Posted on 01/30/2003 11:34:50 PM PST by JohnHuang2
Kenyan police have rescued 11 boys from an Islamic correctional centre in the capital, Nairobi, where they were kept in chains and tortured.
Most of the teenagers came from Kenya, but others were from the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ethiopia.
In a dramatic raid at the Khadija Islamic Institute of Discipline and Education, the police were forced to fire in the air to fight off residents pelting them with them stones - before rescuing 10 teenagers who were being held at the centre.
They were kept in chains and secured by padlocks in small rooms with little ventilation or light in Eastleigh, a Nairobi suburb inhabited mainly by ethnic Somalis and refugees from the Horn of Africa.
The raid followed a tip-off from one of the teenagers who was himself later rescued from a hospital where he had gone to seek medical help.
'Lashes'
Nairobi police boss Stephen Kimenchu led the late evening raid.
"We found the children running around in chains. It was some kind of extreme confinement you cannot imagine to be happening in this country. We were not aware of this until yesterday when we got there."
At the Kasarani police station, five kilometres from where they had been rescued, the children narrated their ordeal at the hands of Islamic teachers bent on turning them into good Muslims.
Guleed Ahmed, 16, from Leicester in the UK, says he spent eight months at the centre:
"It was a terrible place, they chain both legs and both arms, sometimes hands and feet together," he said.
"They beat you at lunch time, dinner time and grab both legs and hands and give you lashes on the buttocks."
'Plain rice'
Fellow student Abdikalik Jama from Eldoret in western Kenya talked of four months of torture and beatings:
"We sleep in chains, eat in chains, go to the toilets in chains. Sometimes we are hooked on the roof in chains and left hanging. We have to memorise the Koran and get punished if we cannot recite the Koran in the classroom.
"Our food was tea and bread in the morning, plain rice for lunch and rice and sugar for dinner," he said.
Nairobi police boss Mr Kimenchu says the children were sent to the centre by their parent who pay $1,500 per child for a two-year stay.
"I think the parents believed their children were learning the Koran. I don't think they were aware of the actual conditions their children were living in," he said.
In Eastleaigh, local councillor Kullow Ibraim Haji also condemned the cruel treatment of students:
"I support the school and the parents who bring their children here to be taught discipline. But I don't support torture and chaining of students," he said.
"Islam does not allow children to be tortured. Teaching and disciplining them is one thing - but not torture."
By Monday night, police were making frantic efforts to contact the parents of the children and also verify the nationalities of some of the rescued teenagers.
They will probably charge the owners of Kadhija Islamic Institute for cruelty against children.
Just another chapter in the "religion of poopstain", er, I mean peace.
Well it sounds to me like they are toturing these kids ..
Islam is also a peaceful and loving religion.
Slowly the realization sets in that it's impossible to soil the reputation of anything connected with Islam. In the US there are representatives of so many major religions. Each seems to have some outspoken members that are a cross section of society. I don't know if it is the need to sell the product or what. Yet when some sect or member does something that is so unspeakable, other members will do anything possible to rout it so as to be unsullied by the sect or member.
What has been public in the last couple of years, at least, has been the abhorent aspect(s) of Islam (throughout the world). Yet there are entirely to few to Muslims - maybe none? - who have gone on record as denouncing what is manifest in Islam. Will that religion ever mature into something to make its members justifiably proud?
Islam is a religion of peace, too. I wonder what Saddam's doing to the children in the Iraqi children's prisons? Scott Ritter knows but won't tell us.
Not any time soon.
Picky, picky.
Actually, I think what we have is a failure to communicate. It just depends on what the meaning of "peace" is. To us, peace means contented co-existence; absence of war. To Islam, peace means "beat the infidels into absolute submission killing as many as necessary till they cease to resist." So everybody's happy right.
No religion ever rises above or transcends that upon which it is built. Islam is built on the twisted delusions of a self-absorbed, warmongering predophile with serious control "issues". Islam is a demon-worshipping death cult.
So in response to your question, I guess it would just depend on what its followers deem worthy of pride.
Islam has a Clintonesque definition of "peace". "Islam" actually "submission". Peace will come only when everyone submits. Something like the Communist definition of "peace", as being the state which will occur after total communist victory (as such, anybody who opposed communism was "against peace")
There are lots of good people in the world (as well as lots of the other kind), of every religion. You are blessed to know two of them.
The big question is: are they good people BECAUSE of the teachings of Islam, or IN SPITE of the teachings of Islam? Do you think your two friends wouln't still be good and kind people if they were Christians, Jewish, or Buddhists? The big issue is not whether good people exist in whatever group, but instead what direction the group's ideals and culture tends to turn people toward?
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