Garbanzo Toons

Three More Buddists Murdered in Thailand

This is the latest attack on Buddists in Thailand by - dare I say it? - Muslims. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has been linking to almost daily reports of Muslim attackers shooting and beheading Buddists in a local terror campaign.

Chicken trader Tonkui Saephoo, 72, was shot dead at a food market in Yaring district of Pattani province by unidentified gunmen, police said, adding that investigators were still at the scene.

In the same province, 52-year-old Thanat Nilvisut, a janitor at Pattani Technical College, was shot dead as he traveled to work.

More than 720 people have died in near-daily attacks or clashes with security forces since January 2004, when a bloody raid on a weapons depot triggered an uprising in the three majority-Muslim southern provinces bordering Malaysia.

In Narathiwat province, suspected Islamic insurgents spray gunfire at teachers' homes, resulting in at least one teacher being shot in the arm.

According to yesterday's news,

Suspected Muslim insurgents shot and then beheaded a local official in southern Thailand on Wednesday in an attack believed to be part of ongoing sectarian violence in the area, police said.

Surin Somchit, an employee of the community water authority, was shot and wounded by four bullets fired near his office in Narathiwat province's Rangae district, police Capt. Songphol Juimanee said.

The as yet unknown number of attackers then cut off their victim's head with a machete and dumped it by the roadside, he said.

According to witnesses, Surin was supervising more than 10 workers laying a water pipe in a rubber plantation, when two gunman arrived on motorcycle and shouted at them in Yawi _ a dialect of Malay spoken mainly by local Muslims _ to run for their lives before they opened fire.

"It seems that the attackers targeted him as a Buddhist, that's why they shout in Yawi," Songphol said. Buddhist Thais generally do not speak much Yawi.

Songphol said police suspect the attackers were Islamic insurgents who are seeking to separate the Muslim-dominated south from the rest of Thailand.

The insurgents launched a campaign of violence at the beginning of last year that has met with a sharp response from authorities and claimed more than 880 lives in Thailand's three southernmost provinces, Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.

The beheading was the sixth carried out this month and the second to take place in daylight hours. Only three other beheadings have taken place in the 18-month wave of violence, one in May last year in Narathiwat, and two others in November.

All of the victims who have been beheaded, including the one on Wednesday, were Buddhists, and Thai officials believe the attacks are an attempt to terrorize Buddhists in the south into leaving the area.

In another incident Wednesday, a gunman on the back of a motorcycle shot and killed a roadside vendor in another area of Narathiwat, police said. On Tuesday, suspected Islamic insurgents fatally shot four people.

Drive-by shootings and bombings have become near daily occurrences in the three southernmost provinces.

The escalation in violence has been attributed to the return of a decades-old separatist movement thought to have disappeared after a government amnesty in the 1980s.

Southern Thai Muslims have long complained of unfair treatment by the central government, mainly in jobs and education, and have expressed dissatisfaction at heavy-handed government efforts to quash the latest violence.

I've got two questions, first, the obvious: How is it that Muslims are complaining of mistreatment as they murder and desecrate the bodies of people of other religions?
Second, why is it that the only time I've read about the murders in Thailand was when Thai officials were accused of abusing Muslim suspects a few months ago? In our politically correct news reporting, have Buddists become as expendable as Jews and the truth? Let's face it - Muslims do not work and play well with others. Eventually the MSM has to admit to that fact no matter how much it enrages Muslims.

Labels: Buddists, Little Green Footballs, Muslims, terrorism, Thailand

posted by Harry @ 6:25 PM