Terrorist connections

Attacks by the forces of international Islamic terrorism continue apace. A
series of bombings in Sharm-al-Sheikh, Egypt, yesterday killed mostly
Egyptian Muslims (80 out of 88), and some international tourists. These
attacks were clearly designed to terrorize people all over the world, to
show that nowhere is safe, and also to impact the tourist industry in Egypt
in order to destabilize the Mubarak regime and thereby to replace it by an
Islamist State. Since there are no Egyptian forces in Iraq and not a single
Iraqi has been killed by Egyptians, this tends to disprove the excuse that
the attacks in London are due to British involvement in the war against
Iraq.
The British Sun newspaper last week published a list and map showing 23
major international terrorist attacks since 1993 (excluding any in Israel!).
Their distribution from the US to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Philippines and
Indonesia shows no correlation with the war in Iraq, only a general attack
on Western interests and on any Muslim states that cooperate with the West.
Saddam Hussein, while still President of Iraq, allowed a pro-al Qaeda group
(Ansar Islamiya) to operate autonomously in the north of Iraq. But, Saddam
was a secular ruler and was never an ally of al Qaeda. Now the nascent
proto-democratic government of Iraq is a much more dangerous potential enemy
of the Islamists, and so they are attacking it with great intensity in order
to try to bring it down. That is why the US and UK must persist in fighting
the insurrection in Iraq, which has nothing directly to do with the former
Iraq war against Saddam Hussein, although former opponents of that war still
lump them together. It would be like lumping WWII and the Cold War as one,
just because one followed the other, when the enemy in each case was
different.
Luckily the planned second wave of terrorist attacks in London failed, and
the security forces should hopefully have enough evidence to round up some
suspects. In doing so they cannot ignore the fact that the Muslim community
in the UK, notwithstanding all statements to the contrary, provides a safe
environment in which such extremists can hide. No doubt there are other
unsuspected cells waiting for their word to go, maybe next time with fresh
explosives.
In Israel, a Palestinian youth from Gaza was captured with a bomb-belt on
his way to Tel Aviv, but a Jewish couple were shot dead during an attack by
terrorists on a convoy of cars leaving Gaza, and two of the attackers were
killed by the IDF. Does this presage a new round of attacks by terrorists
in Gaza, contrary to the understanding that Pres. Abbas gave to Secty. of
State Rice yesterday that the PA wants a peaceful Israeli withdrawal and
expects to coordinate this with the IDF.
To show the connection between all these international Islamist attacks,
those in Sharm were claimed by the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, a terror group
linked to al-Qaeda. Abdullah Azzam was a Palestinian imam who is considered
responsible for expanding the war of Islam from Israel against the West. He
was born near Jenin in 1941 and after College participated in terror attacks
against Israel. Then he went to Egypt to study at al Azhar University in
Cairo, considered the highest Islamic center. Then he moved to Amman and
apparently became disillusioned with jihad against Israel alone. When the
war in Afghanistan started in 1979 he went there and became among other
things one of the spiritual mentors of Osama bin Laden. His main
contribution was to argue that fighting Israel alone was pointless, but only
hatred of the West in general (Judeo-Christian civilization) and military
action could bring about the aims of Islam. He was killed in a bomb blast
in Pakistan in 1989, that has been attributed to either the US or Osama, who
wished to supersede him.