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On August 2, 2011, the Salafi-jihadi website Minbar Al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad published an article by Sheikh Abu Mundhir Al-Shinqiti, a member of the website's shari'a council, titled "From Iraq's Democracy to Somalia's Famine." In the article, he accused the West of attempting to exploit the famine in Somalia in order to invade the country and rein in the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabab Al-Mujahideen organization, which currently controls most of Somalia, and thereafter to seize control of the country's resources. Al-Shinqiti justified Al-Shabab's ban of Western aid groups in Somalia by claiming that the aid provided by them "stinks of trickery and deceit, characteristic of all the positions of the crusader West."
Following is an overview of the article:
Al-Shinqiti begins his article with the claim that the "crusaders," having been convinced that direct invasion of the Islamic countries was too costly an enterprise, are now trying to fabricate pretexts to gain them an "entry visa" into these countries. Al-Shinqiti goes on to claim that just as the U.S. had invaded Iraq on the pretext of spreading democracy, but had, instead, spread death, destruction, and corruption, while taking over the country's resources, the crusaders were now attempting to invade Somalia in order to take over the territories controlled by Al-Shabab, on the pretext of fighting the famine in the country.
Al-Shinqiti asks why the Western aid groups were not cooperating with the Islamic charity organizations with which Al-Shabab had agreed to work, and added that it was these very Western groups that had destroyed Somalia's agriculture by distributing food aid precisely during the country's harvest period, causing crop prices to plummet and farmers to go bankrupt and give up their farms. He also claims that most of this food aid had been rotten and past its expiry date, and that more than once it had been discovered that the vaccinations given by the World Health Organization had, in fact, been experimental drugs.
Al-Shinqiti says: "These crusaders have no compassion or pity in their hearts for the Islamic world; on the contrary, they rejoice when they see the Muslims falling one by one, not just by the dozens or the hundreds, but by the thousands and the millions." If they really had pity for the Muslims, he says, they would help the Palestinians, who are languishing under the Jewish occupation, and would not sow death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He emphasizes that the West was never an overly sensitive civilization, as evidenced by its extermination of Native American culture and the atomic bombs it dropped on Japan. He goes on to claim that "it is the Western world that is generating the calamities in the Islamic world... and the finest day in the lives of the Muslims [will be] the day the Western world exits their midst and leaves them in peace."
Al-Shinqiti concludes his article by justifying Al-Shabab's ban of "these crusader terror organizations that hide behind the slogan of aid," and says that this is how Muslims should always regard the West.
