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Nightmare in Nairobi: What Can West Learn From Israel?

While Israel enjoys a relatively terror-free era, security experts warn of Islamic terror groups spreading across Africa and toward the Middle East as the West avoids dealing with them.
Civilians escape an area at the Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi September 21, 2013. Gunmen stormed the shopping mall in Nairobi on Saturday killing at least 20 people in what Kenya's government said could be a terrorist attack, and sending scores fleeing into shops, a cinema and onto the streets in search of safety. Sporadic gun shots could be heard hours after the assault started as soldiers surrounded the mall and police and soldiers combed the building, hunting down the attackers shop by shop.  REUTE
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The brutal terrorist attack in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall [Sept. 21] may have put terrorism in Africa back in the headlines, but the truth is that it never really left the headlines over the past few years. The difference is that it was usually limited to local, African headlines. Only an incident of this magnitude, with multiple casualties in an ostensibly “Western” mall in an African state that was relatively “organized” could capture front pages and open news broadcasts around the world, at least for a short time.

Soon the Kenyans will finally take control of the situation (which has already lasted many long days), and this no-man’s-land of global terrorism in Africa will retreat to its natural setting, in the back pages of the Western media, where it receives little, if any, attention. We try to ignore what is happening there, in Africa, as if the whole region doesn’t affect us. We try to “sweep it under the rug” and hide it in the same place that we sweep everything we don’t want to see. But it is there. It’s alive and kicking, shooting and killing and blowing things up.

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