The Best Thing That Happened This Week: Brotherhood on a Bus in Kenya

Muslims protected Christians in a terrorist attack.

Okay, it’s a global Best Thing, not local. But can’t we have that just once a year? When members of Somalia’s militant Islamist al-Shabab organization ambushed a bus in Mandera, Kenya, at gunpoint on Monday, they intended to cull all the Christians among the 62 passengers and kill them. The Muslims aboard the bus weren’t having any, though. They lent the Christians their religious clothing, refused to separate themselves despite the attackers’ demands, and delivered their own ultimatum: Kill all of us, or leave. “We stuck together tightly,” Muslim passenger Abdi Mohamud Abdi told Reuters. “The militants threatened to shoot us but we still refused and protected our brothers and sisters.” The attackers fled in the face of this show of unity. Maybe we could all try sticking together tightly in the New Year.

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