In Feb. 2012, the group's leader, Mukhtar Abu al-Zubair, pledged loyalty to Al Qaeda. But it's as easy to claim a relationship with a high-profile terror group as it is easy to wear a Manchester United T-shirt or a Yankee cap on game day. So how much contact do the Somali militia fighters in Mogadishu and Kismayo really have with the ideologues, funders, and operation men within the various Al Qaeda affiliates scattered across the Arabian peninsula, the Afghan borderlands, the African Sahel, and elsewhere? Western security experts say there is evidence that Al Qaeda provides some training on use of suicide bombings, but area experts question whether this is simply skills sharing from freelance jihadists traveling from war zone to war zone on their own initiative.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
