Symbolic Target Bombed in Egypt

So I'm getting ready to blog about the massive terrorist bombing in Egypt and find that, of course, my clever line has already been thought of:

I didn't know Egypt had troops in Iraq. Otherwise, why would the terrorists target them?

With that zinger fresh in our minds, consider the following:

A report from a respected academic institution and a British intelligence document leaked to the press last week stoked the political fire building around Blair. Both concluded that the prime minister's close alliance with President Bush and the joint Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq have made Britain an inviting target for terrorist strikes.

...

[Tony] Blair, [Jack] Straw and other officials say al-Qaida's attacks against the West actually began with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and cannot be blamed on the war against Iraq launched 10 years later.

But recent media polls -- and interviews with Londoners braving the threat to the crowded underground train system known as "the Tube" -- suggest that a majority of Britons don't buy that argument.

"It's got to be connected to Iraq, that's the only thing that makes sense," said Andrea Wright, a commuter using the train Friday, just hours after undercover British police shot and killed a man in front of other train passengers, adding to the week's tensions. The police said Saturday that the man was not connected to the commuter bombings and that an investigation of the shooting is under way.

Her view is that Islamic extremists have chosen London as a target, despite its large Muslim population and traditionally tolerant attitude, because of anger over the treatment of Iraqi civilians by U.S. and British forces.

Furthermore, a significant portion of Britain's large Moslem population sympathizes with the bombers!

However, six per cent insist that the bombings were, on the contrary, fully justified.

Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do.

Moreover, the proportion of YouGov's respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger - 24 per cent.

So, as a corollary to the above quip, I ask, "When do the opinion polls about the Egyptian bombings begin?" Surely Britons, Moslems or not, have an opinion about their relationship to the invasion of Iraq.

The willingness of the Left to blame the West for terrorism despite all evidence is simply dazzling. It is frustrating to read of the wide acceptance of the idea -- by Britons -- of the notion that their country is to blame for the recent terrorist bombings. And it is worrisome that so many Moslems there enjoy freedom and yet wish to extinguish it.

But as Robert Tracinski would put it and Cox and Forkum have noted: "The enemy has problems of its own." Already in the process of discrediting the multiculturalists, their greatest intellectual allies in the West, this is really just the tip of the iceberg-sized dilemma they face with their M.O., put succinctly by Glenn Reynolds as:

I predict that [the deaths of Arabs and Moslems in the Egyptian bombing] will only encourage the loss of patience with Islamist radicalism that is already sweeping the world. That's the problem for terrorists: If they try to terrorize, they make people mad. If they don't, then, well, they're not really terrorists.

And so it is quite fitting that today we saw a terrorist blow only himself up in Egypt. If this bomber was not part of al Qaeda, he sure fooled me with his near-destruction of a symbolic target: himself.

The device, which the man was carrying in a sack, apparently went off accidentally in the neighborhood of Kufr Tuhurmus, several miles from Kerdassa, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe. No other injuries were reported.

Ahmad, who works at a downtown hospital, was too badly injured to be interrogated, the official said.

Initial reports said the blast went off in Ahmad's home. The Interior Ministry earlier put out a statement saying the explosion hit his ground-floor apartment, where he may have been storing "leftover" explosive material.

And this time, I am confident that what he symbolizes will ultimately be destroyed: the idea that it is acceptable to present another human being with the "choice" of enslavement or death.

So our brave jihadist doesn't even make it out the door. He lands in a state-of-the-art Egyptian hospital "too badly injured to be interrogated". And said interrogation will be, not in the "Gulag" with Christine Aguilera in the background, but in an Egyptian prison.

Thanks for the laugh, Ahmad!

-- CAV