ASEAN Summit Urges Confronting Extremists
Extremist terrorists killed 19 people in an attack on a hotel in Mali on Friday before Malian commandos stormed the building and rescued 170 people, many of them foreigners. This came a week after the ISIL militants killed 129 people in coordinated attacks in Paris.
"The perpetrators of these cowardly and barbaric acts do not represent any race, religion or creed, nor should we allow them to claim to do so," Najib said in his opening speech at the ASEAN summit.
"They are terrorists and should be confronted as such, with the full force of the law."
Najib said he had intended to open the summit to talk about an economic community that the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations intends to launch in a region of 622 million people with a combined economic output of $2.5 trillion.
"But the events of recent days and weeks have cast a shadow over us all," he said.
He said predominantly Islamic countries such as Malaysia have a duty to expose as lies the "ideology propagated by these extremists that is the cause of this sadistic violence.
Source: SCMP
