Visiting Thailand?

Mandatory reading if you plan to spend some time in Thailand or those of you who think working on the holy day, Friday, is no big deal.  From Jihad Watch with the complete article on Sign On San Diego:

PATTANI, Thailand – The open-air market in this southern Thai city falls eerily quiet on Fridays. Most vendors stay home, terrorized by leaflets threatening to kill or cut off the ears of anyone who works on the Muslim holy day.

After 20 months of insurgent violence, the no-work threat has driven another nail into what is becoming an economic coffin in Thailand’s terrorized southern provinces.

Among the hundreds killed in the predominantly Muslim provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat are police and soldiers, but police records show that 80 percent are civilians – rubber tappers, shopkeepers, civil servants, construction workers and ice cream vendors.

Bombs have exploded at a department store, a cinema complex, the international airport at Hat Yai and a department store owned by the French Carrefour chain. Now investors and tourists have been driven off and some workers are leaving.

Soaring demand, driven by the booming Chinese economy, has doubled rubber’s price on the global market, but production in Pattani province has plummeted to a tenth of its volume in just a year, according to official statistics.

Prices of quarried rock have doubled, because the government severely limited the use of explosives that were reportedly being stolen for bomb attacks. The government eased the curbs as part of efforts to revive the economy, but Defense Minister Thammarak Isarangura Na Ayutthaya, while warily approving the measure, said he expected coffins would have to be stockpiled for bomb victims.

I might be about to adjust to not working on Friday, but severe restrictions on explosives?  Now they’ve done it!  We we have no viable options but to destroy the extremist Muslim culture world wide.

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3 thoughts on “Visiting Thailand?

  1. My daughter visited Thailand for three months as part of a study-abroad program through her college, and her class managed to arrive about three weeks after the tsunami. We worried about all sorts of things, of course, but one of the points I had made clear was that they were NOT going into the Southern provinces, and they didn’t — they stayed north and inland for the most part. (She did take a trip into Laos, but that’s another story, and we didn’t know about it until she returned.) I don’t think she met a single Muslim while she was there — just Buddhists, and she liked them so much she’s still flirting with adopting Buddhism in a half-serious sort of way.

    I’m curious how the explosive restrictions compare with the US ones you’re enjoying? Ever done a cross-national comparison of explosives regs?

  2. No cross-national comparison of explosives regs. Just barely cross-state. I looked at Washington State some. Very expensive permits required. Something like $2000/year IIRC. In Texas it varied by county, I didn’t get any further than that. Idaho says, paraphrased, “No permits required. Don’t hurt anyone or their property.”

  3. Sounds to me like a book that needs to be written! I’m sure if you couldn’t find a mainstream technical publisher (McGraw-Hill?) you could get the guys at Paladin Press to bite.

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