Jihad Continues in Thailand!~Bomb Attack

Continually we see most of the world coming up with ridiculous excuses for the actions of Muslims. Like blaming it all on Israel or the USA. Yet today Thailand has been hit with its second Islamic bomb blast in less than two weeks. The problem is not America or Israel, it is Islam!

A vehicle burned after a bomb attack in Thailand's Yala province, south of Bangkok, on Friday.
Picture by Surapan Boonthanom/Reuters

Southern Thailand’s Turmoil Grows
By THOMAS FULLER
Published: September 4, 2009

PAKA LUE SONG, Thailand — The soldiers patrolling this hamlet racked by insurgent violence measure their progress modestly: two years ago, when villagers saw them coming, they closed their shutters. Now, they say, most residents peer out of their wood-frame houses and offer strained smiles.

“The local people have started to open their hearts,” said Capt. Niran Chaisalih, the leader of a government paramilitary force garrisoned at the village school.

Paka Lue Song, only a 15-minute drive from the provincial capital, Pattani, is a starting point for Thailand’s influx of troops into the country’s troubled southern provinces, where ethnic Malay Muslims are battling for autonomy from Thailand’s Buddhist majority.

The number of people in security forces, including the army, the police and militias, in the region has doubled over the past two years to about 60,000, said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a leading expert on the insurgency and the associate dean at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani.

The huge increase in security forces initially helped reduce the violence as well as the death toll, which fell by 40 percent last year. But the number of killings has risen in recent months. More than 330 people have been killed so far this year, compared with 285 in the same period last year. Among the dead are civilians — including many Malays — soldiers and insurgents.

There have been so many killings in the three southern provinces — about 3,500 since 2004 — that the government began distributing a glossy brochure last year guiding victims’ families through the process of applying for government compensation.

Although the insurgency has been active for decades in the south, the current phase is considered particularly dangerous because the militants appear to have more of an Islamist agenda and because apparently sectarian attacks have strained the mutual tolerance between Buddhists and Muslims. It also comes at a time of deep political turmoil and social unease in Thailand that has hobbled several governments in the last three years and last year drove away many of the tourists who help sustain the country’s economy.

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Thailand:Car Bomb Wounds 42

Almost everywhere that we look, from Thailand to Russia, to Iraq, we continue to see violence in the name of Islam. Violence that will not end, as the war with Islam is forever.

Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 8, Number 387:
Narrated Anas bin Malik:

Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.’ And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally and their reckoning will be with Allah.” Narrated Maimun ibn Siyah that he asked Anas bin Malik, “O Abu Hamza! What makes the life and property of a person sacred?” He replied, “Whoever says, ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah’, faces our Qibla during the prayers, prays like us and eats our slaughtered animal, then he is a Muslim, and has got the same rights and obligations as other Muslims have.”

Car bomb wounds 42 in Thai south: army

NARATHIWAT, Thailand — A powerful car bomb ripped through a restaurant packed with government officials in Thailand's troubled Muslim-majority south Tuesday, wounding at least 42 people, the army said.

The blast was one of the most serious for months in the kingdom's insurgency-plagued provinces bordering Malaysia where a bloody separatist rebellion has been raging for more than five years.

The 50-kilogramme (110-pound) device was hidden inside a stolen Toyota pick-up truck and exploded during the busy lunch hour in the centre of Narathiwat, the main town in the province of the same name, officials said.

"It's very horrible. We had intelligence that militants would mount a large-scale attack," Lieutenant General Pichet Wisaichorn, the southern region army commander, told reporters.

He said that seven of the 42 people injured in the blast were in a critical condition. Most of the wounded were Buddhist government officials, who are often targeted by the Islamist militants in the region.

Police and rescue workers were rushing the wounded to hospital and the local government chief was among those injured, a policeman said on condition of anonymity.

The timing of the attack just after the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan was "very interesting", said Sunai Phasuk, an analyst for Human Rights Watch in Thailand.

"We are in the holy month of Ramadan and the bomb went off clearly to harm the non-Muslim population," he told AFP.

"It shows the insurgents are avoiding causing collateral damage to their fellow Muslims, because they would come after the end of fasting."

He said this Ramadan was "marked with violence from day one". Over the weekend, eight people, including two soldiers and three security volunteers, were killed by suspected insurgents.

"It seems they use Ramadan to symbolise the cleansing of non-Malay Muslims," Sunai added.

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Southern Thailand:Sharia in the Works

The Pakistani Taliban has been slaughtering anyone in their way and they were rewarded with Sharia law in the Swat Valley. Muslims in Chechnya have been at war with non-Muslims in Russia for over a decade and they are rewarded with Islamic rule. Now the same pattern is about to take place in Southern Thailand where violent Muslims are close to living their Sharia law dream. In the past they were allowed to use sharia for family aspects (just like in the UK), but of course it is never enough. Will the world ever wake up?

Thailand May Extend Shariah Law in Violence-Ridden Muslim South
By Haslinda Amin and Daniel Ten Kate

June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Thailand may allow more local autonomy and consider extending Shariah law to defuse a separatist insurgency in Muslim provinces that border Malaysia, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.

“More decentralization and provisions that respond to specific needs are fine,” Abhisit said in an interview in Singapore yesterday. “We can respond to needs on Shariah law, on the education system.”

Abhisit, 44, is seeking to undermine suspected separatists in four southernmost provinces who have attacked teachers, Muslim worshippers and policemen this month, leaving at least 31 dead and more than 50 injured. The prime minister, who took office in December, has insisted any decentralization of power wouldn’t be tantamount to autonomy, which the government opposes.

“Most of the local Malay Muslims just want a more autonomous, more decentralized administration so that they have political space for their own cultural and religious identity,” said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a political science lecturer at the Prince of Songkhla University in Pattani province. “So far the local identity has been suppressed by the central government.

Shariah law is a system that operates under a code of Islamic principles first established in the Arab world by the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Under a 1946 law, Thailand allows Revolutionary Guard limited use of Islamic rules in the mostly Muslim provinces for settling family and inheritance issues.

Former Sultanate

Abhisit has advocated a reconciliatory approach with more development aid for the region, where separatists have fought for an independent state since Thailand formally annexed the autonomous Malay-Muslim sultanate in 1902. A planned development plan that would create jobs in the region “will go a long way to contribute to stability,” he said.

Large-scale military operations in June 2007 cut the number of violent incidents in the south in half to an average of fewer than 100 per month last year, according to Deep South Watch, a group that tracks the attacks. They have started to increase again in the first six months of this year.

“It appears that the improvement in counter insurgency tactics did as much as it could do and has ceased to make significant inroads,” said Anthony Davis, a Thailand-based security analyst for Jane’s Information Group. “The insurgents are essentially regrouping and as this month shows, they have a significant organizational capacity.”

Negotiations ‘Impractical’

Abhisit said negotiations with separatists were impractical because the movement was “not integrated.” Insurgents in the area, which is about twice the size of the Palestinian territories, were supported by funds from drug cartels, human trafficking rings and other criminal syndicates, he said.

Separatist groups target “devout, hard-working, well- mannered students” from private Islamic schools to join the insurgency, the International Crisis Group said in a report yesterday. Some undergo frontline military training while others are used for psychological warfare, it said.

“Recruiters appeal to a sense of Malay nationalism and pride in the old Patani sultanate,” says Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, Crisis Group’s Thailand analyst. “They tell students in these schools that it is the duty of every Muslim to take back their land from the Buddhist infidels.”

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