'It‘s naive to think South Africa is immune. We are part of a global community' For now, Islamic State‘s (IS) focus on South Africa is not to bring bloodshed to the country.Instead, it involves “careful propaganda programmes using deception to recruit the country‘s youth to fight in a misguided war against the enemies of Islam”.This is the message by South African Islamic scholars and academics days after a 15-year-old schoolgirl was pulled off a British Airways flight from Cape Town.The girl, from Cape Town‘s southern suburb of Kenwyn — whose residents are both Muslim and Christian — ran away from home on Sunday, boarding the flight to Johannesburg with an onwards ticket to Saudi Arabia “to presumably join IS”.Kenwyn community leader Hanif Loonat said yesterday that residents of some of Cape Town‘s sprawling settlements had told him their communities were being turned into recruiting areas.One such area, Loonat said, is Blikkiesdorp, where Somalia‘s Islamic terror group al-Shabab l...
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