasion by Ethiopia destroyed the Courts Movement in 2007 and divided supporters into factions. Some decided to work with the US-supported Transitional Federal Government (TFG); others, like the al-Shabaab, decided to resist US and other foreign occupation and intervention in Somali affairs.
As globetrotting analyst Pepe Escobar points out in a highly recommended recent article, the Islamic Courts had generally stabilized Somalia and disarmed many of the militias. They were proponents of Sharia law, which the US found intolerable and labeled “terrorist,” opening the door for the brand new US Africa Command, based in Germany, to begin working on regime change.

The Islamic Courts Union had stabilized Somalia the way that the Taliban had stabilized Afghanistan. That didn’t stop liberals from repeatedly defending the ICU, despite its nightmarish atrocities.

However the Ron Paul Institute claims that the Islamic Courts Union would have left the rest of Africa alone if we left them alone. This single idiotic idea underpins the Paul isolationism position. It’s also laughably untrue.

The one thing that committed Islamists who believe in regional Caliphates and repeating the conquests of Mohammed don’t do is leave other people alone.

More to the point, the Islamic Courts Union had relied on foreign Jihadists from the very beginning and was part of the Bin Laden network.

Hassan Dahir Aweys, the head of the ICU, originally headed up the Islamic Union, a Muslim terrorist group operating in Somalia in the 1990s and funded by Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden saw the opportunity early on. In the early 1990s, the Saudi exile began sending money and weapons to a Somali group called al-Itihaad al- Islamiya (Unity of Islam), followed by men who trained and fought alongside the Somali militants who aimed to turn the country into a radical Islamic republic.
U.S. intelligence officials, members of the al-Itihaad organization worked with al Qaeda operatives in planning the 1998 East Africa bombing attacks, which killed 224 people.

Al-Itihaad was Aweys’ Islamic Union.

The Ron Paul Institute’s idea that this goes back to 2007 is laughably ignorant. Somalia was part of Bin Laden’s Jihad network.

The Islamic Court Union was intertwined with Al Qaeda fighters and with Al Qaeda’s global money laundering schemes. The United States didn’t destabilize Somalia. It helped prevent Somalia from becoming an even more toxic place than it is today.

Does the Ron Paul Institute really believe that Al Qaeda’s allies wouldn’t have used Somalia as a base for African terrorism regardless of what the United States did?

The leader of the Islamic group that controls much of southern Somalia has revived the idea of a “Greater Somalia” that would incorporate regions of Kenya and Ethiopia – a move that could further stoke tensions with the neighboring countries.
Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, chairman of the Council of Islamic Courts, told Shabelle Radio in an interview late Friday that his group would work to unite ethnic Somali peoples, but he did not say how it proposed to achieve a “Greater Somalia.”
This is the first time that Aweys has spoken about expanding the influence of the Islamic courts outside Somalia since his group seized control of the capital, Mogadishu, in June and then consolidated its control over most of southern Somalia.
“We will leave no stone unturned to integrate our Somali brothers in Kenya and Ethiopia and restore their freedom to live with their ancestors in Somalia,” he said.

Somali Islamists were always going to push into Kenya and Ethiopia. That is why Kenya and Ethiopia tried to stabilize Somalia. In self-defense.

The Ron Paul Institute quotes “globe-trotting analyst Pepe Escobar” on Somalia. More accurately, Pepe Escobar is a 9/11 Truther.

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