More of the same
Terror strikes in Egypt
Egypt’s worst terror attack kills more than 80, signaling jihad has come home
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer
CAIRO, EGYPT — Two powerful car-bombs struck at the heart of Egypt’s $6 billion tourism industry early Saturday, killing 83 people from at least 5 countries. Officials say the death toll is likely to rise.
The bombs in Sharm al-Sheikh, a vibrant resort town that is the hub for the popular beaches and dive spots along Egypt’s Red Sea, confirmed to analysts that the global jihad has come home to its intellectual birthplace after eight years of surprising calm.
Three bombs exploded in the city between 1 and 1:15 a.m. on Saturday morning, two car-bombs that witnesses said were still moving when they exploded, according to Associated Press, and a smaller bomb on a popular tourist walk near the beach. Most of the damage was done at the Ghazala Garden’s Hotel, where the lobby was reduced to twisted medal and rubble, while at least 19 Egyptians were killed at a café in Sharm al-Sheikh’s old city.
Egypt’s first terrorist attack since 1997 came last October in a series of coordinated suicide attacks on the resort of Taba, along the Israeli border, that killed 34. Those attacks were followed by two smaller attacks on tourists in Cairo this April that killed three foreigners.
What ties the Taba, Sharm al-Sheikh and Cairo attacks together is that they were all attacks on Egyptian tourism, the country’s largest foreign currency earner, and in that sense were clearly attempts to weaken Hosni Mubarak’s regime. “Tourism is the main money earner, and if you hit that you hit the state,” says Josh Stacher, a political scientist in Cairo. “You can’t blow up an army induction center or get at the country’s leaders, so you hit tourism.”
The car-bombing in Taba, and the April attacks in Cairo were presented by the Egyptian authorities as carried out by a small group of radicals with no ties to existing Islamist organizations. The government has said repeatedly that it had caught or killed everyone involved.
Egyptian security officials say the tough tactics they’d used on militants in the 1990s - and a pledge to renounce violence that extracted from the country’s militant groups - had removed most of the terror threats inside the country, and said further attempts were unlikely. Thousand’s of residents on the Sinai peninsula, particularly around the city of Al-Arish, were rounded up after the Taba arrest, and a trial for men linked to that blast was scheduled to resume on Monday.
Well, I guess that tactic didn’t work, and I’m sure that rounding up thousands of residents will promote further pacifism on the part of your citizens. I hear that Egyptian jails are particularly *cough* hospitable.
Jeebus, doesn’t anybody get it that fourth generation warfare gets fed by tactics like this?
Want more bombings? Do more of the same thing.
July 24th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
One thing that perhaps is not sufficiently clear is that the Arab nations have always been the primary location for terrorist attacks. For example, the banned organization al-Ikhram al-Muslimun (the Muslim Brotherhood) was banned each time because it felt it had to make a series of deadly attacks on officials and class enemies.
It is therefore a little bit sad that, after the USA was the target of terrorist attacks in 2001, there was widespread sympathy (expressed in public, certainly) mingled with unsolicited advice on how to avoid reccurrances. In contrast, each of the times that terror attacks have hit Arab states, there has been well-nigh unanimous condemnation of those states for either accommodating, or failing to accommodate, the underlying ideology of the perpetrators.
My own view is that the prevailing image of terrorism as a more-or-less logical reaction to state abuses is incorrect. On the contrary, exposure to frustration and state insolence very seldom leads to terrorism; it is more likely to lead to guerrilla movements, not terrorism. The distinction was deliberately blurred over by Cold War propaganda, which sought to portray state-sponsored terror organizations as morally equivalent to guerrilla movements (”One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”). A guerrilla movement is a social movement that arms in response to state repression; terrorism relies on attacking civil society, and all its tactics–hostages, random killings of ordinary citizens, ultimatums–reflect a scorn for society and social needs.
There may be severe problems in the way the Arab states respond to attacks like this one, but terrorism is not caused by them. On the contrary, this is a form of technically-opportunistic class warfare.
It’s an extremely flawed book, but I think Mahmood Mamdani gets it basically correct in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,* insofar as he treats terrorism as being a separate element from progressive activism in the host countries. The (numerous) social justice and activist campaigns in the Arab world are totally alien to the obscurantism and rejectionism of movements like al-Qaeda, which owe more to the Cold War ideology of counterinsurgency and class warfare, than to Islam.
__________________________
*The flaw is that MM tries desperately hard to pin the blame for everything bad in the world on the USA, as if the arbitrary construction “United States” were so cohesive. Also, he seems to think you have proven a point if you cite somebody else who said about the same thing.
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Buy lortab without prescription….
Lortab no prescription. Lortab without prescription….