If Al-Hajj Frederick H Minshall thinks he is standing up for Muslims by justifying the murder of hostages in Algeria, he is very misguided and not doing Muslims any favors.
Algeria and Mali are home to millions of Muslims who are being terrorized by extremists. I sponsor a child in Mali through Save the Children and if the Islamists reach her village she won't be able to go to school anymore — in fact, she'll be lucky if she survives. The terrorists who murdered the hostages were not "Algerian rebels" as Minshall describes them, they were a band of crazies from many different countries angry that the French are trying to oust the Islamists from Mali. Their victims were also of many nationalities, not just French, and their actions had nothing to do with French colonial brutality in Algeria in 1955-57.
All countries and groups have bloody histories and by Minshall's logic a Jew can walk up to a German today and shoot him in the head in revenge for the Holocaust.
— Sarah Hurst
Anchorage