Trouble in paradise: Thailand's Muslim insurgents

On a quiet Saturday morning recently in southern Thailand, an elderly Buddhist monk slowly made his rounds, clad in traditional saffron robes. His feet bare and his shaved head bowed, he collected alms from the faithful. A motorcycle approached.

A man on the bike raised his machete and struck, leaving the holy man dead only moments after a 13-year-old novice standing near a Buddhist temple also was hacked to death.

Another Buddhist monk narrowly survived a machete attack that day in the same Thai province of Yala, one of three Muslim majority provinces in overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand.

The three fell victim to a renewed wave of Islamic extremism now boiling in this traditionally peaceful Buddhist land.

Rebels have killed more than 40 people since the beginning of the year. Most of the dead were security forces, government officials, and Buddhist monks. The attacks have shaken up the country, thrown the leadership off balance, and placed the government in a quandary familiar to virtually every country trying to defeat a terrorist threat.

It will soon be time to outlaw Islam in all non-Islamic countries. Want to be a Muslim? Go to Saudi Arabia. I understand that in the US this would require changing the Constitution, but that's ok, it can be done.

Any Muslims who do not like this idea better move pdq to oust the terrorists and facists from their religion.

Sad to see. I lived in Thailand a few years back and still make frequent trips to the Kingdom and elsewhere in South East Asia.

Radical Islam is dispacing the less menacing, vagually tolerant form of the religion that had been mostly dominant in Indonesia, Malaysia and Southern Thailand.

The current Thai TRT government doesn't want to admit it has a Muslim terrorist problem in its southern provinces. So far Thaksin's response to these events has been to declare martial law, and rethreaten the closure of Islamic schools - neither of these actions have been done with any enthusiam and so far this pisspoor response has only emboldened the terrorists.

Wherever these radicals have taken over in SEA - chaos, brutality, loss of rights and complete intolerance have followed. Sadly, far more of this is to come. It is not only the West that either doesn't see the problem for what it is, or just refuses to admit it. Much of the populations in Asia are making the same mistake.

Islam is religion of conquest. Period. As it has begun to stagnate - producing failed state after failed state leaving it completely unable to keep up with the West or Asian nations, Islam has radicalized from a gutter religion into a death cult.

To deal with this problem, the Thai government must do exactly what the West should be doing - that is, force Muslim communities to police themselves. The way to force Islam to reign in its violent adherents and radical clerics is to punish entire communities if they produce suicide bombers or leaders who advance the cause of terror.

Longbow

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