Area Somalis want peace for homeland

StarTribune reported More than a thousand Somalis gathered in Minneapolis on Saturday to call for Ethiopian troops to withdraw immediately from Somalia.

I hope the Minneapolis police took note of who they were, and wil keep an eye on them.

Their protest capped a week in which transitional government troops retook Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, with the backing of Ethiopian infantrymen. The U.S. government "gave the green light" to Ethiopia to work in concert with the transitional federal government in Somalia, and that action was "totally wrong," said Hassan Mohamud.

Why is it wrong for the government of a country to work with a neighboring country, whose own citizens were threatened with attack by the Islamists, to put down the takeover of Somalia that the Islamists had done.

He is the president of the Somali Institute for Peace and Justice in Minneapolis, which organized Saturday's rally. "We ask the president of the United States, Mr. Bush, and his administration to stop supporting the terrorists. Ethiopian troops are terrorists,"

I suspect you are using the word terrorists to try to justify opposing them. They met on the field of battle, in conjunction with government troops, to push out a group of Islamists that had taken over. They did not set of f bombs to kill innocent civilians, or fly planes into buildings, or any of the other things that terrorists normally do.

Mohamud said to a cheering crowd. Lt. Rick Thomas of the Minneapolis Police Department estimated the crowd at about 1,500 people for a rally that ran for more than two hours.

I hope they keep an eye on these people.

Mohamud said he and other Somalis want the United States to support talks that can yield "peace and reconciliation."

That is what the Somalia ane Ethiopian government wants. Peace, but not with an imposed Sharia Law, and without threats to wage Jihad against Ethiopia.

Robert Spencer blogged If anyone in the American government had any courage, they would tackle this head-on, explaining that they opposed the Somali jihadists not only because they had ties to Al-Qaeda, but because Sharia government institutionalizes discrimination against women and religious minorities and denies freedom of conscience, and is in general an outrage to the dignity of the human person. In other words, they would engage the ideological challenge posed by the global jihad by asserting the superiority of the values of the modern West, and of the civilization built on Judeo-Christian values. But they don't dare.