Little Green Footballs

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Thai'd up in knots

Guest blogger KH writes:

A couple of weeks ago, the Thai coup provoked three posts and more than 600 comments from Johnston and his lizard foreign affairs experts. The comments displayed the searing accuracy that we have long come to expect from them. Previously the only mention of Thailand was a variety of inaccurate postings about the Muslim insurgency in the south of the country. The fact that the majority of non LGF commentators attributed the poor security situation in the south to overly vicious Thai army action was obvious appeasement to Charles and his lizard friends.

What with the general who took power in the coup being a Muslim, the lizards had to go apoplectic, and when he stated that he wanted to take a different approach to the military situation in the south (i.e. negotiating, rather than military action) you could almost hear their teeth gnashing at the thought that Muslims weren't going to get crushed by the might of the Thai army now. While one of the commentators pointed out the broader context, that Taksin, the previous PM, was corrupt, incompetent and not very popular in Thailand, he was shouted down. The thread then followed its usual course of talking about Thailand falling, predicting the inevitable imposition of Sharia Law, conversion of Buddhists, etc, etc. No-one ever seemed to notice that the Muslim population of Thailand is only 4.6%. But coming from the same people that think France (Muslim population, 5.1%) is soon to adopt Sharia Law, that's no surprise.

On October 1st, the Muslim general, Sonthi Boonyaratglin, handed over power to Surayud Chulanon, a Buddhist (and ex communist) general. Guess how many posts Charles made about that?

Links:

LGF

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22676#comments

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22642&only

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22628&only

Thai coup leaders

Wikipedia on Sonthi Boonyaratglin

Wikipedia on Surayud Chulanont

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